by D.W. White
January 19, 2022
D.W. White is a graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Otis College in Los Angeles and Stony Brook University's BookEnds Fellowship. Currently seeking representation for his first novel, he serves as Fiction Editor for West Trade Review, where he also contributes reviews and critical essays. His writing further appears in or is forthcoming from Fatal Flaw, Roi Fainéant Press, Twelve Winters Journal, Chicago Review of Books, Southern Review of Books, The Rupture, On The Seawall, and elsewhere. A Chicago ex-pat, he now lives Long Beach, California, where he frequents the beach to hide from writer’s block. He is on Twitter @dwhitethewriter.
Present Tense Machine by Gunnhild Øyehaug (translated by Kari Dickson); Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 176 pages; $25
Throughout the previous century, a Grand Unified Theory of the universe has been a primary goal of scientific inquiry. As physicists approach a greater possibility of such a theory, one that would unite both the large- and the small-scale to unlock the mysterious workings of our reality, the last twenty years have shown major promise. The late Stephen Hawking — buoyed especially by the discovery of dark energy and proof of the ongoing, and accelerated, expansion of the universe — expressed cautious optimism that not only will a Grand Unified Theory (or its closest possible form) soon be realized, but that humanity’s understanding of the cosmos will be such that a baseline knowledge will permeate into general society. This latter hope, at least, is perhaps borne out not only in the very opening of this very review, but more notably in the fascinating structure and narrative propulsion of Gunnhild Øyehaug’s temporally playful PRESENT TENSE MACHINE, translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson.
The story of two women living in near-modern day Bergen, Norway, Present Tense Machine, at first glance, is much like the night sky; seemingly simple and richly developed, the opening chapters relating scenes of intimate-if-rote domesticity that, while far from unusual in modern fiction, stand out at first for the clarity and perception of their rendering. We are introduced to two couples, Laura and Karl Peter — twenty-four and twenty-eight, respectively, and battling both unruly neighbor and crumbling flat, and Anna and Jostein — early-middle-aged and in the full throws of parenthood and mid-life, if not crises than at least unrest — whose lives we shall follow throughout. Colorful quirks of idiom and self-reflexivity aside, the narration and indeed the book as whole begins along these compelling if conventional lines, before, like the splitting of an atom or the magnifying of a telescope, it explodes into something far more fascinating and demanding.
In an Odyssean maneuver, Present Tense Machine allows itself four chapters of this active, scenic movement before pulling back to provide the intrigued if harried reader a reprieve of knowledge. The audience begins to notice slips, both in the fictive worlds of Laura and Anna and in the narrative entity itself, who takes on an ever-increasing presence across the opening chapters as the seeds of parallel universes are sown. We find out, near the end of Øyehaug’s Telemachy, that Laura, one fine spring day in 1998, up and vanished while her mother, Anna, read a book and watched her two-year-old daughter play in the front yard. In this way, the book begins in medias res, or more properly in medias parallelis, establishing a nearly-overwhelming plethora of narratological problems and explorations as we spend the first few chapters moving between these coexistent yet distinct universes of both story and text. The approach is somewhat like applying free-indirect discourse to reality itself, as not only Øyehaug’s narrative entity but her dueling narrative worlds run parallel and occasionally bleed into each other, both discursively and narratively, in plot and in prose. Her abilities in giving her narration ability to inhabit all possible worlds and realities, moving between parallel lives but also within them multidimensionally, forward and backward in time, and into and out of access consciousness, are both strong and necessary in this engrossing work.
As compelling as both style and story are in the Laura-Anna world lines, the real excitement is found in the third to this tangle of narrative threads, one that slides in on the pair like a chaperone at a school dance. Øyehaug’s first person narrator, a deific figure who dips into each timeline with the omniscient ease of a classical third person, occasionally gives us a bit about her own life, be it updates on her clumsy dog or meandering thoughts. The effect of these intermittent lapses into the personal pronoun — at times singular and at others plural — is a sensation of a narrator looking into each parallel narrative in order to relate their happenings, like some great experiment in a metaphysical laboratory.
Throughout, Øyehaug shows a remarkable ability to move between the macro and the micro, exploring her triumvirate of narrative universes via a medium chiefly rendered in scenic detail and private thought:
As [Anna’s ex-husband and Laura’s father] Bård walks down Inndalsveien in 1998, he doesn’t know that he will never see Anna again, never think about Anna again, never remember that Anna even existed, because Anna, in the very moment that Bård buys a newspaper in the shops on the other side of the road from their flat, reads the word tärdgård and then vanishes into a parallel universe, and that he will be divided in two parallel versions of himself.
This quote, from a section in the eloquent and foundational eleventh chapter, serves as a fitting microcosm of the book’s power writ large.
The book is pitched as being about ‘language, family, and parallel universes’, and while these are certainly apt descriptors (as are the precise adjectives of playful and transcendent), Present Tense Machine is really a work about memory, which, of course, is the locus of all great novels, a rule without exception here. With ever-increasing urgency, it is the memories — real and imagined, recalled and forgotten — from which Øyehaug’s vivid characters and enigmatic narrator draw their power and propulsion. Lives half lived — , not lived, relived and alternatively lived —, are remembered in quotidian hideouts of domestic life, bringing ethos and intrigue to the deceptively simple storyline.
Present Tense Machine’s rather impish approach to narration — not breaking but incinerating, at spots, the fictive fourth wall — serves more than mere ‘Digression’, as a key chapter title would have it. In a mirroring of the unstable nature of reality and the slippery boundaries between parallel universes, the book’s Tristram Shandyian narrative entity challenges the essential groundwork of narration, and the novel as a whole. Ultimately, by uprooting the fundamental theory of the book — by fabricating a third person narration that will, at times, transform into a discursive first opining on YouTube videos and her interactions with the nominal protagonists — Øyehaug provides her reader with an experience similar to those of her central characters, in which the very fabric of assumed reality, the fictive universe for one and the conventions of the novel for the other, are undermined and reconsidered.
©2022 West Trade Review
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A Theory of Everything: Narration and Experimentation in Present Tense Machine
FICTION REVIEW
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