‘If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.’
There exists a maxim that love‘If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.’
There exists a maxim that love transcends all, and Olivie Blake has finely crafted a fragile, fiery love affair that transcends even her characters to become a sensual romance between art and science. Alone With You in the Ether finds Regan and Aldo caught in each other’s gravitational attraction of love, a love that scorches through them and their physical selves to expose their very essences as forces navigating either by emotion or logic. As they come closer together, we must wonder is ‘it love between them or was it need?’ and are they a safe harbor where the other may flourish or will they run to ruin, dashed to pieces on the shoreline of the other. This is, ultimately, a literary romance, one with grit and uncomfortable explorations into themes of mental health, co-dependency, compulsive self-sabotage and the ways the veil of illusion begins to slip as relationships progress and we must decide to crack or embrace that ‘it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.’ These are flawed characters bruising themselves against the world. Told through prose that has passages so ethereally gorgeous it could only exist in service of love and with a dual narrative that threads their lives together, Alone With You in the Ether is a gorgeously interior and intimate portrait of difficult love that we can’t help but dive into even if it is destined to burn us down to ash as Blake’s storytelling beautifully cuts right into the troubled heart of matters as deeply as she cut into the heart of the reader.
‘There would be times, particularly at first, when Regan would attempt to identify the moment things had set themselves on a path to inevitable collision.’
Olivie Blake—a pen name of chosen through a name generator—began her career writing fan fiction and self-publishing novels until going viral on social media landed her a book deal with Tor and the recognition she certainly deserves. Best known for her dark academia fantasy series, The Atlas Six, here Blake writes in ways that feel magical without having to be magic beyond the sparks of love but still retains a very academic atmosphere to her characters and settings. Blake brings Chicago alive here, taking us through the streets, the classrooms of the University of Chicago where Aldo teaches and into the absolutely amazing Art Institute where Regan works as docent. I love that museum intensely and the pair having an affection for the Armory there as the place of their first meeting steals my heart.
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The Art Institute of Chicago
Blake delivers seemingly effortless storytelling that loops through exciting metafiction techniques, such as a whole host of narrators intruding in on the story in part 1, including an “overzealous Cubs fan,” or “an aging, arthritic man in possession of many books” as well as stage direction details. It ushers us into the narrative with a fun and frenetic cinematic energy. I would have enjoyed it if Blake continued this style more through the book as I missed it, but once the characters are established it instead turns more inward as they attempt to have more of a harness on their own narratives. The perspective rotates between Regan and Aldo, offering both internal and external perspectives on each other creating more dynamic characters but also allowing us to detect inconsistencies that show how a self-image is often a slight fiction. This is particularly true for Regan who ‘ was most comfortable when she was at her falsest. Regan did not enjoy honesty, she hated it, was repulsed by it and by her own truths especially,’ and the way the readers perceptions on Regan morph over the course of the book—and with new revelations on her life—emphasizes the way a person seems always in flux. But most notably, this sashaying of perspectives is like a needle threading the two together until, at the end, we witness them as a seamless whole viewed from the outside with a conversation entirely narrated of he said and she said instead of a duality of perspective.
‘Art is something we do to feel human, not because we are’
The prose is quite engaging and this is a much faster paced novel than I tend to read so I was gripped the whole way through. Blake aims for grand phrasing of emotions that land quite impactfully and, sure, it may be overwrought at times but that's exactly how obsessive love feels. I love the way it spirals through the stratosphere or seems to be tumbling out of control or even trails off mid-thought because it so lucidly captures untethered emotions (and intrusive thoughts, which are constantly present in this book). There is a musicality to it, but it is like every instrument in a band trying to all take a solo at once in the cacophony of feeling so much you aren’t sure if you can contain it. It is art, pure and simple.
‘You wouldn't make love with him, you'd make art.’
The premise is rather cute with Aldo and Regan agreeing to have six conversations to see what they learn about each other, something right in Aldo’s wheelhouse as ‘for Aldo, to love something was to study it; to devote every spare thought to understanding it.’ Yet there is a darkness lurking just beneath, something that might not be immediately evident in the blinding glare of meet-cutes and warm infatuation but still casts shadows they choose to find intriguing instead of alarming. Though Blake does capture the way in the falling-hard stage you tend to feel everything reminds you of that person, akin to learning a new word and seeing it everywhere:
‘When you learn a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The mind comforts itself by believing this to be coincidence but isn’t—it’s ignorance falling away. Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.’
