Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi - a mind churns on itself, while reality, if it is reality, comes rushing at it with a strange stutter, everything a bit lost, a bit off, and ready to be ground up further by the uncertain perception of the narrator

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Fra Keeler, Dorothy, a publishing project, 2012.

A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter’s death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow more strange, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions. 

Read an excerpt here. 

“Obsessive/delightful, Fra Keeler subtly elaborates on life’s details, its ordinary lunacies. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s observations are droll and often hilarious. Her novel’s incidents pile up and on, tilting and shifting under the weight of language’s bizarre disturbances. Fra Keeler is wonderfully imaginative, the work of a terrific young writer.” lynne tillman

“Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the descendent of writers as brilliant and disparate as Max Frisch, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Per Petterson. Fra Keeler is a compelling and humorously associative meditation on how ‘one lives against one’s dying,’ and how that living will be in contra-distinction to all that explains that death on paper after its fact. Would that more book groups read books of this complexity and intelligence; discussion would reach on into the wee hours!” michelle latiolais

“In Fra Keeler a mind churns on itself, while reality—if it is reality—comes rushing at it with a strange stutter, everything a bit lost, a bit off, and ready to be ground up further by the uncertain perception of the narrator. This is a book by turns funny and strange, but always entertaining.” brian evenson

Van der Vliet Oloomi’s debut novel turns out to be a surrealist triumph despite a jerky entry into the narrator’s world. An unnamed man purchases a house with one thought in mind—to investigate the death of its former owner, Fra Keeler. Upon moving in, however, his investigation becomes hindered by his own tangled thoughts. A clearly unreliable narrator, the character nonetheless draws the reader deeper into his mental labyrinth, as snippets of a possible truth shine through as from a blinding streak of lightning on a dark night. Lurching toward an understanding of Fra Keeler’s death, the protagonist wrestles with issues of sanity, madness, life, death, and happiness. This short but substantial novel both celebrates the process of thinking and offers cautions about the perils of our inner monologues. A rare gem of a book that begs to be read again. - Publishers Weekly

