SAVAGERY AESTHETIC & PUBLIC: LANCE OLSEN & HEAD IN FLAMES

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem the uses of Western Civ! Surely the husks of Renaissance and Enlightenment need “slashes of verve;” they need “aesthetic savageries,” in the raucous and polyglot twenty-first century. And savagery would seem, at first glance, the aesthetic at work in Lance Olsen’s exciting new novel, Head in Flames. A chapterless—not to say relentless—narrative, Head unfolds in three alternating typefaces that actually look like slashes, no entry longer than a few lines and many a single barbed scratch. Each typeface streams a different consciousness: that of two men intent on spilling blood and another trundling oblivious into his murder. Such a text offers next to nothing by way of scene setting, and while there’s character development, it can be tricky, hidden behind the narrators’ posturing.

Besides, these are characters reined in by the facts. The business about slash and savagery comes from the most famous of the three interior monologists, Vincent Van Gogh. The great Impressionist has a turbulent turn of mind on the day we visit it: that July day in 1890 when he shot himself in a cornfield, then staggered to his boarding house to die. Yet the other two on are on track for worse. One is Van Gogh’s filmmaker descendent, Theo, riding his bike through Amsterdam on the November morning in 2004 when the third narrator, Mohammed Bouyeri, waits outside the Dutchman’s studio, in one pocket a 9mm Glock and in the other a serrated blade.

The murder and beheading at the end of Theo’s commute, combined with Vincent’s eventual passing, deliver a tripartite climax with prickly satisfaction to rival that of any conventional novel. Olsen’s entire rare construct delivers, its imagination exploding through its constraints. I’ve rarely experienced so deep a chill in reading that sets such a formal challenge.

Olsen has worked within similar constraints before, especially in Nietzche’s Kisses from ’06, a backward journey through the philosopher’s experience. His Anxious Pleasures, from ’07, provided group therapy for the family of Gregor Samsa after their breadwinner turned into a bug. Before then, Olsen tended to American subjects, toying for instance with cyberpunk, but his brisk European sojourns have opened his sensibility to new power—he’s never done anything so hard-hitting as Head in Flames.

The worst blows, to be sure, are those of Mohammed Bouyeri. From the first he’s in a place where “words don’t count,” where all that matters is “the weight inside your fist inside your pocket.” Bouyeri’s transformation into holy warrior holds no great surprises, but Olsen leaves glimmering details in his narrative claw marks. We learn the ethnic slur preferred by the Dutch, a monkey’s name, “Makak;” we witness a new version of that lose-lose conflict, a strapped immigrant father versus a son born to the promise of a new land. Yet while Bouyeri’s reflections generate sympathy, they don’t soft-pedal his vi-ciousness—in particular, his faith-based misogyny.

What prompts the murder is one film in particular, an outcry against the brutalization of Muslim women. For this the twenty-first-century Van Gogh worked with a Somali-born woman who’s served in the Dutch parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ali remains one of Europe’s foremost spokespeople against Wahhabi Islam, but here the potential heroine is encountered only at a remove, via Theo’s memories.

The filmmaker’s hardly a saint; he wrecked his marriage with philandering and currently has no intimate life outside of Amsterdam’s red-light district. Theo knows himself, however—“I’m the village id iot”—and with his acerbic wit and his affection toward his son, he’d be the central consciousness of an ordinary novel. Olsen’s sentences often feature marvelous verbs, and the best occur in Theo’s passages, such as the man’s “belly wubbling in glee” under a whore’s ministrations. Then too, Theo provides the most horrifying stuff in the text—and I don’t mean his murder. Worse is his recollection of Ayaan’s recollection of how she was “made pure” as a six-year-old: tied down by fundamentalist aunts and worked over by a butcher’s scissors.

Given such material, and the persistent reminders that European tolerance may have invited in a “Trojan Horse” of “De-Enlightenment,” when “by 2015,” more than fifty percent of the continent’s population will be Muslim—given his insistence on the culture clash that most defines the present—what’s crazy old Vincent doing in there? What’s 1890 got to do with it? Yet the painter gives us the book’s title, a device he rigged up for night-work, a candelabra worn as a hat. Then too, when it came to women Vincent had terrible problems, rooted in his religious training. The most notorious case got bloody.

Olsen isn’t about savagery after all. Rather, for all his ambition, he’s subtle; he teases out the link between the tortured artist, driven to self-slaughter by an “experiment in writing our own lives,” outside God’s will, and the deluded murderer, who acts in hopes that God will revisit his own degraded “soul…in its ragged sheet of skin.” No small accomplishment, and I daresay Head in Flames has set a new standard for the social consciousness of postmodern narratives.¹

—Rain Taxi, 2010

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1. Olsen expanded the postmodern social consciousness further with Calendar of Regrets, another exceptional piece of work, the following year.