Contemporary Authors

How Debut Novel ‘Oola’ Is Like A Millennial ‘Lolita’
Talking with Brittany Newell about her new book

BY KRISTIN IVERSEN · APRIL 27, 2017
How Debut Novel 'Oola' Is Like A Millennial 'Lolita'

The first thing I noticed about Brittany Newell were her gloves. We were meeting for coffee to talk about her stunning debut novel, Oola, which dug itself deeply into my consciousness for many reasons, not least for its tactility. This is a book whose prose is so fervidly lush that it feels like, when you’re reading it, that you’re actually feeling it. Alternately sticky and soft, the words are palpable, not dissimilarly to the way in which merely thinking about those opening sentences of Lolita make the tip of my tongue tingle and the roof of my mouth pulse.

So it was interesting then, that Newell was wearing gloves, a barrier to feeling things directly; and it was perhaps even more interesting that the gloves were rubber, with carnelian nails painted at their tips. But this detail was only one of the striking things about meeting Newell, and undoubtedly the least of them. Far more notable was the expansive grace with which she talked about her experience writing her book, the fluidity with which she experiences the world, and the generosity with which she shared her thoughts and feelings. Oh, and the ease with which she correctly and unselfconsciously pronounces “Nabokov” (it’s a long “o” and it ends with an “off”).

When I first came across Oola, it was via a press release which made a big point of the fact that Newell was still an undergrad at Stanford when she wrote it. This is, absolutely, an impressive feat, but it’s not what’s notable about the book. Rather, Oola, which traces the relationship between Leif, a tormented young writer who spots the titular character at a party and, in no time at all, becomes instantly obsessed with her. The narrative unfolds into a feverish story of paranoia and isolation, lust and power struggles, and it is never less than captivating; a surreal and beautiful depiction of the way in which we feel like we are entitled to another person’s experiences, and even to their very being. So is it incredible that this book sprang from the mind of such a young person?

Sure, but it would be no less so if Newell had been 35 or 52.

Below, I talk with Newell about Nabokov, how she knew she wanted to be a writer, and how being an outsider can inform your art. And, of course, Oola.

How long have you known that you wanted to be a writer?
I guess I always knew that I wanted to be a writer. I think a large part of it had to do with the fact that from a young age I had access to a computer, and that sort of privacy. I was always writing stories on my parents’ MacBook and, like, hunting through probably horrible things on the internet that I shouldn’t have been looking at. I feel like all of that has fed into my psyche as a specifically contemporary writer. ’Cause I think there is a different way that you write when you’re on the computer, a sort of layering. They always say that Nabokov was the first writer to write as if he had been typing on a computer, ’cause he had this weird system of index cards, where he would go back and look through them. Which is like the ability to scroll up and down.

And at what point did you realize you had this novel in you?
I was always typing stories on my computer when I was young as eight, but the decision to do a novel came about when I was a freshman in college and I was trying to do the typical short story thing and I just got sick of it. Like, I realized that it was taking the same amount of time as it would take to write a novel, you know? And with a novel at least there’s the hopes that more people would read it. I just was tired of submitting things and figured I might as well go for the long haul and see if I can do it. And there was an element where I was just curious to see if I could do it, just a personal experiment to see if it would work out.

When reading Oola, I was definitely reminded of Lolita in that there’s an incredibly unreliable narrator and the narrative revolves around obsession and the ownership that some people feel like they have over others, particularly young women.
Yeah, it’s interesting, I definitely had Lolita in mind honestly just as a book that I love and think is really beautiful. But it’s funny because it’s like there’s an impure beauty to that book, because the fact that you like it is evidence that you’re being coerced by the narrator. I think I was just really attracted to that idea of a coercive narrator; you know, it’s not just Oola he’s controlling. In the end, he’s controlling you because you went along with his story and maybe you were annoyed or horrified or upset by things he did to Oola but you still went along with it, exactly like with Lolita, where the beauty of the language has a lot to do with the coercive narration. The element of being carried away by obsession or desire is definitely present in Leif’s relationship to Oola, even though I think as the book goes on, you see that he has more of a plan than he might initially admit to. But you know he might claim like, “I was just carried away by it all and I didn’t know any of this would happen.” And that could be true.