Publishing for publishing’s sake was the last thing Danielle Dutton had in mind when she founded her independent press called the Dorothy Project three years ago. “Starting a press simply to add to the piles and piles of books in the world (or just in my house) wasn’t interesting to me,” Dutton said via email.
“I’ve long admired presses that seem to carve out a specific niche all their own, such as Dalkey Archive (where I worked for four years before starting Dorothy), or Siglio (a press out of L.A. that focuses on work at the intersection of art and literature, and which, incidentally, published my second book).”
To that end, Dorothy follows a disciplined model: two books a year with the goal “to seek out and publish writing that takes risks, that surprises and challenges and delights us as readers; to have a tightly curated list; and to work to create beautiful book objects.”
The focus on quality over quantity has had good results. “We’ve been incredibly lucky so far for a new small press,” Dutton said, citing “good coverage” for the press itself and many reviews. “I’m very thankful for that, and I wonder if reviewers and editors have been intrigued by our constraint-based plan (only two books per year, all the same size, mostly written by women). We’re doing something specific, and maybe that is, for better or worse, an ‘angle’ by which to approach us.”
Well-known, experimental writers such as Ben Marcus have taken notice: for The Millions’s 2011 “Year in Reading” series, he recommended the Dorothy Project’s reprint of Barbara Comyn’s Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. Future projects will include the final book in Renee Gladman’s Ravicka trilogy, and a collection of stories by Amina Cain.
The two books Dutton selects each year are intended to form a contrast. “This year’s two books — Suzanne Scanlon’s Promising Young Women and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Fra Keeler — both deal with madness. Both are debut novels from younger American women writers. But stylistically they’re worlds apart, and the fact that they came together as a perfect pair was somewhat accidental.” Both go on sale this month.
Fra Keeler begins as an investigation by an anonymous, male narrator into the mysterious death of the title character. The first scene shows him buying Keeler’s house from a realtor.
(Certain) events of the unfriendliest category are now unfolding. I cannot put my finger on these events; I cannot pinpoint the exact dimensions of their effect. The truth is, I haven’t been the same since Fra Keeler’s death. Some deaths are more than just a death, I keep thinking, and Fra Keeler’s was exemplary in this sense. And it is the same thought since I left the realtor’s office: some people’s deaths need to be thoroughly investigated, and, Yes, I think then, Yes: I bought this home in order to fully investigate Fra Keeler’s death.
We’re not told what the narrator’s relationship is to Keeler, why he needs to go so far as to buy the man’s house, or where he came up with the money. These omitted facts — carefully ignored pieces of character- and plot-information — belie how much this narrator depends on the momentum of his thoughts to keep his story moving. The manic energy in the language sustains a careful, unsettling tension that’s central to the plot and the novel’s meaning.
We soon learn that this man is a keenly intelligent person suffering not from grief over Keeler’s death, but extreme curiosity and paranoid fixation. After telling how he moved into Keeler’s house, he suddenly stops to say, ominously, “Things creep up on us when we deny their existence. …I must retrace,” and then he dives into a flashback that takes up the bulk of the book.
In terms of plot action, he accepts a package from the mailman, makes a phone call, looks out the window, drinks water in the kitchen, goes for a walk in the nearby canyon (the valley of death?), and visits a neighbor. Meanwhile, he muses on causation and the nature of time, sits in a canoe he finds in the time-traveling yurt that’s appeared in the yard, and later decides that all of humanity’s perception of time is a “purified lie.” Headaches and dizzy spells come and go. He grows suspicious of an old woman in the neighborhood, then sees her face — or his own mother’s face — in a dream, accusing him of throwing acid at her.
Van der Vliet Oloomi’s spare, clear language sets this novel apart from other fiction about mental illness. The controlled tone adds complexity to the narrator’s unreliability as we maintain an immediate awareness of who he is versus what he’s telling us. Well-placed surreal scenes are also described plainly, and then mocked sometimes, as in this moment where a cactus turns into an old woman:
I spotted a cactus a few feet away. The stems were bowing down toward the ground. Not like a light bulb, I thought, this cactus, and I walked one full circle around it. It is a green mass of death, I thought. I stood there for a while, the cactus occupying the whole space of my brain, just as the sky had occupied it a moment earlier. I mused over the shape of the cactus until a chubby, toothless old lady formed in its place. She stared at the horizon. She said, “Take a good look, because this is me now, this is me as I am dying.” I felt a second pang go through my chest. I didn’t know if it was the cactus talking, or the old lady. Weren’t they one and the same, hadn’t they emerged from the same entity? Then, I thought, what rot, the things in one’s head. Because images just appear, an old lady out of nowhere, where the cactus had been. One minute, and then the next, what is the use of these things?
He’s a kook with depth. As a person, he comes across as witty and self-effacing, not powerfully cold and psychotic. He later comments on why madness may be necessary in life, and makes moral judgments about other people’s behavior. Naturally, these aspects humanize him and elicit our sympathy and it doesn’t hurt that he acts like a lovable goofball at times. “Dumb as a lobster, you are Mr. Mailman,” he says at one point, while after a snack and a stroll, he says with childlike joy, “How helpful the slice of bread had been, the walk in the canyon!”
He would be charming. But there’s the book’s violent ending to consider. And as I did, I saw this charm being put to a specific purpose. As I thought about it, Fra Keeler reminded me of Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Reticence, not to mention big classics like Crime and Punishment and Lolita. And what emerged as I considered a bit of context was that one vital aspect is Fra Keeler’s construction: the ending recasts the whole tenor of the book, illuminating who that realtor truly was and who the narrator might really have been. Then something clicked: the book had ingeniously play-acted a role I had wanted it to perform.
From this angle, Fra Keeler can be viewed as a critique of the attraction many writers, readers, critics, and scholars have to the clichéd glamor of evil, who fetishize the gorgeous anguish associated with men struggling with mental illness. And once we make this connection between novels that revel in spectacles of madness to the male violence at its roots (see Raskolnikov, Humbert, et al), and after we acknowledge that readers thrill to such spectacles and scholars add them to the canon – should this not prick at the conscience and urge us to examine our tastes?
Sure, it may only be fiction. But our enjoyment of it says a lot. Avoiding this issue seems to do ourselves and these male characters (and their male shadows in the real world), a disservice, waiting as it were for the next male-ghoul to be put on mad-parade in front of us to jab and laugh at as we turn the page — while pretending we’re actually learning more about the glory, jest, and riddle of the world.
To be clear, Fra Keeler does not abuse its male narrator in this way. Van der Vliet Oloomi hints sympathetically that war, that poisoned source of eternal male vainglory, is what might have driven the narrator to violence and madness. Rather, one of the things Fra Keeler does is offer a wondrously clear lens to those who want to examine tastes that have been taught to lurch grotesquely in the direction of male anxiety, mental illness, and violence when seeking so-called good literature. - Matthew Jakubowski

