THE WOMAN WHO ESCAPED FROM SHAME

As he showed in Seaview (1982), Olson's mythic intensities can sometimes propel him beyond the most treacherous shoals of narrative foul-ups: plots that don't plot, turgid and repetitious accumulations of thematic touchstones, stilted dialogue, and incredible incidents—and bring him instead to some powerful if lurid imaginative constructions (a lot of this work reminds you of those tourist paintings on velvet). But imaginative they really are—at a time when most novelists use the imagination not at all, as if it were a vestigial tail. Here—revolving around themes of sex, the miniature, the creaturely, pornography, Mexico, prostitution—the story is again wildly far-fetched. A sales rep for a surgical instruments company, Paul Cords, visits a Mexican horse-farm that he discovers is actually a porno-film mill, turning out a specialty: sex films that feature with the humans two very small horses, dog-sized, that perform tricks (as well as copulate) in contrast to the human ruttings. Cords, with a woman named Mary Grace (a prostitute but also someone from his past, in fact very familially), has managed to spirit away one of the horses, the female—and whatever motion the book has thereafter is a jagged line drawn both away from being tracked down by the film-makers as well as toward a hidden realization of family ties and magical redemption. Any stricter plot rundown, though, would provide laughs—which threaten, too, at some of Olson's pompous, ecclesiastical prosings, as well as at the murky stillness, like mud, of some of the individual scenes. Yet there's primordial power in the underlying matrix; it's a spooky story, something resonant despite its clumsiness and too-seriousness. Is Olson one of our best unreadable writers?