OVAL

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.