If our lives are lived, as William James claimed, “upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest” that pulls us blindly into the future, then death is the ultimate and inevitable crash upon the shore. This sudden absence creates a rift, a seeming absurdity, too, as the deceased continues to live on in memory. The questions that arise in death’s wake can be maddening. What became of this person, this life? How can he be here one minute, and then gone forever the next?
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s first novel, Fra Keeler, begins with this endpoint in mind. Fra Keeler has died, and the unnamed narrator moves into his house to become the self-appointed investigator of Fra Keeler’s death. He considers, in retrospect: “. . . it is the same thought since I left the realtor’s office: some people’s deaths need to be thoroughly investigated, and, Yes, I think then, Yes: I bought this home in order to fully investigate Fra Keeler’s death.” This is no routine investigation, however, as precious few details about the past, characters, and plot are revealed. We know little about the death other than its cause: lung cancer, and location: the Netherlands, and that there’s a discrepancy even in this detail. Of Fra Keeler’s life, we know even less. The narrator’s connection remains a mystery except that he, the narrator, hasn’t been the same since Fra Keeler’s “timely and magnificent” death. But in what way was it timely or magnificent?
In this sense, the novel’s beginnings seem to ascribe to the tenets of the nouveau roman outlined by French author Alain Robbe-Grillet nearly sixty years ago. In his For a New Novel, he grapples with how the novel can remain relevant in an age when “tell[ing] a story has become strictly impossible.” The new novel values the material world of objects and surfaces over psychological depth, and seeks out more relevant structures. Though while the first of these holds true for Fra Keeler—the narrator is unable to piece together a coherent narrative, that is, discover the “truth” about Fra Keeler’s death—this novel is very much concerned with life’s psychological underpinnings, so much so that the majority of action is entrenched within the narrator’s mind.
Fra Keeler falls within its own more contemporary lineage, too, as part of the esteemed catalog of books published by Danielle Dutton’s Dorothy Project, now entering its fifth year. Dorothy Project is dedicated to publishing works of fiction or “near-fiction” written “mostly by women” and that uphold two standards: the books must be “uniquely themselves” and in this uniqueness they must persuade the reader of their inherent wonderfulness. This is very much true of Amina Cain’s Creature, whose stories take form like latticework structures, whose open spaces are filled with imagination and life, as well as of the three books in Renee Gladman’s Ravicka trilogy, concerned with the architectures of space and absence and language. Dutton’s own novel Sprawl (though published by Siglio) must be included in this lineage, too, as it shares this conern for space and for carving out narrative suited to the novel’s internal logic, in this case, stitched-together suburban lawns and sidewalks and houses and hearths and the lives that unfold around and within them.
And this holds true for Fra Keeler, which follows suit in its concern for space and absence, of mapping the space of a mind and grappling with Fra Keeler’s continued presence in memory and perhaps even in his energy, despite his physical absence. Fra Keeler may masquerade as a mystery but it soon reveals its true ambition as the investigation of experience, investigating the action of thoughts, and specifically, a mind on the brink of madness. Fra Keeler’s death becomes an obsession, a noise that bleeds into every crevice of the narrator’s being. His thoughts continually circle back to Fra Keeler: “Fra Keeler, Time and Place of Death, I thought, and the sky clammed up,” and later: “So much noise after a death, so much sound to a death, and it was calling me, the noise of it all . . .” When a mysterious yurt appears just beyond his window, he thinks: “I should go in—there is information to be gathered.” It’s as if Fra Keeler’s death has subsumed the past, and the narrator is still reeling.
