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The Odyssey

£9.9£99Clearance
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Tantalizing . . . Readers who enjoy Melissa Broder and Ottessa Moshfegh will appreciate this surreal trip through a troubled woman’s psyche.” - Booklist So, there is this brand of fiction: "I'm disenfranchised and miserable and self-destructive; and join me for awhile and then I'll reveal my inciting incident and you can empathize with me." And, I'm not not here for that. I'm not an entirely unsympathetic human and I have the occasional millennial (Though let's not pretend for a second that this gen invented the trope, okay???) self-pitying instinct, so you know, I get the brand.

Ingrid is our narrator here. She works aboard the WA, a huge cruise ship that has been her whole world for several years now. She cycles through a rotation of jobs – gift shop employee, nail technician, lifeguard – and has only 2 friends, Mia and Ezra, with whom she plays disturbing and odd games. Her life and the novel itself is broken up by incidences of shore leave where she gets obliteratingly drunk and makes increasingly dangerous and unhinged decisions. On board the WA she has been chosen to be part of something referred to only as “The Program”. This is lead by an enigmatic man named Keith who encourages Ingrid to reveal the most intimate details of her past to him. This was fantastic! The Odyssey is darkly funny and thought-provoking. Although I enjoyed the premise of Supper Club, I felt like Lara Williams linged on the surface. With The Odyssey, Lara Williams commits completely, this novel feels more direct and purposeful.A Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by The Millions * A Best Book to Read in April by Town & Country and The AV Club * One of 2022's Best Beach Reads by Southern Living A Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by The Millions • A Best Book to Read in April by Town & Country and The AV Club • One of 2022’s Best Beach Reads by Southern Living Peculiarly uplifting … 1946 illustration of a scene from The Diary of a Nobody. Illustration: Culture Club/Getty Images As its title suggests, Lara Williams’s The Odyssey is about a journey. Ingrid works on a cruise ship that crisscrosses the globe. The ship, the WA, is as large as some towns and comes complete with acres of swimming pools, restaurants and gift shops where long-term guests have an inconvenient habit of dying. 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.

As someone who doesn’t generally find cruise ships appealing (and especially so in 2022), I thought the setting of the WA was quite brilliantly done. An entire, carnivalesque world unto itself where Ingrid has endless choices at her fingertips but is also trapped. The ship seems enormous but her own space is small and limited. As the novel progresses, the atmosphere of the WA becomes more dangerous, more hideous, and more satirical. The WA, it turns out, is something more like a cult than an ordinary workplace and the things it asks of its employees become more jarring and horrific. Williams does a good job of establishing Ingrid as the sort of character who will go along with these things. And while I actually really dislike reading books where characters make one bad decision after another, I also didn’t struggle to believe that the employees of the WA would do these things. It reminded me of the cults you read about, like NXIM or even some of the more intense MLMs, that demand utter devotion. Ingrid is a character looking to be utterly devoted to something.This strange, beautiful cruise liner of a book interweaves a biting sendup of corporate, work, and wellness culture with an astute exploration of the emotional icebergs that lie below its protagonist’s placid exterior . . . deeply unsettling and unexpectedly moving.” - Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State Set on the Microsoft campus in Washington state, Microserfs explores the feudal-like work culture at the company: the employees the novel follows are the serfs presided over by Bill Gates. It was one of the first novels to anticipate a dystopian culture in the tech industry that would soon become the norm, and one particular scene in which an employee slips “flat foods” (such as slices of processed cheese) beneath the office door of another employee, to ensure that they actually eat while working, has haunted me for 20 years.

Meet Ingrid. She works on a gargantuan luxury cruise liner, where she spends her days reorganizing the merchandise and waiting for long-term guests to drop dead in the changing rooms. On her days off, she disembarks from the ship and gets blind drunk on whatever the local alcohol is. It's not a bad life. And it distracts her from thinking about the other life she left behind five years ago.It is a book that demands of the reader just as much as it rewards them with. All of the characters were so unique, interesting and flawed that I would have liked to have known a bit more about them. It felt like they floated in and out of the novel and could disappear at any time, perhaps onto land without a real explanation of why they were on the boat on the first place, why they left and where they went. And while Ingrid is British, she uses a lot of Americanisms (i.e., “apartment”, “garbage can”), which is confusing as the reader tries to piece together her character. Within this floating world, something darker is taking place. Ingrid is selected to participate in a ‘self-improvement’ scheme by the ship’s enigmatic captain-CEO, Keith. His philosophy of wabi sabi – a Japanese world-view centred on transience and imperfection – requires total commitment from his employees. The ship falls into disrepair as certainties about time and place slip away. All that remains is a relentless corporate culture that asks for disconcerting and farcical sacrifices from those on board.

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