The Blond Box

The Blond Box uses cultural notions about genre fiction, pornography, and performance art to explore the dynamics of voyeurism and erotic desire as they relate to art's strange and mysterious ability to effectively reverse the course of the gaze, and ogle and penetrate those who would ogle and penetrate it. The novel, set in the town of Courbet, Arizona, initially conforms to the conventions of the mystery novel: that is, it begins with murder. El Malabarista, pianist and juggler for a troupe of sexual performance artists, is found dead in the dusty wilderness, his fingers crushed. From there on, however, Box persistently frustrates reader expectations. The narrative itself juggles the "real" events of 1949 and 1969, and a draft version of a hack sci-fi novel that serves (much like the "novel-within-a-novel" in A.S. Byatt's Babel Tower), as a metafictional commentary on the efforts of retired sex-theater artist, Roberto Mendoza; hairstylist/pulp writer, Dick DeLay; doctoral student, Sandy Redcap; and a host of other characters to, not only solve the murder, but uncover its motivation, which seems to be linked to El Malabarista's knowledge of the whereabouts of a certain unspecified boxed treasure. By turns lyrical and scatological, puerile and cerebral, Box is at once a daring formal experiment and a good yarn, but, ultimately, a beautifully rendered meditation on the weird sexuality of art.

"The Blond Box, like all of Toby Olson's novels, proposes a world whose ordinary elements are gradually seen to be messengers of the uncanny and mysterious. By the subtlest of means, we are led to recognize the strangeness that informs both art and life. It is, in all respects, a wondrous book by a superb writer."

-Gilbert Sorrentino