Was their love for each other there even before them, existing out of time? Or is this a romanticized notion that might not be that healthy to cling to? There are clear mental health struggles with both of them, Regan is avoiding prison for white collar crime largely due to her wealthy parents, and both seem to struggle within society due to their own personalities. Plus Regan has a boyfriend, Mark, who can be cruelly perceptive at times despite being stock-market-wealth garbage. Perhaps the easiest to love character is Masso, Aldo’s charming, well-meaning father—a sharp juxtaposition from Regan’s mother who we see as highly judgemental through Regan’s perceptions—though even he warns Aldo that Regan is the type to burn someone up.
‘So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror.’
The adorableness of the first half of the novel begins to give way to doubts and fears, and this makes a good case for how someone cannot be “fixed” by inserting another person into their lives and that emotional high and romantic monomania will eventually return to the difficulties of love. But in the blazing glory of their initial infatuations we see clear into them and the very essence of their beings, with Regan representative of art and Aldo representative of science. It is why they continuously say they love each other’s brains more than any other aspect of one another, they are trying to love the pure consciousness and essence of the other. Their looks, fears and flaws become just as ornamental as the time and art theories of their conversations that point like maps to their underlying feelings, and I find it a rather beautifully bittersweet theme to place art and science together as a romantic couple hoping their union is an eternal, cosmic force that can even bend time to its will. Aldo’s mind approaches life and love like a math problem, and with his bee obsession I just assume glimpsing in his mind is like looking at this book:
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OMFG, BEES!: Bees Are So Amazing and You're About to Find Out Why Regan approaches life on whims of feelings, something she feels stifled by through her (view spoiler)[court-ordered (hide spoiler)] medications (‘even though she hates her feelings, she'd still rather have them than not’) and has a taste for darkness and self-destruction. ‘Art is loss,’ she muses, ‘it’s the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes.’ What begins as romantic starts to look like a mental health spiral, and what comes easily at first is now fraught with fear and uncertainty, especially in Regan. ‘Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone,’ wrote Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘it has to be made,’ and through these trials will Aldo and Regan discover a way to make lasting love or will they burn up in each other’s atmosphere?
‘To love a person was to forfeit the need to place limits on them, and therefore to love was to exist in a constant, paralyzing threat.’
Regan is a fascinating character, one who is certainly flawed and can be rather frustrating at times but you want her to learn to love herself for herself and not because someone else does. She chases highs, she is assailed by intrusive thoughts (some violent), she is her own worst enemy and both she and Aldo fear she is using their relationship as a fix instead of truly working on herself. They are difficult characters but they still deserve to feel love and there were fleeting moments I felt this book was akin to Sally Rooney characters. Regan struggles to define herself for herself and even many of the bad-faith representations of her she rages against are mostly invented in her mind (Blake has a brilliant moment of narrative crafting when we discover the argument between Regan and her mother is all staged in her head though proceed to assume her fictionalized words are the truth of how she feels about Aldo and Regan). Her choice to abandon her meds is troubling, though Blake explains in the afterword that it is not meant as ‘perscriptive’ and is largely based on her own experiences and struggles with medication after a bi-polar diagnosis. It does touch close to the romanticization of mental health struggles being a gateway to good art, which is a troubling perspective, though that doesn’t seem the intent. As Jeanette Winterson writes in her memoir ‘creativity is on the side of health – it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.’ Blake does well by having the story reject any quick fix or certainty, showing mental health is a lifelong journey and encouraging therapy and repeated self-assessment to remain both productive and healthy. Though as the narrator notes ‘“healthy” for them will always be a relative term.’
‘I want you to bet on me, Aldo. I want you to make investments, I want your future.’
People who are difficult to love still deserve to be loved, and that is captured so elegantly in Alone With You in the Ether. I really loved this book and had goosebumps at multiple moments, it is very moving and searingly gorgeous at times. I’m not one usually for a romance novel, but this feels rather different than what one would expect. It is certainly a literary work, and all the heady topics of time theory and reflections and analysis of art are handled in accessible yet ponderous ways that are folded productively into the larger themes of the book. This was my first Olivie Blake and I will certainly read others, it is a book without any fantastical elements though still is undeniably magical.
s.penkevich
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