“All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere.” With those words, Aleksandar Hemon introduces readers to the voice of a cipher, the mystery man at the center his novel The Lazarus Project. This might also be a good perspective from which to view Lance Olsen’s latest novel, Absolute Away.
Absolute Away is one woman’s life story, leveled with thoughts and the occasional essay, grounded in Olsen’s conviction that neither history nor memory are facts, so both are proper fodder for fiction. Each of the first two thirds of Absolute Away takes place in an accepted historical context, while the third, which is patently fictional, continues the story they begin. What makes the reading a challenge, and ultimately fulfilling, is Olsen’s effort to include “all the lives I could live” in a single narrative.
That single narrative begins in the middle of May, 1933, in a city square in Germany where and when history records that a massive, public book burning was held by the up-and-coming Nazi party. Three year-old Edie Metzger and her parents, anxious young Jews, have come to the square to see the truth for themselves. It goes without saying that their future could go in many directions, but that in none of them will they continue the lives they have thus far lived.
As truckloads of books are burned, the narrative voice recounts intellectual and literary events, past and future, involving specific books and their authors. Additional stories detail how hysteria spreads from one population to another. When rain threatens to extinguish the righteous conflagration, the fire department shows up to pour gasoline on the flames.
Present in the crowd is Hermann Göring, who will play a role second only to Hitler’s in the political and military events to come. First, though, he notices Edie and, like all men, is charmed by her manner. He undertakes to give her a kiss, to which she responds by biting his lip. This moment may augur another moment, a dozen years later, when Göring’s suicide will be revealed by the residue of a vial of strychnine on his lips.
From Germany, Olsen moves to America and the tumultuous life of Jackson Pollock. There are three women in this part: Lee Krasner, Pollock’s estranged wife, from whom it is now widely believed he learned the tenets of modernist painting; Ruth Kligman, another painter, with whom Pollock had a long affair in the last years of his life; and Edith Metzger, a friend of Ruth’s whom Ruth persuades to come along on an evening with Pollock that in the real world turned fatal: Pollock wrecked his car near his home, sparing Ruth but killing himself and Edith. It’s not impossible that Olsen named his novel’s central character after this young woman whose life was otherwise wasted.
The middle third of Absolute Away is largely dialogue, primarily between the women. True to almost any unedited transcript, it’s challenging to read. Many lines trail off as the speaker loses interest or confidence in her thought, while other lines begin with one speaker and are finished by the other. It makes demands on the reader, but it’s in dialogue that writers and readers come closest to being in another person’s presence.
Most promoters of Absolute Away either don’t attempt to describe the third section, or quote the publisher’s blurb. Yet it’s here that the author’s intention becomes clear. While the chronology throughout the novel is loose, as befits the way the conscious mind moves back and forth between the present, sensual moment and its imagination of either the past or the future, the overall journey is from the nascent awareness of the child to the increasing dilapidation of old age. Olsen has a gift for conveying the mental events characteristic of every stage, including when external events distort or disrupt conscious processes. An extended segment of the third part reads like science fiction: a series of distortions of reality that compare to suddenly finding oneself in an M.C. Escher print, like the universally popular “Relativity.”
Of course, the characters through which Olsen traces this late phase of life, men and women all of whose names are variants of Edith, find this predicament less entertaining in reality than it may sound like. But they learn to live with it, to wait until either the door reappears in the wall or a new wall renders it obsolete. It’s arguably here that Olsen most clearly captures the complete reality of any one life. In Waiting for Godot, Pozzo says, “They give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then its night once more.” In Absolute Away, Lance Olsen takes us on that descent, leaving out the fictional rewards and explanations of fables, and showing vast swaths of the detail that doesn’t merit notice in most accounts. For what feels like it could go on for a thousand years, Edith’s life “felt as if she were flying.”
“And then it didn’t.” But don’t worry, the book’s voice reassures readers. “When this round concludes, everyone will change names and a new one begin.”
Absolute Away
Lance Olsen
Dzanc Books
April 16, 2024
212 pp
$17.95
Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Categories: Book Reviews | Literary Arts
