Alone with You in the Ether

September 26, 2022
An artist with bipolar disorder and an obsessive mathematician embark on an unconventional romance in this cerebral love story from Blake (The Atlas Six). When Art Institute of Chicago docent Charlotte Regan, who’s in court-ordered psychotherapy following a scheme to counterfeit foreign currency, meets Aldo Damiani, a prickly University of Chicago grad student, their connection is immediate. Aldo urges Regan to agree to six conversations, over the course of which he intends to understand her. With the bemused tolerance of Regan’s boyfriend, the pair grow closer—so close that Regan offers Aldo “one part of me for your consumption.” She expects him to go for sex, but instead he asks for her art, which she hasn’t worked on in years. Spurred on, Regan takes up painting, dumps her boyfriend, quits her medication, and launches a volatile, passionate relationship with Aldo. Blake’s prose is silky and as eccentric as her characters, with an assortment of third-party narrators interrupting the action in “voice-over.” (“THE NARRATOR, A STUDENT WHO HAS JUST ARRIVED: You can never prepare for weathering anything in Chicago.”) The message of finding a richer life off mood stabilizers won’t sit well with all readers, but there’s no denying the characters make for fascinating and complicated studies. This is a book to savor.

October 15, 2022
Regan is a docent at the Art Institute of Chicago when she meets mathematician Aldo, who occupies his sometimes destructive mind with solving the impossible problem of time travel. They agree to six conversations to get to know each other, but after several weeks, it is not enough, and Regan offers to give Aldo keys to who she is. Instead of asking for sex, as she assumed he would because of the tension crackling between them, he demands to see her art. But Regan is no artist; instead, she is a former forger who sees a court-appointed psychiatrist to keep her bipolar disorder under control. She decides to stop taking her pills in order to feel things more clearly. Nothing is simple in Blake's (The Atlas Six, 2022) surprising love story. There is a lot of conversation and a lot of stream-of-consciousness narration from Regan and Aldo's deep points of view. But the pages fly by as the two figure each other out in this character-driven novel that is intimate, complicated, and utterly romantic.

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November 15, 2022
Two unusual people find intellectual and emotional stimulation with each other, shaking up their stagnant lives. Regan is a charismatic aspiring artist and failed counterfeiter who struggles to feel or find purpose in anything, a condition she attributes to the pills she takes to moderate her bipolar disorder. Aldo is a doctoral student in theoretical mathematics whose thought processes are so abstruse and relentlessly active that he is a terrible lecturer, lacks any close relationships other than with his father, and requires drugs to quiet his brain. One day, Regan is volunteering as a docent at the Art Institute of Chicago when she encounters Aldo sitting on the floor of a gallery trying to puzzle out the secrets of time travel. Thus begins a peculiar acquaintanceship built on six important conversations that eventually spark an all-encompassing, dangerously obsessive love. Is this relationship something that will bring out the potential best from these two, or their worst? The story is somewhat burdened by the reader's expectations of where it might be going. If an author is currently writing a series of contemporary fantasy novels that incorporate time travel, then breaks off midsequence to publish a new work with a science fictional-sounding title and a main character obsessed with theoretical time travel, then it's natural to assume that, eventually, actual time travel will feature in the plot. These two people are so far outside the ordinary that it's difficult to conceive of them existing in this mundane world. The omniscient narrator suggests that the couple's meeting is an epic moment. All of this is to say that fans of The Atlas Six (2022) and The Atlas Paradox (2022) expecting magic, time travel, or any other speculative elements may be disappointed when these expectations are built up to a certain extent but never fulfilled. If this work and Blake's other books share something, it's that characters who are not easy to like are still interesting to read about. Reasonably involving when appreciated on its own terms.

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