This book grabbed me by the lapels, shoved me up against the wall, and held me there for 36 hours until I finished it. Then, it let me go and I fell in a heap on the floor and spend the next day wondering what the fuck just happened. After I finished, I read a bunch of other readers’ reviews online, and I can confidently state that you will either love it or hate it. I LOVED it.
The Odyssey by Lara Williams is not for everyone. However, if you’re a person who enjoys surrealism, moral ambiguity, and feeling disoriented by your fiction, this is the book for you. It reads like an emotionally fraught allegory, a fever dream, splitting the main character’s time between “Land” and “Sea.”
Ingrid is a traumatized Millennial woman suffering from alcoholism and derealization. When she’s at ‘sea’ she works in the high-control environment of an absurdly lavish cruise ship captained by a strange man named Keith who fancies himself some kind of lifestyle guru. She is ambitious, purposeful, and focused, eager to prove herself, convinced of her potential greatness.
Ingrid finds herself accepted into an elite program mentored directly by Keith, which aims to help her improve and fast-track her career for management. During the course of her training, she is asked to participate in strange, cult-like behaviors.
When she visits ‘land,’ however, she spends all of her time falling-down drunk, putting herself in danger, acting out in ways that directly contradict her commitments when at ‘sea.’
As the novel progresses, we learn about Ingrid’s past – the controlling, abusive parenting she endured as a child. Her marriage to an enabler and her incessant attempts at self-destruction. We learn she has left her husband for her job aboard the cruise ship, and eventually, she goes back to the home they shared together, where we see their incredibly dysfunctional dynamic.
I hesitate to add more detail about the plot to this review. I feel it’s important to experience this story page by page in order to appreciate it. Each psychologically deranged detail builds off a previous one, creating a narrative that is incoherent to the mind but speaks clearly to the heart of anyone who has experienced abuse, trauma, addiction, and mental illness.
This is, without a doubt, one of the best books I’ve read this year. If you’re comfortable with being uncomfortable, go get it.
I could not put it down. I’ll be thinking about The Odyssey for a long time.