Do people tend to think that you’re a character in your book?
I think that happens a lot with young, debut novelists, the conflation between their lives and what they write.Whenever people read it, everyone’s always asking whether I’m Leif or I’m Oola—as if it could be so simple to reduce it, like I’m one or the other. People will be like, “Well, you are obviously Oola, because you are a girl.” Or, “You’re obviously Leif, because you’re a writer.” Or they’re always asking if it’s about me and my wife, like, “Which is which? Obviously this relationship has to be based on the two of you, right?” And it’s like, first of all that’d be kind of fucked up if it was. But also, it’s been three years basically, from first writing to publication, and as I’ve gone through my life and as the book develops, there’s always a vacillation between which roles I inhabit and when I’m the passive or the active agent in any relationship, not even romantic ones.

I think what’s also interesting is that people think the characters are so easy to reduce to something static, like that they aren’t also changing based upon the way you’re feeling when you read about them.
So that has actually given me more sympathy towards Leif, because when I was drafting it I was like, yeah, Leif is going to be this embodiment of that colonizing urge that people have in romantic relationships, where they don’t want anything unknown to them and they don’t want anything off limits. And when you’re drafting that in a simple way, it sounds purely nasty, but as I have been able to approach the book in a roundabout way now I can approach it like a reader, rather than a writer, and as a reader I’m more fluid in which characters I relate to and more sympathetic to Leif and the Leif-like things in me. It’s also been interesting because it’s very unpredictable how people relate to some of the characters. I’ve had people say they don’t like Oola at all and they think that she’s cold to Leif and that she’s somehow in the wrong, and then other people who are really creeped out by Leif, and people who are put out by both, because they’re like, “Oh, they’re so privileged,” which is something that comes up a lot.

Do you think there’s an objective reality as to what the characters are really like?
I go back to the original idea of a coercive narrator and the degrees to which we participate knowingly and unknowingly in a seduction. It’s a book about seduction in a way and hopefully Leif seduces the reader with his antics and also with his poetic language and lyrical take on things. I guess the secret is that you didn’t actually get to find anything out about Oola. Like, I had a professor who said if you try to imagine Lolita, like, you have to realize that you didn’t actually learn anything that you can take as a fact. When Humbert is like, “Oh well Lolita was playing into it, and she had control,” [you need to] step back and realize that you’re taking the narrator at face value. It’s a book all about those gray areas between people, between the reader and the writer, between genders, that fluidity.

Is privilege something that you thought about when you were coming up with this story line?
Definitely. For one thing, I was writing it while I was at Stanford and so I was definitely taking cues from that and people I know, privileges that I’ve had, access to being able to travel through grants, things that Stanford has given me. It’s just the environment that I was in for the past four years, that I’m both an observer of and a participant in. But then maybe 70 percent of the way through the book I had my writing mentor ask me, “Why do you think Leif thinks that he can do the things he does? What’s the root of that?” And that made me think about this notion of privilege in a different way in terms of entitlement, because maybe of all the things about Leif, that might be his fatal flaw. I mean, I think his fatal flaw is that he’s a romantic and then, within being a romantic, he thinks that he’s entitled to everything he wants because the purity of his intentions, they atone for whatever he wants to do. And Leif coming from a privileged background and material privilege and material entitlement, that all might translate into interpersonal entitlement. You know like, maybe there’s not that much of a difference between thinking he can travel anywhere he wants and thinking he can travel into any part of Oola.

Yeah, he’s the woke guy who also doesn’t realize how much of what he does is still an infringement on all sorts of other people’s rights.
The sensitive bro thing, where it’s like, “Well you know I’m friends with women, I’m a good one.” That type of attitude.

How was it like living with these characters for so long? And then how is it like when you finish a book like this? How do you move on?
Well, it’s funny, I feel like on NPR, writers always like, “Oh, writing is so lonely, writing sucks ’cause you have to be alone all the time,” which is true, but I feel like once you get into the groove of the novel—like, definitely the first three chapters are misery, and you’re just like, oh my god, what am I doing?—but then once you’re in the thick of it ,you are alone and you are technically isolated, but for me—and maybe this is even cheesier to say—but for me, I don’t feel lonely because it’s this sort of alternate world that you can tune into and sort of feel yourself into and just feel surrounded by something. And then finishing it... I mean honestly I was glad to finish it, because it had been a long time... so yeah, actually, I wasn’t too sad to be done with it.

