Oola
A Novel
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2.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A provocative and impressive debut delivered with a uniquely sinister lyricism by a brilliant 21-year-old; a story about sex, privilege, desire, and creativity in the post-college years
The first thing Leif notices about Oola is the sharp curve of her delicate shoulders, tensed as if for flight. Even from that first encounter at a party in a flat outside of London, there’s something electric about the way Oola, a music school dropout, connects with the cossetted, listless narrator we find in twenty-five-year-old Leif. Infatuated, the two hit the road across Europe, housesitting for Leif’s parents’ wealthy friends, and finally settling for the summer in Big Sur.
Leif makes Oola his subject: he will attempt an infinitesimal cartography of her every thought and gesture, her every dimple, every snag, every swell of memory and hollow. And yet in this atmosphere of stifling and paranoid isolation, the world around Leif and Oola begins to warp--the tap water turns salty, plants die, and Oola falls dangerously ill. Finally, it becomes clear that the currents surging just below the surface of Leif’s story are infinitely stranger than they first appear.
Oola is a mind-bendingly original novel about the way that--particularly in the changeable, unsteady just-post-college years--sex, privilege, desire, and creativity can bend, blur, and break. Brittany Newell bursts into the literary world with a narrative as twisted and fresh as it is addicting.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Newell's debut novel, young writer Leif develops an all-encompassing obsession with his lover Oola as he attempts to pen a book about her. After growing up in New England and graduating from college, Leif travels the world, staying in hostels and house-sitting for relatives and parents of his friends. He meets Oola through a mutual friend at a party in London and tumbles into a physical relationship with her, asking her to accompany him to his latest house-sitting gig in Arizona. Leif peppers Oola with questions about her life, learning about her poor childhood in Los Angeles with parents on the fringes of the music scene. While it's ambitious of Newell to chronicle Oola along with Leif, documenting his unhealthy descent along with her life story, the obvious pitfall of this book rears its head. The reader's enjoyment will ultimately hinge on whether he or she finds Oola as fascinating as Leif does. The best parts of the novel happen when Leif isn't saying things like, "Could you have resisted her, even if you'd had an inkling that this beauty was an act?" The plot comes to life once Oola is off the page and Leif engages with his childhood pal Tay, or goes out in a full Oola outfit, complete with hair bleached Oola blonde. Shortly after she's fled him, Leif slowly loses it when he finds a diary that chronicles a wild part of her life that she'd never told him about. He sets out to find her musician ex-boyfriend Le Roy, and the book hurtles toward an unsatisfying ending.
