Review: 'The Oddysey' by Lara Williams
Pub. Date: 26/04/2022
Publisher: Zando Projects
Ingrid works on a gargantuan luxury cruise liner where she spends her days reorganizing the gift shop shelves and waiting for long-term guests to drop dead in the aisles. On her days off, she disembarks from the ship, wasting the hours aimlessly following tourists around, drinking the local alcohol, and buying clothes she never intends to wear again. It’s not a bad life. At least, it distracts her from thinking about the other life—the other person—she left behind five years ago.
That is, until the day she is selected by the ship’s enigmatic captain and (ill-informed) wabi sabi devotee, Keith, for his mentorship program. Encouraging her to reflect on past mistakes and her desperation to remain lost at sea, Keith pushes Ingrid further than she ever thought possible. But as her friendships and professional life onboard steadily fall apart, Ingrid must ask herself: how do you know when you have gone too far?
Utterly original, mischievous, and thought-provoking, The Odyssey is a merciless takedown of consumer capitalism and our anxious, ill-fated quests to find something to believe in. It’s a voyage that will lead our heroine all the way home, though she will do almost anything to avoid getting there.
In the best possible way, Williams' The Odyssey reminded me of Temporary by Hilary Leichter, which I adored. Not many novels manage to capture that feeling of utter impermanence that life sometimes has, but both Williams and Leichter nail it. It is in the way time just seems immaterial, how the protagonists switch from one position to the other, one relationship to the other, and are always trying to figure out who they are in relation to other people. It is not necessarily a fun reading experience, in the sense that you won't be kicking your feet and giggling at it, but there is something almost pleasant about such a sharp dissection of our own discomfort. I always love reading books about women on the edge for this exact painful pleasure and The Odyssey is definitely added to that list now. I also love the title of the book and how it ties into Homer's epic poem. That text is about a man trying to find his way home to his loyal and loving wife and son, conquering all kinds of dangers and getting himself into trouble. It is a stunning text and a classic for a reason, but a female odyssey would indeed look very different. Ingrid is not hungering for home the way Ulysses is, but both excel at dissembling and telling different kinds of stories and/or lies. Looking at the two alongside one another, with the endless sea as their shaky foundation, is intriguing.
Ingrid works on the WA, a massive luxury cruise liner which seems more like a floating city than a holiday space. She has worked a variety of different jobs there, but is currently finishing her rotation at the gift shop when she is accepted into a mentorship programme, led by the captain, Keith. He is an odd one, devoted to the concept of wabi sabi, meaning everything starts and ends in nothingness. With Ingrid's ties to her own self and her life already fragile, the programme will either push her over the edge or reveal her true self. As Ingrid switches jobs, drinks herself into oblivion during land leave, and battles memories of her life before the WA, the ship and she begin to slowly disintegrate, revealing an internal rot. Ingrid is not a great person, objectively. Her heavy drinking is damaging not just to her, but to everything and everyone around her. Her superiority complex is slimy as well as undeserved. And yet, underneath it all, there is a character there that is deeply in search of connection and understanding, a gentle touch and clear boundaries. I cannot necessarily speak to whether Ingrid's alcoholism is depicted in a realistic way, but I did feel like it gave me extra insights into why people might drink to excess continuously, what it is that they're hoping to get for it, and how they lose control over it.
Supper Club has been on my to-read list for a while, but I'm oddly pleased that The Odyssey was my first time reading Lara Williams. As I mentioned above, it fits right into the kinds of books about women that I enjoy reading. There is, however, also just something about the writing that really struck me and sucked me in straightaway. I think it is something about how Williams manages to create an underlying sense of terror that just suffuses everything. To someone like me, for whom staying even a single weekend on a massive cruise liner sounds like a nightmare of horrors, this terror felt like the right kind of atmosphere for the setting, but it also worked as a way of explaining Ingrid's chaotic sense of self. Ingrid's odyssey is icky and uncomfortable, covering all kinds of issues from motherhood, family, health, bodily integrity, violence, and more. This fits quite well with something else I discovered, which is the collection The New Abject, to which Williams contributed a story. The abject, the thing that disturbs boundaries, that grosses us out because it is both part of us and not, is so up my alley that I'm dying to get my hands on it asap. I can't wait to read more by Lara Williams.
I give this novel...
5 Universes!
The Odyssey was a revelatory read for me, full of stress and terror and oddness, all clinically dissected and yet given the space to be messily human. For those who enjoy reading about women on the edge and the odd lengths humans go to to feel real, Lara Williams' book is it!
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