Tzer Island

Published by University Of Iowa Press on April 29, 2025

This amusing novel is told almost entirely in the form of a chat between two characters. Fans of the movie My Dinner with Andre will probably enjoy The Perturbation of O for its celebration of conversation.

Gideon Anderson was an unenthused college student. A generous uncle covered his living expenses, leaving him with little incentive to make a life for himself. He lost interest in everything and responded to his disinterest by writing a book about all the reasons nothing mattered to him. “It told the brief story of my final year at the University of Chicago where I had squandered my time not participating in classes, not planning for my future, but where I had gone about squandering funds that my uncle sent me on a monthly basis, it was a memoir I had initially titled The Ark of Disquiet . . . .”

Gideon included in the manuscript “all the things that had filled me with loathing that year of my final year at the University of Chicago . . . filling it like Noah’s ark with all the creaturely memories that filled me with bile.” He printed it out and planned to “release that ark upon the waters of Lake Michigan, thereby flushing away the great turd of a manuscript.”

While waiting for appropriately stormy weather to assure that the manuscript would be washed away, Gideon attended a party where he sat next to a “Kentucky gentleman” who “had just published a book about his boyhood in Kentucky.” Gideon drunkenly told the story of his own book and of his plan to jettison the turd into Lake Michigan. The Kentucky gentleman persuaded Gideon to send it instead to his agent, who loved the book and sold it to a publisher that made it a best seller under the title Gideon’s Confession. The book spawned a Broadway musical and a movie, generating enough income to allow Gideon to continue living a comfortable life as a slacker, albeit one who was beleaguered by unwelcome fame.

The novel opens seventeen years later in a coffee shop, where Gideon is reading a manuscript written by the Kentucky gentleman’s grandson for which he agreed write a blurb. He’s spotted by Regina Blast, a woman who was the best friend of Gideon’s girlfriend when Gideon was still a student. Regina was interested in painting light. When Gideon saw her paintings, he got a boner (at least that’s how Regina recalls it). They slept together, ending Gideon’s relationship and Regina’s friendship with Gideon’s girlfriend.

Gideon wrote about Regina and her paintings in Gideon’s Confession. Regina thought his descriptions of her art were honest and perceptive, even if she didn’t appreciate his description of her body or the sexual encounter that subsequent lovers pleaded with her to reenact. The bulk of the novel consists of their conversation in the coffee shop.

Much of their discussion involves Oprah Winfrey. Oprah had Gideon on her show after he was proclaimed the King of Slack, the symbol of the Slacker Generation. Oprah later visited Regina in her studio to view the art that so enamored Gideon. The visit caused Regina to rethink her artwork after she made a sketch of Oprah. She found a perfect O in the sketch and thereafter became “primarily a painter of brushstrokes” that form Os.

Gideon and Regina trade delightfully over-the-top descriptions of Oprah. Says Gideon, “Oprah has a magnificence about her when you are with her in person that is hard to describe, and in my life I don’t think I have ever encountered anyone who was so magnificent as her.” Says Regina, “in all of my life, I have never come close to encountering a person who, like Oprah, possessed such a bottomless depth of humanity and understanding and lovingness . . . ” and on and on and on.

The conversations consist of long rambling sentences. Gideon and Regina repeatedly circle back to the same issues — Gideon’s book, Regina’s art, their sexual encounter, and lots of Oprah. The conversation would be maddening or boring if it weren’t so funny. And funny it is.

The story nevertheless raises interesting questions about the right of a memoir author to discuss intimate details of another person’s life, the nature of art, and the merits of being a slacker. Gideon’s memoir is seen by some as an anti-capitalist manifesto, but it seems clear that Gideon was simply blowing off steam. The story might therefore be seen as raising questions about how media sensations are promoted as geniuses or generational voices when, in fact, they don’t have much to say at all. Serious readers might therefore have serious conversations about The Perturbation of O, but I doubt they will have conversations as amusing as the one in which Gideon and Regina engage.

