By Joe Sacksteder
One might hazard: Always Crashing : biography :: David Bowie : all other humans. But, no. The point of Lance Olsen’s new novel, Always Crashing in the Same Car—a point, I mean—is that Bowie’s defiance of categorization forces us to rethink all equal signs, all tidiness of opinion, all comparisons that end in periods. Hazard, indeed. The point—a point—is not just “look at the weirdo,” but rather that Bowie will long continue to awaken squares like me to our lack of edges. It’s not just that Bowie is unrepresentable—rather, that all of us are, but the world still needs Bowie to remind us, to make the mess manifest. Always Crashing has the confidence to understand that it doesn’t need to tell us anything about Bowie. Can’t. Sure, it serves as a retrospective of Bowie’s life and catalogue, but for an artist who offered us forty years of shocking reinventions, any successful retrospective on Bowie is going to spin us around 180 degrees. Also: Always Crashing is a novel, not a biography, as Olsen is a skillful enough emcee to help us constantly forget.
Opening with “Oh You Pretty Things” (every chapter receives the name of a Bowie song), the aging rockstar notices in a mirror the facial blemish that heralds the cancer that will kill him, “no larger than a five-point o in Baskerville typeface.” And the reader notices that it’s language itself that’s positioned as threatening, infectious, malignant, William Burroughs’s “virus from outer space” for our favorite Man Who Fell to Earth. (Yes, the novel is set in Baskerville.) We move forward with hale reservations about the medium of this precarious project itself, and Always Crashing is invested in exploring literary arts as much as it is in exploring music (that other language). One branch of this exploration is Bowie’s lyrics, whether Burroughsesque cut-ups or not, as well as his always-disarming aphorisms and interview responses. Olsen also culls the hundred texts that Bowie, a voracious reader, selected as most personally influential for the March 2014 David Bowie Is… retrospective, intercutting throughout the book quotes from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, John Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, John Cage’s Silence, and more. The retrospective mode prompts the fictionalized writer of Always Crashing to surface at times and reflect on his own career, on the problems of language, and on the limited number of novels that might be in his future, all while indulging in his Bowie obsession at an artist residency in Berlin, the city that gave Bowie his trilogy of Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger. It is natural to actively forget that this writer and Olsen do not entirely align, as their careers and their obsessions in many ways seem to. Only two-thirds of the way through the novel does Olsen interject a narrative possibility that can be read as more dramatically distancing the speaker from his creator, the recent death of the writer’s wife in a bike crash, a reveal that provides an impetus and depth behind the project’s meditation on mortality. I think of how two words near the end of David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel—a book-length, millennium-leaping list of anecdotes about the lives of cultural giants, including how they died—causes the text’s basement to fall out: “Writer’s cancer.” The wife’s death in Always Crashing remains a “possibility” because the story itself is framed as if hypothetical: “Let’s call that woman my wife. // Let’s call her my life. // Let’s call her Calliope.” The mythological reference, Calliope as Hesiod’s “chief of all muses,” our Department Head of Epic Poetry, further lends itself to an allegorical reading.
In one dazzler of a chapter, “New Angels of Promise,” Bowie’s channel surfing zaps readers with a full dose of 2014 straight to the cerebral cortex: “Family Feud’s Steve Harvey is asking if you overheard the word MOOSE in a conversation what might they be talking about and a somber Japanese official is declaring the spread of polio is and get the total gym experience! and Wolf Blitzer in his everything-is-endlessly-911 expression is reporting dramatic scenes from Southern California.” As in Robert Coover’s short story “The Babysitter,” channel surfing becomes just one available method for readers to interact with the novel’s fragmentation and time travel. A lesson in literary simultaneity, “Warszawa” depicts various moments in Bowie’s life happening all at the same time as he receives his dire diagnosis. “Diamond Dogs” takes the form of micro-profiles of everyone from the expected Angie Bowie, Marc Bolan, Brian Eno, Tony Visconti, and Ava Cherry, to the less expected, like T. S. Eliot, Don DeLillo, and Andy Warhol. Having driven obliviously for years past the inconspicuous Carpenter Road trailer park that was Iggy Pop’s childhood home during my time living in Ypsilanti, Michigan, I was particularly moved by Olsen’s depiction of Bowie and Pop propping each other up over the years. And, in “Diamond Dogs,” of course Berlin is a person.
