Dan Tremaglio’s The Only Wolf Is Time is a novel told through fragments. These fragments initially seem like discrete objects, pulled in from all sorts of sources—some of these scraps are graffiti tags, some are photographs of sculpture, some are dictionary definitions or screenplay dialogue. There’s a little of everything.
But the beauty of Tremaglio’s novel lies in his transformation of these objects. The fragments, although physically separated on the page, cannot be metaphysically separated from one another. Every fragment produces the following fragment and is produced by the preceding fragment; in this way, a narrative is formed—a narrative not written out on the page but formed on the page, pieced together in the style of a stained glass window. A biblical scene composed of stained glass fragments differs palpably from a single panel painting of the same scene. The latter leaves the medium unchanged; the former transforms the medium into narrative.
With its structure reminiscent of the stained glass window, it’s only natural for Tremaglio’s novel to be interested in the act of separation and the act of unification. Tremaglio’s narrative follows two separations and two unifications. In an America wrecked by late stage capitalism—perhaps it’s the near future, perhaps it’s the far future—Roger Airvoldi is born in Long Island to his billionaire but absentee father, Bill Jeffs, and his druggie mother. Some time after he graduates high school, Roger Airvoldi sheds the Roger and the voldi to become just Air, and he runs away from his family and old life, joining the masses of homeless people roaming the streets, those sleeping in Hoovervilles or on rooftops—wherever they can find space. Running away is the first separation Air experiences, and this separation occurs by choice.
Air wanders to Seattle, where he meets Baird, a novelist and graffiti artist, the Enkidu to Air’s Gilgamesh. Joining up with Baird is Air’s first unification, and it’s not a deliberate, conscious unification—it just happens. The second separation occurs when Baird dies of an overdose and Air is left on his own, ravaged by grief. Like the first unification, this second separation is an accident, something over which Air has no control.
After Baird’s death, Air takes up shelter in a sculptor’s studio, in which he meets two members of Anachron, a secret organization dedicated to destroying the government, Bill Jeffs, and time itself. Around this time, Air also reconciles with Glenna, a girl from his high school in Long Island. Eventually, he makes the decision to leave Anachron and join her on her trip to “Unalaska.” Thus stands the final unification: brought to us not by a twist of fate but by a deliberate choice on Air’s part.
Tremaglio tells us outright that Air’s story is supposed to be “a cautionary tale.” The Only Wolf Is Time is a stained-glass Bible scene, and only once we place Air’s narrative in context of the novel’s fragmented structure does the fable flicker like a holographic card, lighting up the moral, bathing the caution sign in neon. Page after page, the smallest of Tremaglio’s fragments are single phrases like “Bye, Jove,” “Reel Soon,” and “Probably Knot.” Even a large-font version of “:(:” gets its own space. The first three fragments replicated here depict the homophones of common phrases. “By Jove” and “Bye, Jove,” once said aloud, sound the same. Only through context can you figure out whether your interlocutor is using the phrase as an interjection invoking Zeus or saying goodbye to someone named Jove.
The two narrative separations in The Only Wolf Is Time involve Air’s removal from his context (Air is taken out of Roger Airvoldi, and Air is taken out of Baird), and the narrative unifications involve Air gaining context (Air is enveloped in Baird). The last unification involves Air’s choice: on one side lies Anachron, an organization dedicated to removing all context, whose members “relish a sentence whose subject has already vanished” by the time the object appears. On the other side lies Glenna, a girl from Air’s past as Roger Airvoldi. By crafting the character of Anti-Glenna and associating her with Air’s Anachron activities, Tremaglio elucidates that the context-destroying goals of Anachron are incompatible with the context-creating unification of Air and Glenna.
Air is only tempted by Anachron because of Baird’s death, a separation and removal of context over which Air had no control. It’s in our nature to fight for complete power over context, over the past and the future and over time itself, because we are not immortal beings; everything in our lives will be taken out of our hands with no prior warning, and it scares us. Billionaire Bill Jeffs, with all his money, plays at having control over context—he’s known in The Only Wolf Is Time for his huge clock tower that hangs over Seattle. The illusion that money can buy complete control over time and thus erase the past and the future alike—that money allows one to choose what context to leave and take—is intoxicating. The elite classes have always professed control over time, and it’s hard to untangle a claimed control over time from a real control over society. Louis XIV’s state appeared in control of the 24 hour day, and the bourgeois French Revolutionary Time was created to take control of this entangled time-state. In Air’s time, the proletarian Anachrons rise up to kill Bill Jeff and create their own time—the Anachrons have untangled the time-state, and chose to focus on eradicating the elite time. However, nothing can come of a fight over time domination, over who gets to destroy or create their own contexts, because a destruction or a creation of individual discrete contexts separates humans into incomprehensible fragments without a shared past or future, and separates Air from Glenna.
Tremaglio’s novel is cleverly constructed. Each of his fragments requires the context of the other fragments; the “P.M.” half of the book requires the context of the “A.M.” half and vice versa, plus the novel itself is not a stand-alone fragment—it requires the context of our present day: the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of an elite class of tech elites. In a single fragment, taken from a book Baird was writing, protagonist Jon Union establishes a squat called dreamhouse—“One word. All lowercase. Sans the.” The context here is The Social Network—“Drop the the. Just Facebook. It’s cleaner.”—putting dreamhouse in context as an anti-capitalist social in a half-written media. Jon Union’s name takes the I out of join union. Word by word, Tremaglio constructs his fragments to require context.
Tremaglio’s novel succeeds mostly because it never expands beyond its scope. It never gets too big for its britches; his novel is not an ambitious warning about society and social ill, because there have been far too many warnings and “wake-up calls” already. The Only Wolf Is Time is a small cautionary tale about Air’s life and his choices—a fable, a single scene in a stained glass window. Tremaglio’s craft is astonishing.
The Only Wolf Is Time, by Dan Tremaglio. Montclair, New Jersey: Sagging Meniscus Press, February 2025. 194 pages. $20.00, paper.
Ria Dhull is an artist and critic living in NYC. You can find her weekly film reviews at Spectrum Culture and her other writing spread across the web. Her animated short film Seraglio Row is forthcoming.
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