The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Blond Box, by Toby Olson
reviewed by Joseph Dewey

Toby Olson. The Blond Box. FC2, 2003. 285 pp. Paper: $14.95; Utah. Green Integer, 2003. 493 pp. Paper: $12.95.

Toby Olson has always been compelled by the mystery of mystery. Whether investigating the mystery of redemption, the alluring pull of the aesthetic impulse, the taking-in of a sweeping natural landscape, or the promise of salvation premised by love and the sweet friction of sex, Olson—like D. H. Lawrence—has long accepted the writer’s responsibility to endow the unsuspected immediate with the weight of enchantment without possessing the vocabulary (or, frankly, the interest) to thin that response into the explicable. The Blond Box shimmers in a rich sheen of mystery—it begins campily within the genre (a double murder unsolved for twenty years that involves a treasure map, a traveling sex show, and a legendary jazz pianist and juggler) but quickly involves as well the pulling mystery of art (characters are, in turn, mesmerized by the audacious experimental canvases and implicit terrorism of Marcel Duchamp); the intriguing mystery of history (characters wrestle with imperfect recollections, mine newspaper archives and inhabit libraries and dissertations, manage awkwardly the heft of nostalgia and regret, reel within the play of coincidence and chance); and ultimately the luminous mystery of narrative itself (Olson braids three narrative threads that spin a mesmerizing symbol-system of resonance and that foreground ultimately the intricate intensity of plot itself: the account of the 1949 murders themselves outside a dusty Arizona town; the account of a pulp sci-fi writer in 1969 Philadelphia, interested in using the mystery as the subject of the latest installment in his soft-porn detective series, who sends his grad assistant on a fact-finding mission to Arizona; and a draft of that wildly original sci-fi/political futuristic thriller, complete with emendations to the writer for revisions). At every turn Olson reminds his reader how information inevitably recovers ambiguity, how the tidiest sense of remembered history and constructed plot are more journeys into accident and chance, how everyday lives must play out against and amid the luminous, albeit clumsy, mystery of attraction and want. The language, as always with Olson, is broad, adamant, and stunning, this text a conjured place fit for extended habitation.

Utah, reissued as part of the Green Integer Masterworks of Fiction series, testifies to Olson’s enduring place in contemporary fiction. David, a masseur whose powerful touch can ease pain and coax revelation, finds himself in crisis: the haunting love of his life has abandoned him to pursue her aesthetic inclinations out west, and his closest friend has wasted away into a death-too-soon. David undertakes a journey west to jumpstart his own dead heart and along the way to clarify his own place at midlife and to settle his past, an ambitious (and potentially clichéd) agenda that Olson manages with originality, dignity, and richness. That David’s reclamation ultimately occurs at a mysterious Utah artist colony, that it involves lost children, shattered marriages, compelling adultery, and a creepy vengeance-with-angry-bees scenario, reminds readers of Olson’s legitimate position not only as a Lawrencean advocate of the redemptive power of art but also his legacy as a pure, engrossing storyteller.