Just as the story detonates containers like “novel,” “biography,” and “historical fiction,” so too does it make us question everything we think we might know about the love letter, both in regard to language and even to Bowie. Given that five-point Baskerville o, it might not be surprising that a novelist who has spent decades loving language does so with enough respect to wallow in its failures, its unbridgeable distance from the objects and people and feelings it can never fully name: “Your wife died alone, and you came to learn it is never the case that you can’t locate the appropriate language for what follows. It is rather the case that language can’t locate the appropriate language. It isn’t as if, if you tried hard enough, you could rummage out the right phrase. It’s that our system of communication just can’t tolerate certain pressures and torques.” Like in Olsen’s novel most akin to Always Crashing, 2006’s Nietzsche’s Kisses, the fact that this book is going to then use language to transition a cultural giant from larger-than-life to “room temperature” shows his continued dedication to impossibility, to celebrating language not despite its inadequacies but because of them.
Olsen uses the trickiness of a love letter to David Bowie in 2023 as a way to illustrate how Bowie’s existence short-circuits the will-to-delineate that cancel culture implies and necessitates. But not in an offensive way. The novel does the opposite of shying away from the heap of evidence that majorly complicates Bowie as a figure to celebrate: his “Nazi period,” his thousand-plus sexual encounters with groupies, “some of whom number girls as young as thirteen,” his relative disownment of his family members during their deaths (including his schizophrenic half-brother, Terry), his casual cruelty in particular to his first wife, Angie, the potential racism of his “China Girl” video, plus a decade or two of pretty awful music there in the Tin Machine years. One of Olsen’s strategies for squaring this evidence with his admiration for Bowie is not to. Aggressively not to, dumping the most disturbing clips and most roasting testimonials and reviews into a long chapter, “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” intercut with some of Bowie’s greatest hits: his tremendous charitable donations, his famous confronting of MTV video jockey Mark Goodman about how few black artists their channel featured in the early 80s, his kindness to Sean Lennon—described by Yoko Ono—after the murder of his father, along with lyrics and barbs that argue in Bowie’s favor more spectacularly than any logic-based apologia could. The heart’s filthy lesson—a lesson—is that to love Bowie without confronting the filth is to be wearing blinders made of a novel that you yourself are writing about Bowie, one in which Bowie is unrecognizable. Olsen respects his readers enough to make us resolve the dissonance for ourselves, or hopefully not to, aided by his generatively volatile prompting.
“Everybody Says Hi” shows us another strategy, inventing an interview with Angie Bowie—the interviewer’s questions withheld, replaced with “…?”—that allows her to dismantle her ex-husband for his selfish, vacuous, and phony tendencies, for example: “He lived every second of his life for acclaim while pretending it was merely this unexpected, unwanted byproduct of his oh-so-authentic-and-eccentric cutting-edge art.” As far as the “ridiculous middle-aged boy” he’s become: “The Great Rebel in the end wants nothing more than to become a pillar of the establishment. You see it all the time. You want pathetic, I’ll show you pathetic.” The chapter “Ricochet” performs the inverse maneuver, a list of increasingly aggressive interview questions aimed at an increasingly offended but totally muted Bowie. In regard to Bowie’s Nazi salutes, his past musings about what a “bloody great Hitler” he would have made and the need for an “extreme right front [to] come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up,” this female interviewer asks, “Do you honestly believe any musician, any celebrity whatsoever, could get by with something like that today for more than, I don’t know, half a picosecond.”
Readers might wonder whether Olsen should get to put words in the mouth of Angie Bowie, whether he should be imagining himself—ourselves—into Bowie’s final, private moments on planet Earth, reenacting the worst of his symptoms, whether he should even be touching the video for “China Girl” with a ten-foot-digression, whether he should be making Iman, supermodel and Bowie’s widow, speak at one point the title of his own novel Calendar of Regrets. I’m not sure Always Crashing wants to imagine the possibility of a reader who doesn’t really care about Bowie and Iman’s relationship, would rather stay out of it, not have it turned into yet another text: “If challenging texts—think Ulysses; think Tender Buttons; think Gravity’s Rainbow—teach us how to read them (and they do with a vengeance), what results when we encounter one like Bowie&Iman, a text that makes it its business to italicize its own illegibility?” I will say that, of the part of the story I cared about the least, or wanted to actively resist, the “solution” that Always Crashing arrives at for how to depict the couple’s illegibility, as well the trickiness of Bowie’s actual passing, became for me the most stunning and virtuosic achievement of the novel. I want to croon more specific praises here—but these are the novel’s final fireworks.
Of the eight books by Olsen I’ve read, Always Crashing in the Same Car is perhaps my favorite (Calendar of Regrets says hi), not only because it feels actually worthy—unbelievably—of Bowie, but because it serves as summation, cypher, and TNT for Olsen’s previous catalogue, his most definitive statement to date on the big impossibilities he’s been dancing with for years, plucking the coins from the eyes of those old fictions of time and presence and language.
