Posts Tagged ‘Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’

10 Jun

‘Mutual Interest’ by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith – An Unusual Marriage and a Successful Business

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘Mutual Interest’ by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith    (2025) – 317 pages

 

I read ‘Mutual Interest’ with a smile on my face the entire time. Each sentence is witty and wonderful, delicious. I admire each one of Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s sentences; I know there is going to be something in each one to engage my mind.

In this lively novel, it is 1900 in New York City, and after a couple of short affairs with other young women, Vivian, 24, decides to get married to a man approaching 45 years old named Oscar. However her marriage plan is not the usual.

“…after listening to Oscar rattle on for half the evening, she was fairly confident in his queerness. (How heartbroken he would have been, to know how easily she saw his secret soul!) With such a man there would be, Vivian reasoned, no need to bother each other.”

Their marriage would turn out to be mutually beneficial. For Oscar,

“Gone were the monikers like “horticultural gent” and “Mr. Washed-Out”; silenced were the rumblings he was a queer and a failure and a hopeless hayseed. Everything was drowned out by the possibility of a romance,…”

Besides,

“How many men did he know who regularly visited their wives’ bedrooms? Were there any above the age of forty-five? Oscar had already reached the all-purpose excuse of middle age!”

Then there is another younger entrepreneur named Squire Clancy. Oscar sells soaps; Squire sells candles. Vivian decides the two businesses are compatible. Besides Vivian quickly detects that Squire is also gay.

There is broad physical humor when Vivian stealthily pushes Squire into the walrus pool at the aquarium, and there is more sophisticated humor when Vivian follows through with her plot to marry Oscar and to bring Squire in to keep all three of them content, safe, and financially secure.

Oscar is practical; Squire is creative. Together their business, Clancy & Schmidt, is successful. Meanwhile Vivian continues to have short flings with other women.

“Vivian had found a way to make marriage work for her; she had won a game, she thought, that these girls were terrified to play.”

The second part of ‘Mutual Interest’ transpires ten years later, still in New York City. World War I has begun, and the Panama Canal has opened. Due to the complementary skills of Oscar and Squire, and especially due to the organizing skills of Vivian, the business Clancy & Schmidt has become hugely successful. Squire has moved into Vivian’s and Oscar’s house and sleeps in Oscar’s now double bed, leaving Vivian the time and the freedom to hunt and find various short-term female lovers.

As I mentioned before, I loved the sentences in ‘Mutual Interest’. Can a sentence be delicious? I asked Google. Here is Google’s AI Overview:

“No, a sentence cannot literally be delicious. The word “delicious” is used to describe something that is pleasantly or favorably tasting or having a pleasing smell.”

Google AI apparently has not read ‘Mutual Interest’ by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith. ‘Mutual Interest’ is a novel of marvelous exquisite, yes delicious, sentences.

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith is a fiction writer whom I was fortunate to discover with her first novel ‘Glassworks’ which was my favorite read of 2023. ‘Mutual Interest’ is another winner.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

 

12 Dec

My Favorite Fiction I’ve Read in 2023

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Another year. Here are my favorite fiction reads of 2023, and as always, fiction is all that really counts.

 

 

‘Glassworks’ by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith – ‘Glassworks’ is an intriguing and endlessly fascinating quirky family saga with one family member of each of four generations involved with working with glass in one form or another. The situations that Olivia Wolfgang-Smith creates for her characters are like no other I have encountered in fiction. They are unique and wildly inventive.

 

‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray – Clocking in at 643 pages, ‘The Bee Sting’ was the longest novel I read this year and the most immersive. This long story of the Irish Barnes family held my interest throughout.

“We’re all different, but we all think everybody else is the same, he said. If they taught us that in school, I feel the world would be a much happier place.”

 

‘North Woods’ by Daniel Mason – ‘North Woods’ is the captivating story of a plot of land in western Massachusetts and the people who lived there through the years from colonial times until the near present when it is now advertised as Catamount Acres. What makes ‘North Woods’ a special delight is that the author Daniel Mason’s playful enthusiasm for his material shines through. It is written with a certain esprit with warmth and intensity.

 

‘My Phantoms’ by Gwendoline Riley – Having read two books by Riley this year that were excellent, Gwendoline Riley was my Writer Discovery of the year.

‘My Phantoms’ is a daughter’s portrait of her mother, a mother she cannot love or even like very much. I found this unsentimental approach to family life entirely refreshing. The author Gwendoline Riley has a gift for getting at the root of her characters’ personalities and for noting the subtle differences between people that might cause them not to get along with each other. Mother love is not an automatic thing.

 

‘Vera’ by Elizabeth von Arnim – ‘Vera’ was inspired by the author’s disastrous second marriage. Here are some words that describe the husband Everard: ruthless, domineering, merciless, cruel, without pity or compassion, malevolent, unrelenting, vindictive, demanding, trying. There is also “his extraordinary capacity for being offended”. This is a dark comedy.

 

‘Time Shelter’ by Georgi Gospdinov – ‘Time Shelter’ won the 2023 International Booker Prize. In the novel, each country in Europe must vote to decide what years of their past they want to return to, which years from the past really glowed for the people in that country.

