Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin

  Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin is a novel about two sisters caught between worlds—and replicates that experience for readers. The essential premise of the book is that sisters Lark and Robin (yes, really) have a tumultuous relationship with their mother Marianne, which drives Lark to study in the United States. Later, Robin follows and Lark acts as her substitute mother. Robin is a piano prodigy; Lark is a filmmaker. It does get more complicated than that, but those are the basics to keep in mind.

The novel has some moments that stand out as impactful, but I’ll return to those shortly.

First, I want to address two aspects of the book that I think don’t entirely work. For one, I can’t pinpoint whether it’s Lark’s voice or some other element, but the novel feels rather cold. I found it difficult to connect with the characters, particularly their mother Marianne. Lark offers very little sympathy to her mother and it’s hard to see past Lark’s narration and find the positives in Marianne for ourselves. The same applies for the other characters, too—it’s hard to tell whether they’re just unlikeable or whether Lark’s narration colours them so convincingly that they feel distant.

There are two elements in the dynamic between Lark and Marianne that I found edifying. Partway through the novel, Lark starts filming her mother for a one-on-one interview. The description of the filming sessions and Marianne’s openness show that brief glimmer into her that feels human. Later in the novel, Marianne has dementia and feels compelled to constantly clean. At the end of a tense interaction, Lark narrates, “She gave me a broom and together we swept away invisible dirt, wiped invisible cobwebs. Afterward we shared the pastries and drank the weak, cold tea she had made” (195). There’s something tender in that moment where both attend to an absence and have a shared vision of life that they generally don’t have. That tenderness seems to fade, though, when her mother passes. It lacks fanfare and even feeling, returning to a coldness that chills the novel.

The second issue is that I think the book lacks coherence. The focus of the novel is much harder to pinpoint than I implied in my opening paragraph. The book is a reasonably tight 272 pages in my edition, but it’s so jam-packed that it’s the longest short book I’ve read in a while. The first part reads like a bildungsroman of Lark setting out on her own and going to school. It’s Victorian-ish to start and we get a reasonably lengthy section of her learning about film and dating her first boy. Their relationship is annoying but well-developed; it felt like one of the more authentic and sincere elements of the book. Then there’s also a section about her horrible roommate, Robin arriving, and the roommate’s old cats dying while in the sisters’ care and the roommate’s reaction when she finds out. That, too, was a compelling moment that was reasonably rich in character development. From there, we get another lengthy section about Robin and Lark’s respective studies and dating lives; Robin becomes a piano prodigy that studies at Juilliard and then goes on to tour Europe before leaving her agent in the lurch and sending a postcard to Lark that reads “Don’t try to find me.” Meanwhile, Robin goes back to her studies in film, working on her own, and apprentice-editing for an established artsy filmmaker. The descriptions of the films, I found, were compelling. The images they inspired for me felt rich and I could imagine engaging in film analysis for films of that sort. Later, we see a fraught relationship between the filmmaker and his daughter and his daughter and Lark. The filmmaker and Lark start dating; they stop dating; Lark wants a child; Lark can’t have a child, and there’s lengthy discussion of it. There’s a section where Marianne becomes senile and is clearly in decline—again, there’s a great moment, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. The weirdest thing is that Robin essentially starts a wolf sanctuary and she has a barn where all the stalls house broken pianos—again it feels a little bit Victorian (I think about the wolves peppered throughout Wuthering Heights and the pianos in the barns feels like a Gothic secret). Of course Robin becomes a surrogate for Lark. Oh, and there’s a part about nursing a wolf back to health.

To me, the book is trying to tell too many stories at once. The parts just don’t seem to fit together and instead it feels like a piecemeal approach. To be generous to Ohlin, I’m going to accept that it’s intentionally structured to mirror Lark’s filmic experience. Film distorts time—like in a film, Dual Citizens allows us to jump across years. Like film, we jump cut between topics. Filmmakers splice and juxtapose. The filmmakers in the novel also have an intense focus; one of Lark’s mentors is an ardent feminist whose views are given voice through the characters, and the other has an intense focus on slice-of-life moments and holds an intense zoom. That also felt like Ohlin’s approach. Consider, for example, this description of Lark’s mentor’s film Potato, “which was released two years later, but not widely seen. It’s not hard to understand why. The film is slow, densely composed, exquisite. Every shot shows how he labored over it, and this is perhaps part of the problem: his fingerprints are on every frame, urging the view, Look how beautiful this is” (104). I would argue that the structure of this novel is similar: it is slow and densely composed. It is, in some ways, laborious to read with its intense focus. The passage describing the film continues, “It’s as if you’re not allowed to see anything for yourself” (104), which I think is how Lark’s narration makes me feel: we’re offered judgment and we have to follow her perspective on the other characters in the book. The passage continues as follows: 

The other problem (besides the title, which encouraged bad behaviour among writers, unable to restrain themselves from headlines like Spud Flick a Dud) is the film’s level of abstraction. The tight composition focuses on the threshers, the planters, the rolling escalators in which the trembling potatoes are fed into the gaping maw of the processor, the camera so close to the equipment that it becomes difficult to tell what the machines are doing. The whole experience is aestheticized, and for all the nearness, there is no intimacy. (104)

I think that the novel does very much the same, though not to the level of abstraction. Ohlin does, however, keep intense focus on particular moments and details. The amount of time dedicated to Lark’s first relationship: is it necessary? I’m not sure, but the novel seems unable to look away and, “for all the nearness, there is no intimacy” (104).

Similarly, Lark’s own approach to filmmaking (and indeed life), is that she “gathered tidbits—things I read, a picture that lingered, the memory of an afternoon in a movie theatre, the face of my sister as she laughed—and sometimes my head felt cluttered as an attic with them” (101). Dual Citizens embodies that piecemeal approach to storytelling. For Lark, “stitching a film together satisfied this collector’s itch perfectly, [her] magpie treasures woven and spackled into a nest” (101). The book is a series of moments, but loosely joined.

When the plot does have a “twist,” I feel like it was obvious. For instance, when Robin disappears from her European tour with the note not to find her, I immediately suspected it was an issue with an unplanned pregnancy. Probably a hundred and fifty to two hundred pages later my suspicions were confirmed and rather than it being a moment of shock and pathos, my reaction was more…”well, yeah.” I just hoped for something a little more cohesive and a little more surprising. The book trailed too far into the quotidian without offering the sorts of philosophical explorations of minutiae that I find so compelling in other similar works.

Overall, Dual Citizens had a few charms and a couple of moments that felt like highlights, but as a coherent project it felt a little flat and cold. Ohlin’s writing style is certainly descriptive enough and has flashes of inspiration that elevate its status in the literary world—but I was just hoping for something with a little more force, a little more complete.

Nonetheless, happy reading!