Oval

April 29, 2019
Wilk’s provocative if flawed debut highlights the difficulties of idealism and the dangers of corporations co-opting progressive goals. In a near-future Berlin with astronomical housing costs, 20-something scientist Anja and her artist-turned- “disruption consultant” boyfriend Louis live in an experimental sustainable community. The perpetual malfunctions of the house compound their struggles with strict rules such as composting all trash they produce (they surreptitiously discard it offsite), limiting their use of climate control, and not smoking. When Louis returns from his mother’s funeral in Indiana, Anja worries about his ostensible lack of grief. Howard, an ex-boyfriend and the slick PR face of the mega-corporation where Anja works, suddenly announces her project on self-constructing cartilage-based architecture has been canceled, but she will be immediately rehired as a consultant with hazy duties. Anja, who works despite having a large trust fund, suspects a conspiracy and enlists her former lab partner Michel and unfocused quasiactivist friends Laura and Dam for emotional and investigative support. As Anja grows increasingly cold to him, Louis reveals he has been feverishly developing a drug designed to make people more generous. Before launching distribution through Berlin’s clubs, he convinces Anja to try it out with spiraling, unexpected consequences. While the parts do not gel into a satisfying novel, Wilk’s wry satire poses pressing questions.

May 1, 2019

DEBUT In near-future Berlin, Anja and Louis live on the Berg, a human-made mountain and sustainable ecocommunity that has never worked as it should. Part of a creative class in which innovation and corporate doublespeak reign supreme, artists are patronized (in multiple senses of the word) as consultants, and everything can be commodified. The couple struggle to find normalcy after the death of Louis's mother, and Anja soon realizes that Louis is hiding more than his grief when he reveals Oval, a pill he's invented that makes people more generous. He plans to circulate Oval in the city's thriving club scene as a way of subverting neoliberal charity and improving income disparity. Featuring a vaguely sinister, all-reaching monopolist company; biotechnologies such as Oval; and Berg homes that are inherently destructive, Wilk's debut reads as a prelude to postapocalyptic biotech ecofiction, recalling Jeff VanderMeer's Borne. Weighted with Anja's angst about her relationship with Louis, whom we only see through her eyes, the story is slow to build, peaking in the final pages. VERDICT For readers who enjoy a bit of the speculative with their literary fiction, this is an overall thought-provoking look at culture, society, and relationships.--Vikki Terrile, Queensborough Community Coll., Bayside, NY

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2019
Wilk's first novelis a strange, vivid thought experiment. In a near-future Berlin, scientist Anja lives in an ecosettlement on an artificial mountain. She worries over her malfunctioning house and struggles with a new job after her lab shuts down her experiments. She frets over friends Dam, a gay man who sends out horoscope-like weather updates each morning, and Laura, a skeptic who gambles on reality-show results. Along with her usual worries, she has to think of Louis, who recently lost his mother and is focusing on a proposal for a pill that could incite generosity and force society to change for the better. Anja's quiet, shy analysis turns a critical eye to our future, asking daring questions of how the desire to change the world for the better could instead turn on it a new kind of toxicity. Wilk makes the reader ponder how relying on corporations to invest in art and sustainability could put us on a perilous path. In Anja's world, artists are corporate entities, and the drive toward sustainability gentrifies communities. Oval is a book of plot twists and turns that roots itself in Anja's relatable, practical soul and scientific passion for inquiry.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 1, 2019
Deeply weird and unsettlingly hilarious, Wilk's dystopian debut pushes the grim absurdities of the present just a little bit further, into a near future that's too plausible for comfort. Anja and her boyfriend, Louis, live together, inconveniently but rent-free, on the side of an (artificial) mountain in an experimental zero-waste eco-colony--a welcome escape from Berlin's skyrocketing rents. And yes, their house doesn't really work, exactly--though it monitors them constantly, it is in a perpetual state of decay--and yes, it is a project of Finster, the all-knowing corporation where Anja works as a lab scientist. Or she did, until her division is suddenly shut down and she's promoted to "Laboratory Knowledge Management Consultant," where she'll "do nothing for more money." ("That's how companies run," her mentor/ex-lover advises, brightly.) But when Louis, an American "artist-consultant" with a prestigious NGO gig, where it is his job to produce exactly nothing with explicit applications--"his creativity," Wilk explains, "was both the means and the end"--returns from his mother's funeral, he's changed somehow, in ways that Anja cannot pinpoint. Instead of grieving, as she imagines grief to be, he immerses himself in a new and secret creative project: a drug called Oval that gets people high on generosity. "Generosity is already in the brain, just waiting to be unlocked," Louis tells her. "It takes the tiniest change to make giving feel better than taking." It could be the solution to inequality. After all, he says, "Capitalism--it's in the brain." With Louis consumed by his project, and the eco-colony all but condemned, Anja--who has developed a mysteriously vicious rash-- is left to navigate an increasingly sinister reality. If the novel sounds dangerously on-the-nose, it isn't thanks to Wilk's off-kilter humor. But the book's true surprise is its startling emotional kick: If the circumstances are heightened to extremes, the relationships--with their delicate dynamics--are all too real. Witty and alarming, a satire with (unexpected) heart.

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