Oval by Elvia Wilk
Review by Trahearne Falvey
‘It was always the apocalypse’, declares Laura, the resident doomsayer in Oval, ‘you guys just didn’t notice until now.’ Wilk’s ambitious debut, which follows scientist-artist Anja, her artist-scientist boyfriend Louis, and a cast of other bougie twenty-somethings in a very-near-future Berlin dominated by freakish weather and stark inequality, provokes engagement with a crucial question bothering the literary world: faced with the overwhelming reality of the climate crisis, what is the novel for?
According to the theorist McKenzie Wark, the literary novel ― which she dismisses as consisting of ‘bourgeois subjects…prattling on about their precious “inner lives”’ ― is too clogged up with what Franco Moretti calls ‘filler’ (the everyday objects, styles and habits of bourgeois society) to accommodate the totality of the climate crisis, and is therefore obsolete. As signalled by the novel’s first sentences ― ‘After death, bureaucracy takes the wheel. Funeral arrangements, bank account closures, insurance payouts. Unpaid taxes.’ ― most of Oval is made up of all the little things the characters are noticing when they are not noticing the apocalypse: feeling alienated at the gym, the difficulty of recycling, the sexual and social politics of nightclubs, the limits of non-disclosure agreements, the insularity of the avant-garde art world, and the reality TV show The Bachelor. Wilk straddles the space between literary and science fiction (seen by Wark as more suited to the task of responding to the climate crisis), in order to represent the total, catastrophic mess of late late anthropocentric capitalism whilst giving voice to the neuroses and solipsism of bourgeois subjects that live within it. Ultimately, though, the balance is tipped in favour of the bourgeois novel, and enjoyment of Oval will depend on how interesting you find the characters’ pseudo-philosophical musings.
Among a smart yet shallow cast, Anja is sympathetic: a nuanced character who combines millennial ennui with the muted idealism that befits her job as a scientist working in sustainability. At the outset of the novel, she is living with Louis in an experimental eco-house on an artificial mountain owned by a corporation called Finster, and becomes relatably overwhelmed by the expectations of being a good sustainable citizen:
‘She couldn’t keep track of everything she used; trying to do so had led to an ontological breakdown on the microlevel of her daily life. Were eyelashes and skin cells on a par with hair ties and coffee cups? Were paper coffee cups on par with a mug that had to be rewashed using graywater from the house, which cost energy to pump?’
The influence of Don DeLillo is felt in this arch, ironic prose which crackles with wit and observation (and in which a word like ‘ontological’ is not out of place) but also in the eponymous Oval ― a drug which, much like Dylar in White Noise, seems to have the potential to solve a fundamental problem with humanity.
Louis spends more and more time at work, secretly developing this pill that stimulates generosity in Berlin’s nightclubbers. When he eventually shows it to Anja, saying ‘Capitalism ― it’s in the brain’, she is sceptical of its potential to solve inequality: ‘He pointed to an area near the front of his skull where she supposed the capitalism was sequestered [...] “So you take it and it turns off your…capitalism?” She laughed.’
Anja’s scepticism is proved right; Wilk develops the critique of individualised, technological market-led solutions introduced with the waste disposal scene. It’s an important argument, but when combined with the novel’s representations of corporate greenwashing and the colonisation of relationships, science, art, everything by the market, results in a read which is often desperately bleak in spite of its comedy.
Louis believes Oval can solve the city’s homelessness problem, and action in the novel is often triggered by problems with housing: Anja has to abort the decomposing eco-house and move in with Laura and her brother Dam, and then Laura and Dam’s apartment is bought by Finster, their rent goes up, and they are forced to move out. But it is difficult to feel too much for these characters when there is so little at stake: Laura and Dam, whose respective forms of work seem to be betting on the outcome of The Bachelor and occasionally releasing the surreal, poetic weather reports threaded throughout the novel (‘friendly skies, calm waters / immense gratitude / 30°’, ‘black sun, definitive night/ the shiver (-1°)’), can simply move to Barcelona to continue partying, while Anja has an enormous trust fund.
When homeless characters appear, their German is left untranslated and they only serve to trigger guilt in the bourgeois characters: ‘I can’t give them anything and I can’t deal with the guilt of saying no,’ says Dam, ‘It’s like the precarious are expected to support the downtrodden in this city.’ It is difficult to discern Wilk’s intentions here: is she earnestly thinking through the consequences of a very real housing crisis, or criticising a recent conflation of the notion of precarity to include bohemian millennials alongside the genuinely poverty-stricken? Is she inviting us to hate these self-involved characters, or sympathise with them? Regardless, it seems strange that, as the Oval drug causes havoc and the novel’s final section rushes towards a catastrophic ending, the people most affected by the problems Wilk highlights are absent.
Oval buzzes with Big Ideas, from object-oriented ontology to the humanities’ so-called ‘mycological turn’, but for all the huge questions it raises around power and sustainability, the world of the novel is remarkably privileged and narrow, best encapsulated by Laura: ‘We get fucked up, we spend our time in dark rooms, we don’t make anything. Protests are basically street parties. When we see the news we watch it through a filter, because none of it’s real to us - we cry about it sometimes, but it doesn’t really touch us, it’s not real, we feel safe.’ It’s a brutal and accurate diagnosis of many millennial lives, but we might question, like McKenzie Wark, if that is enough.