Art of Nesting

The dozen storylines in Lance Olsen’s Calendar of Regrets do not exactly intertwine. They are not braided, nor are they truly linked or interconnected, despite the thought-moments and mid-sentence hijinks that transition the novel from one chapter to another, and from one month to the next. Instead, these narratives are nested, one inside the other, so that the first and last chapters contain within their tellings all the other storylines, serving not just as the opening and closing of the novel but also as the opening and closing parentheses of the book and of the book’s style, within which everything else is contained, allowed to go its own length without changing what it is embedded into, and is it any wonder that all these things share the same adjectives: Opening sentence, opening quotation mark, opening parenthesis (

A parenthesis contains material that can be omitted from a sentence without destroying the meaning of the sentence, but which—if done correctly—might add something to the whole by its inclusion. Calendar of Regrets is a book of parentheses, of narratives containing other narratives which themselves contain other self-contained narratives. The question, then: Is the story of the just-poisoned Hieronymus Bosch that opens the novel damaged by removing from within the chapter containing the mugging of Dan Rather, or a young backpacker’s trip through Thailand? Does it need the story of the time-looping angel, or a fairy tale of a man born as a notebook, into whom others write their dreams? Perhaps not, and yet, there they are, even though what glimpses of these worlds that Bosch sees at the split of his narrative are not really in his present world at all, but rather the world of another sensibility, another time or consciousness. The slip of his gaze is signaled by a lexical split, a mid-sentence shift, one that also removes the gaze of the book from Bosch and alights it mid-sentence upon a dinner party in New York City, almost five hundred years later, where a young Dan Rather has just returned from covering the Chernobyl explosion. We follow Rather out of the party and onto the streets, where he is attacked, seemingly mugged, and somewhere inside that story—

and somewhere inside the story of Dan Rather is the transcript of an interview with William Tager, the delusional assailant who attacked the newscaster, shouting “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” years before he kills Campbell Theron Montgomery, an NBC technician, believing that television networks were watching him and beaming messages into his head. Nested inside Tager’s story is a bored teacher making homemade pornographic videos and mailing them to strangers selected out of the phonebook, giving her weeks meaning via these acts of creation and communication: “I’ve learned that making is always a mixture of danger and discovery,” she says, “meaning always a story.” Further into the book, inside the brackets of the story of Iphi, the doomed half of a pair of fundamentalist Christian terrorists, we find a mother whose family is being held hostage by another kind of female terrorist, and also Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, about to be sacrificed against her will, and so never to be a mother herself. And inside her story? Inside her story is still more, a pirate radio broadcast and then an angel, and inside the angel there is a carnival, and inside the carnival is the center of the book, which does not repeat as all other stories here do.

Calendar of Regrets is a book of brackets, of nestings, but also it is more liquid than that, its narratives separate in form and subject but also able to be sloshed, shook slightly from their containers, so that some of the stuff of one will show up in another, like a fossil broke loose during an earthquake, like a rainbow splash of oil dispersed across a breaking wave. We see these connections only momentarily, and they disrupt the characters never as much as they disrupt us, who as...