In her column “Brutal Monsters,” Cate Burtner ’25 offers commentary on the literature of mental illness.

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

Olivie Blake’s “Alone With You in the Ether” is slippery when it comes to genre classification. The book is psychological and contemporary, and it is certainly fiction. But what about the subtitle on the cover: “A Love Story”?

The book does tell a love story, but that story is between two unwell minds, not two fleshed-out characters. “I could study you for a lifetime,” the character Regan muses; the connection between them is solely cerebral.

Regan is an artist with bipolar disorder, an unsupportive family and a criminal history. Aldo is a theoretical mathematician confined within the walls of his obsessive brain. 

The story has an energy that approaches the fantastical. The couple is plagued by unhealthy attachment, yet their love persists. Readers watch as the characters make poor decisions with no hope for intervention.

The “love story” follows the couple from their art museum meet-cute to their making of a childish rule that they will only have “six conversations” before parting. When Regan and Aldo agree to follow these terms instead of going on one normal date at a time, readers are subjected to ramblings about their niche obsessions and quirky sensibilities. 

While these conversations have an unmistakable charm, they are marred by an immature flavor. The author’s lack of research is glaring — these adult characters’ professions and interests seem to be more based in childlike wonder than intellectual truth.

The book’s simplicity of the interpersonal and of character works to its deficit. Why is Regan so reckless and impulsive? Why is Aldo so neurotic and obsessive? Why is this all that each of them are? The book understands its characters down to one simple flaw. 

This lack of subtlety in character is rare in realistic fiction. Usually, readers are given a kit of formal tools with which to excavate the answer to “Who is this?” The unique unrealism of “Alone With You in the Ether” may lend itself to a new kind of accuracy — often, people do seem to be only one thing. The outside perspective that literature offers almost necessitates a singularity of character. It is near impossible to craft nuance from every perspective at once. And I wish this book did not attempt to do so. 

The narrative was a focalization tug-of-war between Regan and Aldo, yet it was also heavily skewed towards Regan’s point of view. The book could have fully committed to her perspective instead of merely approximating that of both characters. From falling in love to descending into mania, Regan’s full interiority could have added a crucial depth and gravity to a story that is otherwise shallow and low-stakes.

While I found some aspects of the book a bit silly, there were sections that played with form in a refreshing way. Whirlwind sex scenes were met with a drop-off of punctuation. Regan’s imagined conversations with her family were constructed from tense fragments. These are sections that demand attention and evade easy genre categorization.

That said, author Olivie Blake’s fantasy writing background did seem to bleed into the fabric of her literary fiction.

In place of displaying research, Blake world-builds. The characters are half-constructed from nothingness in a timeless Chicago. Regan and Aldo become fantastically relatable. The book focuses on the magic of their love, emphasizing the fanciful aspects of each character’s mind.

To its credit, the book leaned into these fantasy elements to stitch together a story met with rave reviews. However, the book has little trust in its readers. It explains all of the clever details instead of just having them. It is an interesting story that readers do not have to excavate; the meaning is unearthed piece by piece by the author herself. There was no faith that we could dig up anything new on our own. 

No one gains anything by forcing this novel into a genre corner. The genre doesn’t matter. In “Alone With You in the Ether,” the protagonists get deep quickly, but they don’t unearth any gems you can’t find in the latest fantasy romance book.