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Published by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, on April 15, 2025

Someone murdered August Ingraham and set fire to a wing of his mansion, although not the wing in which his body was found. The prime suspects are five sisters: April, June, July, January, and possibly March, although March (the youngest) hasn’t been seen for a while. Another suspect is their mother, May Iverson, August’s wife and the creator of Mother May I.

August was only married to May for a couple of years and wasn’t in the picture when May’s five daughters were born. Their biological father, Ernesto Iniesta, had an argument with August a couple of weeks before his death and is also a suspect, at least in the eyes of true crime podcasters. A neighbor who had a reasonable grudge against August also had a motive, but he became an unlikely suspect after his dead body was discovered outside the burning house.

The Influencers is presented as a whodunit, yet as the title implies, it is more a sendup of online personalities.  The novel skewers a certain kind of “influencer,” internet celebrities or wannabes who place their enviable lives on display for the world to see, except for the parts they try to conceal.

Chapters written in the third person generally narrate the actions of family members. Other chapters offer first-person thoughts spoken collectively by followers of the family members. The followers are obsessed; their obsession contributes to the humor. They believe they are best positioned to solve August’s murder, as they know more about the family than the police will ever learn.

May is “famous for picture-worthy after-school snacks and homemade costumes and glamorous New Year’s Eve parties,” as well as lifestyle and fashion advice, product lines (such as Mother May I dish towels), and product endorsements. On her Mother May I platforms, she posted daily videos of her children growing up, sometimes to their displeasure.

The non-identical twins, pale June and dark July, made a career of their mother’s career. They “followed their mother into the world of making money off polishing and posting their daily lives. June and July each had their own personal brands,” but they post some content collectively as the Summer Girls. According to their fans, “It was June we loved for having no filter, no brakes, and July we loved for her gentle way of moving through the world.” June is even a bit motherly in her relationship with May. “If June didn’t keep an eye on her, she was going to fund a line of vitamin-infused nail polish or an independent film about reverse racism.”

Growing up, April was the problem solver, the replacement mom who stepped in to help the other girls when May was busy hawking products. Now April has a fabric store and, in the collective opinion of Mother May I fans, is too competent to have burned down a part of the house while August (presumably dead at the time) was in a different wing. “Rather than such scattershot arson, she would have set the fire close enough to the corpse to turn all evidence to cinders. She might have even been able to make both look like accidents.”

January works in theater as a lighting designer. She keeps to herself and away from cameras. Maybe she’s never gotten over her mother filming them as they shopped for her first training bra or her mother’s broadcast about her “many feelings” when her daughter had her first period. I’ve never had a period (wrong gender for the curse), but I can imagine being mortified if my mother discussed her feels about my bodily discharges with the entire world.

The followers debate the potential of each Iverson to be a killer based on what they know of their personalities (or on how they dress or wear makeup). They dissect new footage of the family that a true-crime blogger has posted to her site while the Iversons try to discover the source of the video clips. The videos appear to be candid camera recordings, some of which portray May and the girls in a negative light, the kind of recordings that May would never have posted. Who took the videos and who released them to podcasters is another mystery the followers want to unravel.

Sharp-eyed followers identify a guy lurking in the background of certain videos who might be named Luke, who always wears a sweatshirt, and who may or may not be dating June or July. Luke Sweatshirt is another murder suspect.

Like many fans of celebrities, the Mother May I followers are fickle. When they like what they see, they can’t get enough of it. When it seems the family is about to melt down, they are just as happy to be cheering against them. That seemed like a particularly telling observation about the nature of people who become absorbed in the details of Kardashian-type celebrities.

As the novel nears its end, the central mystery — who killed August? — is temporarily overshadowed by a second — what happened to March? Both reveals are surprising, although the explanation of August’s death and the fire in his mansion is underwhelming.

The novel is long and the pace sometimes drags, in part because endless descriptions of the Iverson family’s fashion choices become a bit wearing (no pun intended). Anna-Marie McLemore’s central point is the importance of children building their own identities and the damage caused by mothers who shape their children with the intent to monetize them, but the story suffers from redundant reminders about all the ways in which May failed her kids. Still, the story always maintained my interest and a steady diet of comedic moments kept me smiling.

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