Toby Olson | Walking, A Love Story

the long walk to the lover’s bed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Toby Olson Walking, A Love Story (Seattle: Occidental Square Books, 2020)

 

For over five decades now Toby Olson has been writing fictions that superficially appear to use basically realistic plots and a delight in a Dickensian-like world of coincidence. His newest work, Walking, a love story published this year, contains both of these elements.

 

     On the other hand, there is always something surprising about an Olson work, something that cracks open that seemingly mimetic shell, pushing his works into the 20th and 21st century. One of his earliest fictions, for example, The Life of Jesus, published in 1976 (originally by New Directions and reprinted by my own Green Integer) is, through a childhood imagination of Christian iconography, basically a surreal-like work seen through the lens of American realism.

     In Dorit in Lesbos, Olson takes us on a magical travel voyage to the Greek islands which, in its whirl of inter-relationships and evil doings transforms it from a realist work to a kind of whirlwind fantasy. Write Letter to Billy (Coffee House Press, 2000) is so intertwined with familiar relationships and with a past murder-mystery that the book, in its concerns with the psychological interstices of family life and its presentation of its hero as a kind of murder detective, pulls it out of what we basically think of as realism into more contemporary pop-fiction genres.

      Often in Olson’s fictions, sexuality is twerked or even hidden in a way that few 19th century fictions dared to explore. In The Bitter Half (University of Alabama Press/FC2, 2006) the hero is a cross-dressing prison inspector, who first sleeps with a young, escaped prisoner while perceived as a male, and later invites him into her commune-like society as her heterosexual lover.

      So too is this strange alteration of dark and sunny sexuality at the center of Olson’s newest work, Walking. The endless “walker” in this case, named, at least temporarily Aphrodite, is also the storyteller, slowly revealing the horrific sexual acts of her own father, who as a dollmaker used his creations to stimulate sexual arousal while in the real world torturing and murdering unknown women whom he accidently encounters.

      Her own story is a complex one, with a childhood of being horrified by the intense looks into which her father embraced her, his later supposed suicide, and his reappearance as a strange visitor named Hephaestus (the Greek god of fire, metalworking, stone masonry, and sculpture—an ugly man whom, for that that very reason, was married by Zeus to Aphrodite). Such a marriage is certainly what this father might wish as a consummation of his desires, a sexual encounter with his own daughter.

     Yet, in Olson’s retelling of the Aphrodite myths, his always walking hero also tells the story of and controls the actions of all the fiction’s other characters, most of whom end up in a Day of the Dead celebration at the Sea Burst hotel (clearly a reference to Aphrodite’s own birth) iu an unnamed beach town that has assimilated a population of Chicanos. Like Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds and Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew (both of which works Olson refers to in his brief afterword, the characters she creates also quickly get out of hand, developing their own plots and incorporating new characters which she has utterly no desire to deal with.

      Since the characters of this tale apparently are all creations of Aphrodite’s imagination, they all magically link up in other ways as well. Ned, a New York artist, like Aphrodite’s father, uses mannequins and dolls in his art installations, reminding us subliminally of the art of Hans Bellmer, whose mannequin-limbed dolls also bring together a sense of fascination and repulsion.

      The local doctor, Ram Chopra, on hand for holiday accidents, has lost his wife in a never solved murder, which for years he was accused of committing. But in the course of the fiction we discover, along with Chopra, that the true murderer was actually Aphrodite’s father, now self-named Hephaestus.

      Oddly enough, there is another woman staying at the Sea Burst, Lisa James, Ned’s sister, whose husband was also killed, and who went to trial for his accidental murder. The two quickly fall in love, almost at the same lightning speed that the former heterosexual Ned falls in love with the Sea Burst’s piano player, who we have formerly seen in Philadelphia, Bo Bogardus.

     Meanwhile, Ned and Lisa’s mother Edna Hobby is charmed by the precocious young son, Charly, of the local veterinarian. The young Sherlock, also attempting to learn magic tricks, entertains Edna for an entire afternoon, which washes over her as a kind of redemptive force, given that the man she was to have married returned to his former wife just before the wedding. Later, the hotel manager, Angelo Camp falls in love with Edna.

     In the interim, however, lured to a small stone castle by the evil Hephaestus, Lisa goes missing. All are worried about her, but it takes her new lover, Ram, to discover that she is now hidden away in the Rapunzel-like edifice wherein Hephaestus has locked her up in order to torture her before he murders.

     With some difficulty, Ram breaks open the door, saves his new lover and almost joyfully and calmly strangles the murderer of his own wife, burying the body in the sand several feet away from the stone formation. The strange detective pair of Charly and Edna uncover the body the next morning and even peruse the nearby castle, Edna recognizing that her daughter has been there given the evidence of a Djarums cigarette butt, the brand Lisa smokes.

     They report their discovery to the police, who later arrive at the Sea Burst to question them; but they reveal so little that Ram and Lisa are never connected to the stranger’s death.

     Other relationships develop among the leftovers of the holiday, and even Aphrodite transforms herself into Sara Brown to enter a budding relationship with Ernesto, Charly’s father the veterinarian,.

     By the end of this work, we almost want to sing out The Beatles “All You Need Is Love” or, at least, Wilco’s “Love Is Everywhere”—but  as the goddess of love has already warned us, “Beware, so too is hate and mayhem hiding in the shadows. You have to carefully work to find love or have it blessed upon you by a force like Aphrodite, and even then it often needs the fanning of Eros’ flames.

     And, in that sense, Olson’s newest fiction might be described as a kind of love sonnet of redemption for all of those who have lost love and felt they might never discover it again.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2020