His paucity of words, and his stilted interactions all seem to reveal the ways he’s been jarred by this wave’s crash. I say “seem to” because it’s impossible to draw conclusions with any certainty. But just witness: When the phone rings persistently, he answers, hangs up, and it rings again. All the while he assumes it’s the mailman calling, the mailman who had just delivered a package from Ancestry.com: “‘Welcome,’ the voice said, and I felt my mouth fat and milky around my tongue. I thought goats, a thousand goats, walking across my mind, milk the goats, I thought, and they kept walking across my mind. ‘Welcome to Ancestry.com,’ said the voice, and I thought what the hell is this, and I threw the receiver against the wall and then the phone rang, two rings, nothing more. I picked up. ‘Welcome to Ancestry.com,’ the voice said, “Press one.’ I said, ‘You piece of shit mailman,” and heard the words come out of my mouth.” As in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, all action is filtered through the narrator’s delusional mind. The reader is confined to his vagaries of thought, his obsession with finding connections, his faulty perception. It’s maddening to read, and yet such a pleasure.
Much of the delight and confusion of this book resides in its utter madness, in the way a mind unspools on the page, the way that the reader becomes entrapped within the narrator’s delusions and misled conclusions. There is logic to the madness—a skewed logic—but logic nonetheless. He mutters, “Fra Keeler,” like a constant drip, and he’s preoccupied with retracing events. He’s so caught up in pinpointing the truth that he develops an obsession with fingers and hands—from the realtor’s ugly finger, to the mailman’s fat, boiled hand, to later thinking of the same realtor’s finger as snakelike, which leads to looking for snakes under bushes, followed by spotting a snakelike cloud in the sky. At times his observations are on the verge of brilliance: “in every moment, at the same time that we exist, we also do not exist, because our potential death, and within it our exact death, is right up against us. We are continually disappearing.” In other moments, he seems paranoid: “thoughts get passed from brain to brain,” he deduces, “so that our thoughts are only a repetition of someone else’s thoughts.” At times the world spins, his blood boils, and a yurt appears beyond his window that he’s inexplicably drawn to, and there he surrenders to madness.
His few interactions with others are terse and idiosyncratic, accompanied by an elaborate and often amusing string of commentary within his mind. When the mailman compliments his plants, he thinks, “If that’s what he had wanted to say why had it taken him so long to say it? Maybe he had wanted to say something else, something along the lines of you don’t look so good, Mister, but had regretted it, shoved the thought and all the words that went along with it back into his head and said the thing about the plants instead.” Nothing is as simple as its surface suggests. Every interaction and every point of engagement has an undercurrent of meaning and intent that can only be guessed at.
His methods of investigation are questionable at best, his sources of information erratic. He moves into Fra Keeler’s house to investigate the death more thoroughly, and also the string of “unfriendly” events that have taken place in its wake. When he sits with papers and sorts through details regarding the death, they’re inconsequential. He considers: “Hospital records do not reflect the whole truth, nothing close to it. How is one to make sense of the facts that are listed when the deceased person’s place of birth and death are so distant from one another?” Facts are inadequate when describing the arc of a life, when attempting to approximate its depth, meaning, shape, tenor, tenacity, and energy. From this dead end the investigation turns into a kind of philosophical inquiry.
Whether or not Van der Vliet Oloomi was thinking of William James’ writing on the nature of life and experience, their shared concerns are worth investigating. James writes of the many possible lives that could stretch between the fixed points of birth and death in “A World of Pure Experience”: they constitute a “quasi-chaos through which one can pass out of an initial term in many directions and yet end in the same terminus, moving from next to next by a great many possible paths.”
It’s this quasi-chaos and all of the potentiality that sends Van der Vliet Oloomi’s narrator aflutter. He believes it’s only from the endpoint that the meaning of a life can be discerned: “One event stands in relation to another in the same way that it is in relation to a third event. And a fourth and a fifth as well. So that your whole life is a string of events taking form in a backward manner.” He’s continuously retracing lines backward from a present that’s always slipping, grasping at random details as if every portent might be significant. In contrast to James’s insistence that “we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure,” the narrator is always looking back over his shoulder, reevaluating the tenuous connections he’s made, unable to navigate what lies ahead.