“If Scandinavia couldn’t decide which of its happy periods to choose, Romania was also racked by doubt, but for opposite reasons.”

Time Shelter’ is a thought provoking novel that is quite playful and humorous at the same time.

 

‘Abyss’ by Pilar Quintana – The story in ‘Abyss’ is told by an 8 year-old girl which makes it easy to follow. Children as young as eight can sense the undercurrents that are roiling beneath the surface in their family. They have a front row seat for observing marital discord. What Elena Ferrante did for family and community life in Florence, Italy, Quintana does for family and community life in Cali, Colombia.

 

‘This Other Eden’ by Paul Harding – This novel is based on a real incident in United States history. Malaga Island was home to a mixed-race fishing community from the mid-1800s to 1912, when the state of Maine evicted 47 residents from their homes and exhumed and relocated their buried dead. Why is the government so anxious to evict them from their island? Many of the islanders have dark features, so white racism enters into it.

 

‘The Queen of Dirt Island’ by Donal Ryan – There are four main characters in ‘The Queen of Dirt Island’, all of them female and each of them from a different generation.

“You only get one life, and no woman should spend any part of it being friends with men. That’s not what men are for.”

The short two-page chapters in this novel made for a quick comfortable read.

 

‘Forbidden Notebook’ by Alba de Cepedes – In ‘Forbidden Notebook’, Valeria Cassati must make entries in her notebook surreptitiously. The other family members must not find out about it, which is not so easy to do with a husband and two college age children. She does not have a room of her own in their small house. Did keeping this forbidden notebook which was hidden from her family cause Valeria to seek out a life of her own, including this forbidden romance with her boss Guido?

 

‘The MANIAC’ by Benjamin Labatut – Here is a fictionalized biography of the real mathematician and scientist John Von Neumann. Von Neumann was one of those eccentric genius types who had difficulty tying his shoes, but came up with the stored-program concept for computers which allows them to do quite a few things these days.

 

‘Harold’ by Stephen Wright – Harold, the seven year-old boy, is in the third grade. Mrs. Yuka is his teacher. Harold’s mind wanders, a lot.

“He was in and out of paying attention like someone who was away and occasionally came by to pick up their mail.”

Of course this does present a problem for Mrs. Yuka.

The author Stephen Wright is a quite famous comedian, and ‘Harold’ is filled with the same kind of offbeat humor as Wright’s routines. Like Steven Wright, Harold looks at things from a different angle.

 

That’s all, folks.

 

 

20 Jun

‘Glassworks’ by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith – “Life is the Cause. One Must go Mad Sometimes.”

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘Glassworks’ by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith    (2023) – 354 pages

 

‘Glassworks’ is an intriguing and endlessly fascinating quirky family saga with one family member of each of four generations involved with working with glass in one form or another.

The first generation takes place in 1910 and centers on Agnes and the Bohemian glass modeler Ignace Novak. Ignace makes delicate glass sculptures of flowers and bees, etc. He has become world famous in his glass artistry, and Agnes brings him over to Boston for her company to sell his sculptures.

Agnes and Ignace. Their first names even rhyme. Except Agnes already has a husband, a mistake.

“Was an unhappy marriage enough to ruin a woman?”

One day when Agnes shows up at his studio with bruised ribs, Ignace tells her,

“He harms you. He is harmful.”

When two people are right for each other as Ignace and Agnes plainly are, a bold solution may be required. The reader will be hooked irretrievably after reading this first section.

In the second generation in 1938, their son Edward installs decorative windows for libraries and other public buildings. Edward only got the job because his boss admired Edward’s father’s work. Edward is clumsy and liable to break any glass he is working with and cut himself in the process. Agnes and Ignace are happily married, away from Boston, and intent on pursuing their own interests; they often forget about Edward. Edward is in quite desperate circumstances until he meets Charlotte.

In the third generation taking place in 1986, Edward and Charlotte’s daughter, simply known as Novak, washes the windows on New York City skyscrapers.

“But Novak also worked with glass. She knew about distributing pressure, about not pushing something so hard it broke.”

Much of this section takes place in a Broadway theater during a performance of the play “Dames in Love”. Novak becomes fascinated with one of the actresses, Cecily, and tries to help her with disastrous results.

“Novak had baptized them in fire, by hurting Cecily the way only family could hurt you.”

The fourth and last section in 2015 focuses on Cecily’s daughter Flip. Flip also works with glass:

“The system” at Solid Memories was simple. Customers sent in cremains – at least three tablespoons – from a loved one or pet. They chose an ornament design and color from the catalog. And they waited to receive a glass sculpture – “not a paperweight,” Martin said; “you gotta be careful with folks on this verbiage” – shot through with the ash of their departed, twirled and pigmented into purposeful abstract designs.”

In each of these four generation stories, our main protagonist or protagonists gets themselves into a desperate situation by virtue of their own defects or wrong turns. The reader becomes heavily involved in their plight to the point where the reader is hanging on to every sentence. Finally our protagonist or protagonists reach some totally unexpected resolution to their plight. These situations that Olivia Wolfgang-Smith creates are like no other I have encountered in fiction. They are unique and wildly inventive.

 

Grade:   A+