Toby Olson

This book was given a Faulkner Award, and like Faulkner books, it doesn't make much sense. I kept trying to like it, but it skipped around in place and time so much that I struggled to understand what was happening and when it was happening. The plot devices were convenient to the point of being silly.

I also disliked the underdeveloped idea of Bill thinking so much about Jen's sexuality. It was strange, and had very little bearing on the rest of the book.

I finished this book out of wishful thinking- I kept hoping it would sort itself out and start making sense. It never did.… (mehr)

For the first third of The Bitter Half, I had to wonder if I was actually reading a novel by Toby Olson. The narrative was straightforward in a way his novels never are. The narrator, Chris Pollard, is a specialist in prisons who consults with wardens around the country in an attempt to halt escapes. He meets up with 'the kid,' a charming teenager who routinely escapes from prisons, and hears a dark Faulknerian tale of childhood. Sometimes the kid's dog Buck becomes the central consciousness. The setting moves around from Mexico to Wisconsin to Louisiana to Philadelphia, the Depression a weighty backdrop.

But things derailed quickly and the mysterious Olson obsessions with masks and endlessly embedded significations and miscues materialized. The narrator is not at all what was imagined, calling entirely into question our reading of the novel's first (bitter?) half. We realize we've not been mislead, but have made assumptions based on appearances, which obviously deceived. Toby set a trap and we fell for it deeply. Then acrobats and illusionists and uncanny coincidences brought us to more familiar Olson territory.

Perhaps The Bitter Half is his best novel since the greats Dorit in Lesbos, The Woman Who Escaped from Shame, and Seaview. Perhaps I'll revisit it in a few years as I do his others to understand better the delicious manner in which my former Temple University prof flumoxes me.… (mehr)

The story takes place in three different times... 1949, 1969, and a fictional 2069, where characters in a sci-fi book being written in 1969 follow a parallel storyline to the plot unfolding in the "real world." Beyond this interesting and unusual structure, the book introduces us to an odd grouping of characters who are engaging and genuine, wracked as they are with various medical problems.

Ultimately _The Blond Box_ is about the art of Marcel Duchamp, and the best function of this odd narrative is providing a thoughtful, hypothetical context for his strange art. It's like a different way to write about an installation, instead of a scholarly article, instead of a critical review, a novel that positions the art in the center of a system that explicates it in the unusual way it demands.… (mehr)