How was it revisiting it years later?
Ah, it’s so bizarre. I gave my dad an advanced copy and it’s so sweet. Like, my dad really likes westerns and he’s not a literary reader but he’s... like I always say that, like, he and my wife are going to be the foremost Oola scholars because my dad is literally, like, diagramming sentences and is taking notes in the margins. Seeing what stands out to him as a pretty conventional older man is really actually incredible, and I feel like I’m teaching him things about gender and sexual fluidity. But when I was going through his copy a couple weeks ago, it was the first time that I felt like I had enough distance to approach the book like a reader, not like the writer, which was just really exciting. In a way I was like, “Wow, this is exactly the type of book I’d want to read. It has all the themes that I like.” [Laughs] It’s just really unsettling, but I think that’s the most difficult point for a writer to get to, that necessary distance where I’m not obsessively like, “Oh, I should use a different word.” Because I can be very obsessive on the level of a sentence. I’ll swap out ten different synonyms for blue. But, yeah, I liked it so and that’s saying a lot, ’cause I’m hard on myself.

One of the things about the character of Oola, an experience that you share with her, is being wealth adjacent, which I think is such a common denominator in so many artists that I know, like, they grew up near something powerful and covetable that they could never fully attain. It’s the kind of formative experience that adds to the outsider feel that so many artists share, this whole different sense of the world that you wouldn’t maybe get otherwise. More than the discussion of gender in the book, a lot of people have really zoned in on the class elements, and, more than anything, I think class is extremely difficult to talk about and parse out. I grew up in a really affluent community and had a lot of access to intense privilege with the public schools that I went to and living in a safe neighborhood, but then I grew up never having very much money and having my parents go on food stamps and I had a job when I was in high school and was the only one in my family who had an income for awhile. It was very up and down. I’m from Marin, which is a very affluent place, and not having a word for what I was... I think that’s kind of a theme in my life, not having a set word for what I am, and I think that that has definitely spilled over into like many elements of my life; not really knowing what type of relationship I was having with my now wife, and then also just with my own gender identity. I still don’t know exactly what I’d call it except for I’m femme and assigned female at birth, but I think when you sort of lean into that space where words become inadequate, that’s an exciting place for a writer to be. Your whole thing is like, well, all I have are words, and ultimately I believe in language, but at the same time I’m always finding myself in places where language objectively fails. That creates a sort of tension and falling outside of something definitely makes complacency sort of impossible.

How I learned to share silence
ARTS+CULTURESPEAKERBOX
In the first in a new series of creative writing submissions, Brittany Newell explores how her coming-of-age in a nudist dormitory taught her to chill the fuck out

8 July 2016
Brittany Newell

Brittany’s been bad. She is a drag queen and a rat. She comes from California and was born in 1994, amidst soft cyber sounds. Her debut novel, OOLA, will be published by The Borough Press (HarperCollins) in the UK and by Henry Holt in the US and Canada, both in 2017. She is working on a new novel about asexuality and CCTV.

I walked in my college graduation ceremony on June 12, 2016. I was the last of my childhood friends to finish with school—the curse of the quarter system. It was a typically paradisiac day in Palo Alto, hot and still with a lurid blue sky. Everything felt fake: the professors in their Hogwarts gowns, my diploma in Papyrus font, the influx of strangers claiming to be the parents and siblings of my suddenly-bashful friends. Stanford’s green-lawned microcosm was invaded that morning, by the smiley and/or tippy reminders of our lives before and after college—there in the bleachers sat proof, in a rarely-used pantsuit, that we’d once Googled how to know if you’re gay, that we’d once sewn straightedge patches onto our purposefully-torn jeans (I did), that we’d once been less than the glistering wholes, barely contained by our white folding-chairs, allegedly facing the dawn of Real Life. No, Grandma slyly announced: we’d once been blanks with light-up shoes. Our fabulosity was recent news.

