Consulting the End

Thoughts on: Elvia Wilk

This is your brain on capitalism, and this is your brain on a new designer drug meant to make you feel good when you are generous—one could imagine an updated public service announcement, free-range eggs frying in a pan that you can purchase from a sponsored link. This is the Oval of Elvia Wilk’s Oval, or O if you’re cool.

I quipped to a friend while reading that I hoped it wasn’t all about partying and doing drugs in Berlin—I’ve been reading a lot of Tao Lin, and while he makes the enumeration of drug doses interesting enough, I’m tired about reading other people’s highs. Of course, I didn’t know towards what kind of high this book was headed, but the high she describes is not one familiar to drug users or Lin-readers—instead, her boyfriend, processing losing his mother and working as a consulting artist to a corporation, creates Oval as a pharmacological solution to human’s self-serving nature. Louis seems to believe that designing a drug that makes people feel good through gestures of good-will—giving people things (whether they want or need them is beside the point)—will train them to be better humans, and in the end, solve capitalism’s conundrums.

If the plot sounds abstract, rest assured Wilk does more to estrange us from the Berlin we think we might know, including weather that doesn’t follow any prescribed season, ranging wildly from wintery snow to spring mildness in a day. I love the escapades exposing the inherent strangeness of “consulting.” Our main character Anja, after losing her job in a lab, is immediately rehired by the same company to consult and share her knowledge, though what that might be is couched within so many layers of corporate jargon as to be indecipherable—possibly entirely meaningless. As an academic facing down a dismal job market, all I hear is that I could consult, and apparently make oodles of money doing…something. No one seems to be able to tell me. Wilk offers an answer: I’m right to think these are meaningless jobs providing meaningless services in the name of the bottom line. They might even be as insidious as her company, cutting off her experiments early before exposing what the simulations don’t show.

Wilk’s abstractions remain firmly grounded by her attunement to the body here. That capitalism has been embodied (“Capitalism—it’s in the brain” Louis says at one point) is supported in all the minor moments of the text. Her psychosomatic rash, her anorexia, and the body using tech all point us to the physical effects of existing in and processing larger systems. The body is not immune and seems to warn us of things we aren’t otherwise aware. In what I found to be the most engaging chapter, Anja showers at the gym, offering an extended meditation of the strangeness of bodies. Looking at the other women:

“She knew she was an alien. There they were, inhabiting their bodies, and here she was, rocking around in hers. They knew what their bodies looked like, and they knew what their attitudes toward their bodies looked like” (136).

In this chapter, for a second time Anja claims that the way she is isn’t right, though she abnegates responsibility—“Anja didn’t know how to classify her body, she only knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t her fault” (137). Earlier she ruminates that “She wasn’t accurately constructed. It was a fact” (52). The feeling of being in a body here carries a truth value: either we inhabit them or rock around in them, either we feel like we were made right or something is wrong. She worries about Louis, and when she considers that he has lost his mom, she finds him in a different body: “His body was a different body: a body without any parents. There must have been a physical trace, a scoop missing out of him somewhere, but she couldn’t identify where it was” (54).

It's hard for your reading of a book to change completely once you’ve read the final sentence, but Wilk’s final words change the frame of reference for the entire novel, a masterstroke at the end, perhaps answering our own internal questions of whether we can ever be exempt from capitalism. Oval is not the solution, and Wilk doesn't give us one. There is no way to consult us out of our troubles.