Lance Olsen's sixth novel, Girl Imagined by Chance, is a formally innovative, intensely lyrical novel about the way fictions can take over our lives. It tells the story of an unnamed cyber-journalist and his photographer-wife, Reyla, who, childless and approaching middle age, abruptly move to a small Idaho town, abandoning Reyla's eighty-nine year old grandmother. Thus, Genia enters the world, a baby girl conceived only in imagination. However, to her creators' surprise, Genia proves as needy as every child. Soon they are scrambling to nurture and feed and protect their fiction and facing serious questions about the existential anxieties that compelled them to flee to Idaho in the first place. At its heart, Girl Imagined by Chance investigates the mystery of self-knowledge. Its prevailing metaphor and structural device, the photograph, examines the way images, in their magical ability to mimic memory, ultimately mock and eradicate it. The individual past, seemingly stable and fixed, turns out to be as protean and unknowable as the future, and the body becomes strangely dispensable, perpetually adrift in a cybernetic world of hyperlinks and interfaces. If Jean Baudrilard, Helene Cixous, and Clarice Lispector had collaborated on a novel, Girl Imagined by Chance would be the result.