Since that Twilight Zone Sunday, I’ve been hardcore reflecting (what else is one to do when suddenly home again, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars you placed on the ceiling a decade earlier?). I turned 22 on June 18 and waited for the lightning bolt of understanding. Instead, I got a sunburn and a pair of Costco sneakers (so subtle, Mom remarks, showing off her matching pair). I know that I’ve changed over these four jam-packed years, acquired bad habits, good memories, and political awareness that would stun my younger self, she who lines up the plastic stars just so; but how to put it into words? I’m no believer in The Best Years of Your Life credo, that fratty, slightly crazed conviction that college is the peak of fun and all else a mindless Facebook scroll through happy memories. College or no, I would have grown up; frankly, I probably would have had a more badass time had I not been shackled to school, exacerbating scoliosis with a backpack full of rented books. But as it stands, my school’s preposterously sheltered campus is where I’ve lived for four long years, getting intermittently tan and antsy, and by proxy where I learned more who I was and what I valued.

“I’m no believer in The Best Years of Your Life credo, that fratty, slightly crazed conviction that college is the peak of fun and all else a mindless Facebook scroll through happy memories”

Specific details pummel me: meeting my best friend at an LGBTQ mixer for incoming frosh, where we ate Trader Joe cookies and exchanged phone numbers with barely-concealed need (a FRIEND!!); a summer grant that led me to Berlin; drugs done, things written, people kissed; a long-awaited diagnosis for the stomach pains that haunted me since childhood and made me the go-to pizza party pooper. But these are mere tidbits, relevant to me alone, foam atop the sea-changes I’m struggling to name and that I’ve seen in nearly all my peers. While the world at large seems loonier, I recognise new chillness, a bittersweet poise, in the friends I once freaked out to “Cyclone” and semi-inhaled cigarettes with. We seem to sit more snugly in our skin, however different it may be. If I had to boil down the biggest changes in my life from age 18 (drifting through September with Animal House-­cum-arthouse dreams of kinky English majors) to 22, here’s how I might phrase it: I’ve learned how to sit with others.

Four years ago, I would never have described myself as chill. I couldn’t chill to save myself. The prospect of “kicking it” filled me with dread: what exactly did this abstraction entail, and when would it be over? I lived in fear of awkward silences, unable to take them as anything other than evidence of my social ineptitude. I drafted conversation topics in my head before meeting up with friends, and always had an excuse ready if I felt the need to leave. I was terrified of office hours, because I felt too uncomfortable to be alone with a professor. The instant I felt the mood shift at a party, I headed for the door. I blamed shyness for my inability to hang; I now think the issue was too strict an idea of how things should play out. As a wannabe rebel at age 17, I taped this Guy DeBord quote to my bedroom wall: Boredom is always counterrevolutionary. I needed to be seen as busy, purposeful, forever on point; I couldn’t bear the transition period.

For my junior and senior years of college, I lived in a co-op called Synergy, known to most kids on campus as that nudist house on the hill. Over the course of my time there, amidst the stink and bliss of fifty other students (most of them, I’ll admit, semi-clothed), I slowly came to let my guard down. Eventually I realized that the ability to sit quietly with somebody else, to expose yourself in a moment of boredom, as the body winds down and the hours stretch out, is the true mark of intimacy. It was a process so gradual I can only recognize it in retrospect: that eventually I stopped hiding out in my room, only able to relax if no one was watching. The more I got to know my body, and the different ways it moved through space, the more willing I was to let others see it, crunched between a prof’s stack of books, or, more likely, in a post-dinner slump. Perhaps Synergy’s clothing optional policy had something to do with it; chillness is a form of nudity, in that banter and activity eventually slip off—whoopsie!—to reveal a body as uncertain as the person’s beside you, and a heart just as questioning. To sit with others is to realize how equally up-in-the-air we all are. It is to open oneself to the infamous flow. This, or the vast quantities of weed smoked by slow-talking neighbours, led me to appreciate the grace of unfilled space.

“The instant I felt the mood shift at a party, I headed for the door. I blamed shyness for my inability to hang; I now think the issue was too strict an idea of how things should play out”

Perhaps the ability to sit with others is most prized in the moments, or hours, leading to sex: when one aspires to be the last gal standing (or sitting, or sprawling) in close quarters with her crush, to get to the point where there is nothing else in the room but two bodies. Was there ever sex without preceding silence? One has to be patient, and stubborn, to reach this showdown, when chatter dies, when pretense deflates, when desire is in the open: for all the flutter of one’s heart, one must be chill enough to show it. Stripping is a transition period.

