Jagged Little Pill

Set in a near-future Berlin, Elvia Wilke’s Oval follows partners Anja and Louis as they navigate life under greenwashed turbocapitalism. The pair live on the Berg: an artificial mountain in Berlin, built by Finster Corp. as ground zero for their experiments in smart houses and sustainable urban living, experiments that seem to go sideways from the very start. When Louis returns from the United States after his mother’s funeral, Anja expects him to be grieving in a way she can understand, but instead he seeks normality, feigns unaffectedness, and dives back into his work as an artistic consultant for Basquiatt, a large nonprofit. Anja, once employed by the omnipresent and looming Finster Corp. as a researcher studying cartilage for biological homes, is sacked from her research division and rehired (along with her lab partner Michel) as a consultant — an indefinite, formless job that she suspects was created to pay for her silence on the suspiciously abrupt death of her research project. Communication continues to deteriorate between Anja and Louis, and their home on the Berg becomes increasingly unlivable until eventually the two separate; Anja stays with her friends (soon to be evicted by Finster), while Louis sleeps at his office, nose to the grindstone on a secret project.

This secret project is the titular Oval, a newly developed drug that temporarily rewires one’s brain so that the act of giving induces intense pleasure. Louis wants to release Oval to the public (the lower middle class particularly) in order to create a culture of giving, which he suspects will, among other things, fix the rampant houselessness in Berlin and ultimately save humanity from itself. Instead, to no reader’s surprise, the drug induces those who take it to give wantonly, without regard for need. Eventually, the drug’s popularity leads to a days-long rager in the heart of the city, and the party starts a blaze that burns Berlin to its foundations, which Anja only barely notices because she has isolated herself on the Berg and discovered that all of the mountain’s livability issues were part of Finster’s planned obsolescence scheme all along.

The world these characters inhabit is one in which climate destabilization has made the weather so unpredictable that some have begun to suspect that the government’s wholly inaccurate meteorological reports are an elaborate lie meant to supersede reality. It’s a world in which the only work for artists is corporate-contracted consultant work, and those who fail to meet the terms of their agency’s contracts have their disembodied, shrunken heads put on display at lavish parties. It’s a world in which companies and non-profits trip over themselves to see who can make the most money off of “sustainability,” without fundamentally altering the consumption-dependent capitalist business model. The setting is clearly dystopic, but it is also not inconceivable. In fact, it’s familiar. Houselessness has spiked; the seasons are increasingly unrecognizable; the middle class averts their eyes from what’s below them and parties away the weekends on designer drugs; well-meaning individuals believe they can save the world from within powerful global systems invested in the status quo and find themselves disarmed, disinterested, or burnt out; and multinational businesses are still pumping out endless, resource-heavy consumer goods meant to be thrown away while claiming to be environmentally friendly. In Wilk’s near future Berlin, perhaps the scale of exploitation and control has grown, but the systems are very much the same, omnipresent in our contemporary lives.

But despite this often-accurate portrayal of the path global capitalism is forcing us down, Oval ultimately offers little to the wider field of dystopian literature, neither illuminating a lurking threat to the prosperity of human and non-human life and liberty, nor portraying any methods of active resistance to oppressive power structures. Especially in environmental dystopias, these considerations are crucial. Throughout the novel, Wilk attempts to balance the story’s literary aspects — namely the evolving dynamics...