I adored Oval, Elvia Wilk’s gleefully acerbic satire of class, greenwashing, disruption culture, and yes, 'authenticity.' A searing depiction of big tech’s habit of stealing our souls only to sell them back at 200% list price, Oval is kind of like The Jungle for the age of late capitalism, if The Jungle gave fewer fucks and was blessed with an A+ sense of irony ... it’s to the book’s immense credit that it also happens to be savagely funny, a roasting of the 21st century workplace that makes Office Space look genial by comparison. Wilk has terrific fun puncturing the breathless hype around innovation culture, infusing her set pieces with the high-wire absurdist energy of a Marx Brothers movie ... the book bares its teeth in its closing chapters ... What Wilk exposes in these final pages, deftly, is not only the emptiness of 'innovation' or 'disruption' culture, but that a culture built around empty words can still result in very real, very devastating consequences.
The book feints toward an Ottessa Moshfegh–style ennui, the kind of tragic vision that disguises itself as satire. But Oval has a warm center in Anja, who is friendlier, more approachable, less alienating and alienated than the typical Moshfegh heroine. (For her sake, the reader forgives occasional clichés in the world-building.) Oval wants to hold a dystopian mirror up to the way we live now, and sometimes its approach resembles that of the artist-consultants: airily grand, conjectural. Anja, who is pragmatic to a fault, mitigates against this ... Wilk entwines a classical sensibility with biological determinism—she almost suggests that humans have reached the final phase of a natural decomposition process, like cells programmed to grow and then atrophy ... I finished the book feeling calmed by the evil that Wilk reveals. For the first time, the events felt almost improbable, like a bad dream.
Wilk’s first novel is a strange, vivid thought experiment ... 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.
Despite these glimpses of the macabre, the future outlined in Oval focuses on the drudgery of corporate serfdom ... Ultimately Oval describes a neoliberal zombie-world in which everything, from creativity to ethics, has become privatized. But the true scope of these changes is revealed only slowly ... Oval is a chore to read because its scenes are so pointedly trivial. The soulless banality connects Ms. Wilk’s future with her critique of the present.
In a complex cycle of moral accounting, the novel occasionally tips into overcompensation. The vacuity and dystopian flatness of the cultural-corporate nexus Oval depicts come across as easy and often trivial targets for a writer as talented as Wilk. The satire can turn sour, overly literal ... a high-minded, intelligent novel with slight performance anxiety over its hypertopical subjects. Sometimes that means remarkable precision in merging plot with ethical treatise; in other places, Anja’s internal monologue echoes Carrie Bradshaw’s 'I couldn’t help but wonder' refrain ... Though the final pages hint at regeneration, the novel’s ultimate fantasy is not redemption but relief—from guilt and moral burden. With this, far more than its subject matter, Oval strikes a note that will vibrate with Wilk’s contemporaries.
Oval itself — the book, the story of it — seems to be going nowhere, and taking a damn long time to get there, too. But then, something clicks ... And when you get it — when the nickel finally drops — you see Oval for what it is: a disaster story just waiting to happen. A disaster story that is happening, while you were paying attention to other things ... Though, by the end, I could see the balance of Wilk's various metaphors, her careful obscuration of very real, serious problems by small, petty, day-to-day ones, getting there was a mighty wander. Oval is a short story dressed in novel drag. It's a game of chicken played with a lovely sense of boredom ... as much as I liked where Wilk ended up — as much as I appreciated her juicy language, her eye for trauma, the scalpel-edge to her sense of the absurd — the road she took to get there just wasn't interesting enough to make the trip worthwhile.
Elvia Wilk’s debut novel Oval is a speculative meditation on the evil humans do—to the planet and to each other. It’s also a distinctly millennial love story and a sometimes sharp and sometimes meandering critique of modern society ... There is heavy critique throughout the novel of the Neo-Liberal project of charity, of NGOs, and of the life of the (mostly) white, hip, cultural class ... Wilk’s corporate speak throughout the novel is terrifyingly accurate ... There are critiques that could be made about Anja’s inherent position of white privilege, her failure to critique her own lack of any meaningful activism, and her ability to escape the destruction meted out on the less fortunate. But these are all simplistic and avoid the broader global critique Wilk is making—efforts at 'sustainability' and charity under the guise of corporate power likely will lead only to the ruin that comes at the end of the novel. There is no great redemption here and Anja’s last thoughts at the close of the novel speak to a failure at the very heart of modern society. It is a shatteringly good end to a largely good debut.
Oval is a blistering diagnosis of how today’s social structures have shaped us. Western capitalism has generated a state of benevolent-seeming dysfunction, and Wilk is astute at rendering the social comedy of our malaise. But the book’s real drama unfolds on a more complex interior plane ... The book both soars and falters as it explores its characters’ unseen humanity — their contradictions, memories, and misunderstandings — and the ways contemporary capitalism reaches into our private lives ... Wilk is a skillful cataloger. She has DeLillo’s gift for revealing microscopic social interactions as whole paradigmatic traits of the way we look and live today. But, ultimately, she’s also onto something more ephemeral than the field of visibility can express. What remains unseen? Oval is most intriguing when it resists the need to document the details of our tech-dominated consciousness. In its willingness to draw characters both complex and unresolved — to observe the shadows in their composition — it transcends its influences ... Wilk attempts to offer a lot else, too. Her emotional observations are convincing, but they’re where the novel is most uneven, and sometimes amateurish. We end up with long poetic scenes punctuated with bland academese ... The book also runs into trouble where its dystopian technologies are concerned. It begins so many threads — from human tissue experiments to weird climate hiccups to Oval itself — that it has little space to tie each up satisfactorily. What lingers in Oval is a wish that we reconcile ourselves to a productive kind of uncertainty.
The book’s tone is similar to that of Ling Ma’s Severance; both combine millennial (or simply self-obsessed) ennui with decay: the Berg, for example, is overrun with mold, and things constantly break down, making life there seem precarious. However, Oval lacks the oppressive ick-factor of Ling Ma’s novel, and expectedly so: the plague-ridden New York of Severance is more menacing than a bland Berlin’s rule by megacorporations ... The tragically beautiful millennial brainiac with an eating disorder is getting to be a tired shtick. It’s unclear whether Wilk is condescending or sympathetic to her narrator. I hope it’s the former ... Wilk’s writing is strongest in the scenes set in clubs or at art shows, where everybody is based on a host of insufferable tropes. However, it’s hard for the novel survive on satirical interludes alone, and her attempt to combine satire, dystopia, sci-fi, and millennial ennui feels too tightly packed for a book that is less than 350 pages. The raw material is strong; Oval could have worked well as a TV adaptation or trilogy, developing the plot in book one, the grotesquely pathetic characters in book two, and tying everything together in book three, culminating in what is already a cynical, apocalyptic ending that layers destruction with reflections on the housing market. Millennial ennui–fueled, post-apocalyptic fiction might not have reached full maturity as a self-standing literary genre. However, if literature is, indeed, headed in that direction, Oval is surely a seminal text, my personal quips notwithstanding.
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 ... 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.
