Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake

Gifted & Talented

by Olivie Blake

Tor 2025

There's “It is a truth universally acknowledged …,” and also “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day,” and there's “Call me Ishmael,” and even “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” And then there's the opening of Olivie Blake's new novel Gifted & Talented (the part that comes right after the book's dedication: “for my family (lol)”): “Meredith Wren, a fucking asshole, not that it matters at this state of the narrative but it's worth pointing out, sat blinded by the overhead lights from the stage, squinting unflatteringly into the brand-new, state-of-the-art auditorium that had just been completed on Tyche's unethically verdant campus.”

Blake hit literary stardom with her 2020 novel The Atlas Six, and now, five years later, she has a loudly enthusiastic and very online fan base that pre-adores everything she writes. This is likely the only reason Blake doesn't even seem self-conscious about the egregious, almost aggressive sloppiness of her prose, the unapologetic slangy idiocy that begins, as seen, right off the starting block with “Meredith Wren, a fucking asshole ...”

Instead, she gets right down to the business of her new book: imperious, autocratic business tycoon Thayer Wren has died, and his three adult children, Meredith (think Sheryl Sandberg, only, if not quite as evil, since even fiction has its limits), Arthur (yearning, idealistic, beta), and Eilidh (conflicted, complicated, possibly possessed), are forced to compete with each other, both for control of the family empire and for their horrible father's posthumous affection.

Pre-publication reviews were quick to point out the obvious. Both Publishers Weekly and Library Journal noted the similarity between the premise, the world, of Gifted & Talented and the premise of the HBO show Succession, about a group of rotten siblings competing for the opportunity to love/viciously betray their imperious, autocratic business tycoon father. Those early reviews are diplomatic, suggesting some “Succession-esque” echoes and touches in Gifted & Talented, rather than that Blake simply gulped down the show, added some extremely unconvincing little fantasy elements, and regurgitated the result onto the page in exactly the dumb, idiomatic language of a protracted social media post. As in Succession, the patriarch in no way deserves any regard from his children (“Maybe he didn't want to know who any of us really were, and maybe he died without having the faintest idea,” one remarks, before fatuously adding, “Isn't that sad? It's sad. Life is so sad”). As in Succession, the family's business empire is savage and corrupted to its core. As in Succession, the siblings are utterly unsympathetic morons who invariably talk in cliches. And as in Succession, boring overwriting is positioned to be considered somehow wise or profound. When Meredith contemplates her corrupt company Tyche, for instance, she admits her own complicity:

Because she'd taken the money. Her hands were filthy, with no way to walk that reality back. She knew who she'd gotten in bed with. No one had said anything when Tyche was accused of tracking users' data. Nothing had change when people criticized the conditions of Tyche's factories, their history of labor abuse, the thousands of workers who were undertrained and injured on the job. People still bought their products, still used their services. The only difference was that now everyone knew it was bad, Meredith included, so everything she said yes to was just another bite from the poisonous tree.

To walk something back … to get in bed with something … whatever the Hell taking a bite of a tree could possibly mean … the junk prose just bombards the reader, paragraph after paragraph of it, like the longest Twitter thread imaginable. The supernatural gifts of the siblings are never more than cursorily explored; the interactions between the siblings are starched but never personal or believable; and since Blake goes out of her way to make her characters completely repulsive, readers not already part of the author's fan base will be very unlikely to care what happens to any of them. And always, at every turn, there's the book's torturously awful prose:

The possibility existed that Thayer Wren had given so little thought to his mortality that he had not specified any funereal eccentricities, but then it would be even worse, because Arthur, Meredith, and Eilidh would be responsible for inventing the pomp and circumstance that would be suitable for their father, which was unimaginable at this moment in time, an era in which anything Arthur thought was right or even acceptable would surely be met with revilement en masse. And to think he would have to say words, publicly, on the nature of his relationship with his father! Full sentences, even!

Gifted & Talented has an evocative cover design and end papers featuring drawings of squabbling wrens. The book's success is a given. It's like biting a poisonous tree.

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News