Book Reviews: Totally Killer and The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility

by Anne Pyburn, September 28, 2009

1991. The era of the original Bush adventure in the Middle East. The era of grunge and Bret Easton Ellis and “Seinfeld.”

Greg Olear’s protagonist Todd Lauder inhabits that bygone time like a cozy flannel shirt. Though he’s plainly seeing events from a present-day perspective and with the knowledge of a fully adult man, the voice is somehow that of a twentysomething slacker narrating from a couch in the corner of a cozily seedy apartment.

He seems, at first, to be an unlikely sort to get swept up into a web of murder, conspiracy, and high adventure—his focus is intensely personal. “I never loved Taylor Schmidt. Despite what you may have heard.” he begins. Taylor Schmidt, we learn, is dead. Todd mourns her to this day despite knowing full well that she was a soulless psychopath. He’s a well-meaning man, or kid—there’s some aspect of him that is curiously trapped in his era and story like a preserved laboratory specimen, something about his personality that just hasn’t jelled. By the end of the story, we understand exactly why this might be, but to say more would be to give away one of the twists in this wacky tale of capitalist aspirations run way beyond amok.

The early 1990s are fully evoked, a character in themselves. (“A Gulf War that we thought, in our prelapsarian naïveté, didn’t have the ratings to spawn a sequel. Oh, and the Soviet Union—the Big Bear, our Orwellian enemy for a half century—broke up. Just broke up, like it was a fucking rock band.”) Chronogram humor contest winner and Hudson Valley native Olear’s first novel is a dark, hilarious, and original fable, well worth reading. (Olear will read on October 3 at 7pm at Inquiring Minds bookstore in New Paltz.)