Anne Carson talks about leaving space for God in her writing; my agnostic/Valley Girl spin would be that I’ve learned how to leave space for whatever. I don’t mean this flippantly. As a big-dreaming 18-year-old, desperate for life to feel lifelike, I couldn’t handle so vague a promise. My days felt numbered; everything needed to be picturesque, Snappable, with a but-gusting caption (THIS is the moment I fall in love, THIS is the Night to Remember). Ironically, four years older, I feel surrounded by time. The dream need not reside on the horizon, but rather, can be pulled into the present; one can inhabit it, like a hot tub, if only one knows how to sit with others (this is not the drugs speaking, or at least, I don’t think). As far I’m concerned, boredom, or a room full of people facing each other without the immediate need to speak, is the earliest stage of any revolution. The right words will come, as will the actions, if one leaves space for them. Perhaps this comfort with time, this go-with-the-flowiness, will change as my lifestyle becomes more fixed. But for now, to be able to sit on Synergy’s porch, or in some nondescript dining hall smelling always of ketchup, as the world freaks out and our bodies invisibly wither and we talk about nothing really at all, is proof, to me, of how I’ve grown.

And there’s more where that came from.

Brittany Newell, who often writes and performs under the nom de plume Ratty St. John, is a 2017 graduate from Stanford. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the winner of the Norman Mailer Award for Fiction. Oola is her first book.

Two young artists fall for one another in this twisted debut, testing the boundaries between love, obsession, and identity.

When 25-year-old writer Leif sees Oola for the first time at a debauched party in London, he feels “an unassuming tingle” at the “sight of her shoulder blades” and makes his move. So begins Leif’s obsessive taxonomy of Oola’s body and history, from her sexual preferences to how she moves when no one else is watching her. At first, these two eccentrics seem made for one another, living and loving in a network of empty houses that stretches from the Arizona desert to Europe to a family cabin in Big Sur. It’s here that Leif’s earlier signs of fixation tip into something edgier and more consuming. On the road, Leif counts how many men follow Oola with their eyes, but in California, he takes notes on the ways she showers for a writing project fueled by “days of research, of study unhinged.” Both the object of Leif’s desire and an objectified cipher, Oola remains slippery and mysterious, barely tangible except as the presence that drives Leif to examine his own past—and what he might make out of his future. Newell’s rangy, circuitous tale is a kind of queer Nadja for millennials with a self-satirizing—and satisfying—bite.

A dreamy and provocative exploration of sex, privilege, and self-discovery.

One of the things that writing teachers, and, increasingly, literary journal guidelines, warn writers against is this: Don’t, they say, ever, they say, write a story or novel about a writer. Worse, they say, is a story or novel about a writer writing about writing. The best stories and novels often break the rules, though, and this is the case with the original, astute debut novel, Oola, by Brittany Newell.
Newell is, frustratingly to this mid-twenties writer, only 21 and graduating from Stanford this spring. It’s also frustrating to know that many, if not all reviews, will mention this fact and possibly focus on it. It’s a shame, because whatever her age, Newell’s insight, intelligence, and prose are all clearly prodigious, which is obvious in her creation of this book, which is both subtle and outrageous, wonderfully readable yet philosophically challenging.

The novel opens with a short prologue chapter, followed by an odd scene, which Newell’s blog (she is a “drag queen” and performance artist who goes by the name Ratty St. John when not writing brilliant novels) suggests may be somewhat autobiographical (I only mention this because I was struck by how bizarre and specific the image in this scene was, and knowing there may be some personal experience with it allows me to feel that image all the deeper for its likely accuracy). In this scene, which takes up the whole of the second chapter, narrator Leif and titular Oola have made up a game. They gather in the living room of the house they’re house-sitting, wearing bits of clothing belonging to the house’s usual occupants. “Then, when she felt moved to, Oola would put a pair of nylon stockings on her head.” Quickly it becomes clear that the pantyhose are on Oola’s face:

Through the stretched fabric, her features were blurred, as if a left-hander had been penciling her, smudging the last stroke as he made the next. Her eyelashes were crimped, her nose squished, her mouth forced open, her cheeks Botoxed back.