He’s paralyzed by mapping the chaos of the potential—all of the potential lives that Fra Keeler might have led, all of the potential deaths that he himself still faces, all of the potential motives behind every action and every word, all of the potential stories in the world. How can anything of importance be discerned when there are endless possibilities? But even he concedes that there is a space where potentiality meets reality. And it seems that when these other potentials become more potent than the real, this is where true madness lies.
And then there is the space that a thought occupies. The phrase “I thought” is a constant refrain. Actions do take place, and some are significant and with consequence, but thought is the action and through line in this novel. In this sense Fra Keeler aligns itself with Clarice Lispector’s Passion According to G.H.,—another book whose advancement relies on the progression of ideas and thoughts running through the narrator’s mind, where it takes nearly two hundred pages for the narrator to cross a room. Plot and action aren’t meant to create narrative momentum. What matters is tracing the movement of the mind while considering the essence of being, passion, life. Privileging thought over action is an argument that its movement is as true as the movement of a body swimming through water. It’s an acknowledgement that every life plays out within the space of a mind.
In Fra Keeler, thoughts often possess physical qualities, words are sometimes objects—as when looking at his plants and thinking of the mailman’s face, the word “sidelong” creeps toward the narrator “like a worm.” Thoughts can be touched and probed, and can have a mind of their own: “they exist before you, I told myself, picking the thought up again, and by some trick of the mind you think it was your thought, and you drag it out, a thread as long as your DNA, and you push it back against your finger and say, ‘Ah, yes: This is my thought,’ and it breathes back against your finger, and you are very satisfied, you and the thought together, you thinking the thought is yours and the thought thinking back at you, right up against your finger.”
What is the line between sanity and madness? In Fra Keeler, it’s a thinner line than we’re generally willing to acknowledge. This narrator falls into the abyss, but the quality of his thoughts offer often overlooked glimpses into the mysteries of existence. When considered in sequence, thoughts accumulate, change direction, diverge, and chart new paths. And if thoughts have material qualities, then they become as real and tangible as the surfaces we encounter in our everyday existence. And so Fra Keeler’s preoccupation with thought isn’t launched as an attempt to plumb depths but rather a way to regard the many-faceted mind.
Williams James also writes of the same preoccupations and mysteries, of time and memory, of moving forward into the future, and of life as an encounter with an ever-shifting reality: “If we do not feel both past and present in one field of feeling, we feel them not at all. We have the same many-in-one in the matter that fills the passing time. The rush of our thought forward through its fringes is the everlasting peculiarity of its life. We realize this life as something always off its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we feel to be the dawn fulfilled. In the very midst of the continuity our experience comes as an alteration. ‘Yes,’ we say at the full brightness, ‘this is what I just meant.’ ‘No,’ we feel at the dawning, ‘this is not yet the full meaning, there is more to come.’” It’s uncanny to note that James also experienced a mental breakdown on the heels of the death of his cousin Minny Temple, to whom he was exceedingly close, possibly in love. Maybe the tendency toward madness in the face of a loss results from watching an intimate and seemingly integral part of one’s mental landscape fall away? It also suggests that there’s wisdom to be salvaged from these encounters.
Ultimately, Fra Keeler’s preoccupation with thought and a mind’s unraveling reminds us that we’re each ensconced within our own mind, we’re stationed behind the window of our own perceptions, perhaps never truly knowing anything beyond ourselves. There’s something magical and mad in this. Fra Keeler suggests that losing someone close is like losing part of oneself, breaking with a known reality. In the face of an inconceivable loss, there are no answers to be found, just a cascade of questions. And yet this kind of encounter is also possible within a novel, where a progression of thoughts and interactions play out on the page. That’s the triumph of this novel, to animate the movement of a mind, and in this case, a mind plummeting into the abyss of madness while struggling to maintain its grip. There is mystery within Fra Keeler and it largely remains a mystery—about Fra Keeler, and just where did he die? Isn’t that the way of life? What do we ever truly know beyond our own thoughts and encounters? Who needs the certainty of such details to keep reading when there is so much else to consider? - Anne K. Yoder