OOLA by Brittany Newell

There’s much to love in this ambitious debut novel. Exquisite, iridescent language and a theatric series of scenes propel characters to discover themselves and each other. Relationships take shape and shred; nonconformity itself becomes a quest.

Settings range from a remote California coastline cabin to the Arizona desert and a Berlin punk club. The first-person narrator, Leif, falls in love with Oola and also with the wild, weird, broken world itself.
In this first-person literary jewel, gender lines and emotional boundaries are blurred. Leif and Oola are humans of privilege, who roam the world, to construct and dismantle various versions of self.

Unfortunately could not access the book, though I tried re-downloading both the file and the application I read ebooks on (Adobe Digital Editions) several times.

Hard to believe this debut is from a 21-year-old Stanford student. Incredible! Left me wanting more.

What a debut novel! Twenty-five-year-old Leif and twenty-one-year old Oola are quirky "soulmates"--at least in Leif's mind. As they travel from place to place, house-sitting and getting to know each other, Leif's obsession with her grows as he watches her adoringly and memorizes every gesture and curve of her body. And yet she is still a mystery to him and as circumstances begin to change--the water tastes salty, she becomes paranoid due to the aliens watching her--Leif has to wonder what is happening to his girlfriend. Although depressing at times--maybe just because at my age those post-college years are way behind me--it is brilliantly written by a fresh new voice in fiction, one that I imagine we will hear from again!

This is a story of obsession that goes beyond the object being obsessed about. Leif and Oola are in their twenties when they meet and were attracted to each other. Leif has been getting house sitting jobs all over the world and Oola joins him. During their travels from one house to the next, they only have each other and become isolated. Leif’s obsession with Oola keeps growing until he not only wants to know every inch of her, both physically and mentally, but he wants to become her.

I chose this book because of the beautiful writing by the author that the publisher promised. And yes, there is beautiful writing in this book, as well as crude, rough language. The author writes with wit and black humor but I found the book to be very drawn out in parts and offensive in other parts. I find obsession fascinating and usually like strange, unsettling books but this book also involves drugs, fetishism and gender bending. Though in thinking about it, I’ve read other books involving those topics that I thought highly of. This one was just too coarse for me. I think the author does a good job in showing the deterioration of this relationship but I think it possibly requires a younger, more modern audience. Overall, it just wasn’t for me though I did appreciate the author’s talent.

Lyrical Nihilism, With A Side of Ennui and Dread

Despite the fact that the characters initially range all over the globe this is an L.A. novel the way anything written by Joan Didion or Eve Babitz is basically an L.A. novel. Heck, our heroine Oola's narrative recounting of her childhood could be a chapter in Babitz's "Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.". And I mean that as the highest possible form of praise. In the first half of the book the hot, bleached white, dry, languid, and vaguely decadent prose sketches two lost souls who may have the means, but certainly don't have the will, to save themselves. City of Angels indeed.

At the halfway point we wonder if it is possible to be passively-obsessed. Our ridiculously unreliable, deceiving, and increasingly unbalanced narrator mixes lucid observations and comments with unnerving descriptions of Oola, and at this point we begin to become uneasy about whether his obsession will stay within the realm of thought and feeling or move into the realm of action. You'll have to read the book to find out the answer to that question.

Of course, at some level the plot is sort of a snipe chase. The point is to listen in on the conversations between Leif and Oola, to follow the weird path traveled by Leif's mind, and to tease out and appreciate what the author is doing with any particular sentence. Many staged pieces, recollections, reminiscences, and bits of narrative history sit outside of the story, and could easily be shuffled and reinserted at different points in the book without doing it too much violence. Since you can say the same thing about nightmares and social history opinion pieces I guess that's oddly appropriate.

In any event, if you want a dark, provocative, witty, occasionally humorous, (but more often unnerving), report on the state of our gender bending, privileged and lost mid-twenty somethings this is a rather remarkable place to start.

(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)