Then Leif also wears the stockings, and they take turns until it turns light outside and the game stops with some embarrassment.
This scene, so early in the book, before we really know who Leif is, who Oola is, or what their relationship is, serves two purposes: one, it shows us these characters’ ability to act very, very weirdly, to enjoy it, and to be self-aware about their oddity. Two, it demonstrates a theme that will be present through the book: the blurring of the self, the other, and the perception of that difference.
In terms of plot, the book is quite simple. Leif is a WASP with wealthy parents who have wealthy friends who go out of town and need house-sitters, a perfect situation for Leif, who is traveling around Europe in an attempt to be a writer. Or maybe more accurately, he is attempting to become a writer through the tried and true method of being very privileged and traveling a lot and hoping that worldliness will lead to wisdom. Oola is a conservatory dropout, a pianist taking time off to wander around Europe and sow her wild oats (some more). The two meet, have amazing chemistry, start traveling together, sleeping together, and as far as we can tell, falling madly, deeply, truly in love with each other. Eventually, they end up in Big Sur, California, indefinitely living in a cabin belonging to a relative of Leif’s who’s gone, also indefinitely, into hospice care.

In Big Sur, Leif’s project, alluded to earlier in the book and which has clearly been developing in his mind for some time, starts in earnest. Leif is attempting to write a book about Oola — maybe and maybe not the book readers have in hand; it’s never made 100% clear whether we are reading Leif’s thoughts, his notes, or the finished product of his labors. Oola, by the way, has consented to this project, a fact that Leif sees as excusing everything he goes on to do. Her consent is in the first pages of the book, as if in order to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt; but her consent is flippant and flimsy, not the “firm and enthusiastic yes” we’re taught in consent workshops. On page 3 of the book, when the couple is climbing into bed to go to sleep, Leif announces that he is thinking of a new project in which Oola will either be the main character or the person on whom the main character will be based. The extent of Oola’s consent is this: “Me? Well, fuck, I’d read it. Guaranteed five-star rating. I turned the light out last night, by the way. So scoot, fatty.” I’d say that’s a half-hearted consent at best, but Leif takes it firmly, enthusiastically, and quite too far.

Lush, edgy, lyrical, bad-ass, pensive, taxing--it's hard to paint Oola into a picture that captures its striking prose and fearless curiosity about identity and obsession. In performance artist, drag queen, recent Stanford graduate and Pushcart nominee Brittany Newell's first novel, 25-year-old Leif is shaking off a "screamo and Foucault" adolescent past, "sewing Situationist patches to our jackets with dental floss" while housesitting for his moneyed New England family's network of friends with empty domiciles around the world. Oola is a striking six-foot music student raised by a metal band roadie and casino hostess "in a dinky town north of L.A., just around the corner from Neverland Ranch." They meet at a hipster London flat party; and with the impulsiveness of unencumbered youth of means, they take off on a global romance in great houses across Europe, the Middle East, Canada and, finally, at a remote cabin in Big Sur.

As the sparkle of discovery shines on the hidden pleasures of sex, drugs, food, conversation and the mysteries of each other, Leif becomes obsessed with Oola's body and habits, turning his observations into what he envisions will be a novel of celebration. He boasts: "I loved to watch Oola in the shower.... I came to memorize her postures, the hygienic loop (rinse, wash, repeat) that, like prayers of digestion, lent me a glimmer of infinity via the banal."

Deftly managing her narrator's adulatory voice, Newell eases her narrative from the lovers' giddy days when they "binge on rice and Siracha... play Twister on the porch by starlight... [and] sit on the porch in the morning, butt-naked, reading the paper," to when Leif becomes helplessly fixated: "I loved her mosquito bites, which pulsed radioactively under my lips.... I traced her scabs with my thumbnail and interrogated her bruises." Leif begins to wear Oola's tossed-aside clothes, blossoming into a streak of transvestitism as she retreats into insomnia, moonstones and "iron-fortified breads and blocks of cadaver-colored tofu." Five drafts into his manuscript, Leif seems to know neither himself nor Oola, as she falls into a dangerous downward health spiral and senses finally, "That's me. Never the poet, always the trope."

Like Leif's book, Oola is a novel of discovery--ever shifting and digging deeper. It is a diary, a romance, a dark trip over the edge. Capturing today's zeitgeist of an experimental, hungry, indulgent youth, it also harkens back to the masculine, queer, trippy work of William Burroughs and Hubert Selby. But Newell is very much her own woman, even with a male narrator who reflects, "I loved like no one else did, I went where no one dared to go. I planted my flag in the moon--then I swallowed it whole.... I went into a certain wild and things got wild indeed." Still, make no mistake. As the title suggests, this is Oola's story--not Leif's.

