Evil Genius

 Creepy book (in a good way)

Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky portrays a marvelously bizarre character who narrates the novel as well as portraying, in her words, her equally bizarre workmates, friends, husband, and other random people that she encounters. At one point, she says: “My life was meaningless, probably.“ (p. 176) Maybe just chaotic, maybe meaningless, generally surreal, I thought, while reading it.

For example, the narrator, Celia Dent, among many things, collected Barbie dolls. She had mutilated her first three dolls by stabbing them in the face with a nail-file. Later she had a huge, never-unboxed collection of them: 

“To make up for what I had done to those poor rubbery faces, I began to collect Barbie dolls in earnest. I took loving care of them. I never took those dolls out of their boxes. My mother encouraged my interest. She cleared out the pantry. Together we put up shelves and painted them pink. Over the years, my collection grew. Every birthday and every Christmas and every time I got an A on my report card, my mother gifted me a new doll for my collection. But it was maybe too late to reform me.” (p. 20)

Celia Dent’s inner life is full of violence. There’s some of it also in her physical life — as well as the “lives” of the Barbies. As she works in her job at a telephone company complaint center, and commutes from her home in Redwood City in the San Francisco Bay area into the city, her mind is full of oddities —

“I heard the same little song in my ear that I’d heard on the train the night before—love and death, love and death—and the people scurrying along the sidewalk with me, all those scurrying souls, yearning toward that train station, whipped their heads around and stared at me in wonder. Those people had heard my innermost secret thoughts. My body had shouted my secret thoughts out in every direction. All the thoughts I’d tried so hard to keep quiet. Thoughts about love and death, is what I mean. Thoughts about how love could be a land mine buried in a shimmering field of wheat, or a pistol shot, or a sticky trap set in a corner, or a noose, or an insidious addiction—and so could death be all these things.” (p.75)

She sees herself in odd ways, sometimes by imagining her father of whom she knows nothing whatsoever, but speculates that he might be the subject of a photo with the name “Dirk” written on the back. Her mother won’t tell her anything. But she creates an identity for herself —

“I remembered what I had always known: I was Daughter of Dirk. I was Minion of the Crab Queen. I was in a full fever. I wasn’t a normal girl. I was supernatural. I was uncanny. I was magnificent.“ (p. 117) 

Most critically, she’s a witness at a very bizarre and violent death scene, which I can’t tell more about because it would be a terrible spoiler (and I’ve already spoiled a bit). Anyway — upon being held in jail she ruminates on refusing to talk: 

“As was my right. Remaining silent had been my right ever since Ernesto Miranda’s landmark case in 1966. Think of it. One man, named Ernesto, single-handedly altered the dialogue in every climactic scene in every true-crime show and police procedural to come, forevermore, and what’s more, thanks to Ernesto, I was walking away a free woman, but with a soul still burdened by my unconfessed crimes.” (p. 206) 

The New York TImes review was complimentary about Evil Genius. The reviewer focuses on the era of 1974 as depicted in the novel: “Revolution was in the air, and to be young was very heaven. Or very hell, according to 19-year-old Celia Dent, the narrator of Evil Genius. Claire Oshetsky’s noir delight of a novel … Evil Genius alludes to Hearst, Watergate and other flashpoints of the era as Celia seeks freedom beyond the narrow cage of her life. Now older, she peers back some 50 years to a moment of transformation.” (source)

Review © 2026 mae sander