Write Letter to Billy
Reviews

"A wonderful story of what family means, of the flesh-level pain of sibling rivalry, and the discovery of love. It is a fantastic and beautiful tapestry of some of the most imaginative and precise prose writing going on in America today. Toby Olson stands tall among the handful of writers I most admire and respect."
-Richard Wiley

"Write Letter to Billy is a delectably complicated maze that kept me spellbound from start to finish. Only the most sophisticated of writers could manage to combine the seriousness of a quest for identity and meaning with the intensity of a thriller, not to mention an excursion into deep-sea diving and the resort life of southern California. Once again, Toby Olson has written a terrific novel full of peril and surprise, offering startling revelations and sudden expansions of the heart and mind."
-Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Like his eight previous novels, Toby Olson’s Write Letter to Billy radiates a singular quality of the mythic quest for identity. A narrative told in the first person by its protagonist, Bill Stewart, a retired Navy deep-sea diver and underwater repair specialist, the novel follows his travels across America, from Philadelphia to Catalina, as he searches for explanations of the twelve items—the ninth of which is the book’s title—on a list of things to do that his father made shortly before his death. The exegesis of this mysterious text, it turns out, must come not only through the investigation of records, photographs, places and persons, of memories and new discoveries, but also through the physical act, and all the demands and dangers that attend it, of the quest itself. In short, Bill, like the adventurous knight of a medieval romance, must dedicate and risk his entire being, body and soul, to the search for answers to questions that are themselves not always completely clear until they are almost resolved. And the road to their resolution not only brings him to the point and poignance of greater understanding of who and what he is; it also shows him, through its tests and trials, that his seemingly modest life has bestowed upon him more than he ever dreamed he possessed.

The story moves through a maze of clues and characters, a number of whom are coupled in various biological and psychological pairings that first confuse and then help to unravel the murderous mysteries below its surface. Bill’s own hidden pairing, curiously marked by scar tissue on his upper body, remains submerged for a good part of the novel, only to be revealed in an eerie secret sharer-like scene aboard a ship whose name, though missing letters, is also an important link in the realization of the text that is the protagonist’s life. But the two persons of cardinal significance for him, the hinges, as it were, on the door that opens upon the journey into himself, are his adoptive father, an ingratiating California kook of an amateur inventor, and a daughter, Jen, he didn’t know he had until she is almost sixteen. The urgency of their presence for him registers almost simultaneously, as he receives notice that he must go back to California to remove the boxes of his father’s things he had put away years before in a storage place that is going out of business just as he is becoming acquainted with his daughter, of whose existence he has learned from a former lover living now in Wisconsin.

Pressed to begin to integrate his present life with his past and future, though largely unaware of its implications and demands, Bill sets off for southern California with his newfound daughter to give her a special summer vacation there as he takes care of his affairs. She becomes deeply involved with them and with him, as their life on the road together turns increasingly meaningful and dangerous. His late father, who comes across in flashbacks as a father-artificer figure not quite up to the standards of a Daedalus for most of the novel, actually provides the means for Bill’s salvation, and Jen’s too, in a high-flying denouement. In Olson’s stunning appropriation of the myth, the ordinary human artificer saves his Icarus from falling and sinking into the sea and enables him to overcome his own worst nature and to rescue his daughter, whose mother tells Bill, as the plot’s multifarious pieces come together, “She’s made a fucking god of you.” The reversal of the fate of Icarus in his father son/father-daughter adventure thus ends with a domesticated apotheosis proper to our time and world.

As one might expect from a writer who is also an accomplished poet, a number of powerful metaphors pervade and illuminate the action of this complex mystery and thriller of a novel. The ancient four elements of earth, water, fire, and air all figure prominently as the venues through which the quest occurs. Tunneling through the earth, diving into the sea, playing with electricity, and moving through and finally rising above the smog laden air of southern California are all organized under a master-metaphor of Manichean light and dark that embraces and unites the inner and outer realities of Billy’s search for answers. As his readers have come to expect, Toby Olson writes here with an extraordinary eye for detail and atmosphere and offers up to them two more major set-pieces of superb invention and execution, a trademark of his novels. With Write Letter to Billy, he continues to build a body of highly original fiction that is as rich and rewarding as it is unique.
- WORLD LITERATURE TODAY, Spring 2001