Oola by Brittany Newell is somehow about everything and nothing at the same time. There are so many ideas discussed in the book that the brain becomes overwhelmed. Art, culture, finding yourself, sexual and gender identity, the idea of never knowing the people closest to you, all packed into 250 pages of the novel.

​The novel is in Leif’s point of view and becomes very uncomfortable to read his thought process. But Newell isn’t afraid to push that uncomfortable feeling to create dynamic pacing. Honestly, I can’t decide if Leif is a likable character or not, and Oola makes me not really care either way. In the beginning, Leif is lost and whiney, going from housesitting job to housesitting job. A well off son of New England WASPS, he tries to run from his privilege and pretend he doesn’t have it. He seems like a very typical pathetic white loner type but as the novel progresses you start to see many more sides to him. Maybe the most interesting thing about Leif is his gender and sexually fluidly, which the reader sees as the novel progresses.

When Leif meets Oola something dark unlocks inside of him. He becomes obsessed with Oola, sex, and the idea of being the only person needed in Oola’s life. Nothing is ever enough with Leif, he just wants more and more. The obsession seeps into the text from the very first page:

“It was three in the afternoon in late May; I was tired in that drawn-out way, nonsensical way, when your body assumes a vaguely erotic position no matter the task and despite your actual urges… She didn’t notice me. This is how it often was, she the show and I the crowd, but that day I was keenly aware of the fact that this was what she would be doing if I weren’t around.”

His obsession begins to take over his life, it starts with small things like watching her every move to he tallies the looks Oola would receive from other men on their travels and categorize it in a specific system. He tells her wants to write a novel where she is the main character. She laughs him off and says sure but not a lot of writing gets done. Instead he focuses in on her even more. He begins to collection odd objects that she tosses:

“… I did nothing more than pick her cigarette butts out of the abalone-shell ashtray I’d filched from the porch. I turned them in my hands, like pearls still gritty from the surf. I tried to smoke a few, reduced to an uncool teen as I puffed on chemical aggregates and leftover spit. Some were dabbed with bits of lipstick, which I pressed to my lips with especial conviction.” (78)

Eventually Oola doesn’t like the hyper focus, she starts asking questions about the kind of book that Leif is going to write. She tells him, “I don’t know what your book’s like, but… I can’t be your thing, OK?” (133) Leif doesn’t understand why she is pulling away, so he tries to relate to her harder. She stops talking about herself, instead she talks about aliens like to watch her. In fact, she itches all the time from their stares. Leif tries to understand but the more confusing it becomes. Eventually she leaves him, just gets up and walks away. He’s not sure where she goes and why she leaves.

Leaving triggers something inside of Leif and soon he starts to wear her clothes, like her sweatshirt. At first he says it’s because he misses her. Then he wears her dresses, dyes his hair, and wears her leftover makeup. He wants to now become Oola. He finds her old diary and reads about her old love, tracks him down, and almost has sex with him. Eventually he just likes the clothes and being a woman, it makes Leif feel good.

In the end, he finds Oola in a facility where she is wasting away. She is nothing like how Leif remembers her. Oola is horrified when she sees Leif, she recognizes her clothes. Leif brags about being with her old love, and she freaks out. She goes on and on about aliens and how they are inside her. It’s a tragic ending, where neither of them recognize each other. Oola breaks his heart when she tells him that she doesn’t know if she loved him. Instead she asks him to tell her if she did. Their visit ends with him beating her with the bouquet that he bought her.

Newell’s novel is interesting but at the times the reader can get lost inside the chaos, we lose the thread of conversation between Leif and Oola. It could be that Leif is an unreliable narrator, but he is so focused on her that seems unlikely. Part of the problem is that Oola herself isn’t fully fleshed out. She doesn’t not give herself over to Leif so there are too many missing pieces he can’t put together. When she starts talking about aliens is when I got lost, I didn’t see that coming. Maybe Leif’s POV hid them on purpose but it felt like reading another book.

Overall, Oola by Brittany Newell is a fascinating look at what happens when lost souls try to find themselves in each other.