FN Review: The Book of Lost Fragrances

When I was offered an advance reading copy of M.J. Rose’s new novel, The Book of Lost Fragrances, I hesitated. It wasn’t because, as Ms. Rose’s publicist pointed out, Publishers Weekly described it as a “deliciously sensual novel of paranormal suspense.” Here at FirstNerve we have no problem reviewing novels loaded with paranormal suspense. And the deliciously sensual is always welcome. (Mmmm . . . tasty!)

No, the hesitation was due to the prospect that The Book of LF would, by its mere physical presence on the shelf, cause a small but steady decline in testosterone levels. And you know how that goes—you review a romance novel and a few days later a small inner voice is saying, “Try putting a dollop of crème fraîche into that pesto,” and pretty soon the chardonnay budget is through the roof and you’re wondering if it’s time to start using a moisturizing facial scrub.

But rather than shrink from FN’s commitment to all things olfactory, I bravely accepted the offer and my copy of The B of LF arrived last week.

It had great looking cover art. Inside, a page listed the author’s previous novels including Lip Service, In Fidelity, and Lying in Bed. [Awesome titleage!—Ed.] Then came an epigraph from Marcel Proust, an unmistakable signal that the story to follow would be highly enriched with canards about odor memory. Indeed it is. M.J. Rose is a Proust Booster of epic proportions; an estrogen-fueled fabulist who takes odor-based recall to a whole new level.

The BOLF is ostensibly the story of Jac L’Etoile, a semiologist who has her own TV show called Mythfinders. Soon enough, however, we’re following multiple story lines set in ancient Egypt, Revolutionary-era France, and present-day China. The plot hinges on Cleopatra’s perfumer, who is charged with making a memory-evoking fragrance powerful enough to reveal the smeller’s previous lives. The perfumer and his lover take to their double-wide sarcophagus, each holding a jar of the scent, so that they may use it to find each other in subsequent incarnations. Their souls—and his vision-inducing scent—make numerous reappearances in the L’Etoile family, Parisian perfumers who have been running a successful business since before the Revolution.

Also in the cast of characters are the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, who want the fragrance to help them identify the next D.L., along with the Communist Chinese and their hired thugs who want to stop them. Plus the Jungian analyst from a Swiss nuthouse who wants the fragrance so he can settle some of his own Oedipal issues. Plus Jac’s bisexual brother Robbie, her Alzheimer-stricken father, and her ex-boyfriend Griffen North, now a studly archaeologist.

Whew!

M.J. Rose stocks her story with enough characters to fill a Hollywood tour bus: dramatis personae-wise she’s the Charles Dickens of romance novels sensual novels of paranormal suspense. When Jac, under the hallucinogenic influence of the ancient Egyptian scent, has flashbacks to her previous lives, it gets a little complicated. With all the reincarnations, the effect is like flipping between three episodes of Law & Order SVU playing on different cable channels—while eating an entire jumbo tub of buttered popcorn. The overall effect, for me, was filling yet unsatisfying.

For other readers this might be a feature, not a bug. The reincarnation bit lets you thrill repeatedly to the same emotions with the same (?) characters in different epochs and places. It’s the multiple re-entry vehicle of romance novels sensual novels of paranormal suspense. More bang for the buck. Except that there’s not really that much bang in the book. TBOLF observes a certain literary decorum. Despite all the yearning and passion, I was startled when the word “cock” made its single appearance.

The genre elements of TBOLF let the reader have her cake and eat it too. You can have guilt-free sex with a married ex-boyfriend because you were hot for him in a previous life. You can be a modern American woman but also be suavely French. You can have no perfumery training whatsoever yet have a better nose than your father and brother—both professional perfumers.

Nifty.

Rose writes quite convincingly about scents and about the experience of smelling. I give her credit for sustaining an entire story based on smell—as a plot element, as a theme, and as narrative description. In this she does better than Tom Robbins. While she takes the metaphysical claptrap of Jitterbug Perfume seriously she spins it into a passable chick-lit potboiler.

Hey, who wants some more chardonnay? You really should try the pesto.

Profiles in Smell: Julie Hagelin and John Hildebrand

One of the pleasures of a life in science is the company one gets to keep. I was reminded of this today by the chance pairing of two items on the web. These vignettes give you a glimpse of how people happen onto the strange path of becoming smell scientists.

I met Julie Hagelin at an AChemS conference about a decade ago. She presented a poster about the crested auklet, an Arctic seabird that she discovered smells like tangerines during the breeding season. She let me sniff a vial of the birdy odor—remarkable stuff. Julie recently relocated from Swarthmore College to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where she is turning her attention to another animal with neglected olfactory abilities: whales.



John Hildebrand is jovial guy I’ve bumped into regularly at AChemS and other science venues. He studies odor perception in the hawkmoth, Manduca sexta. The moth is found in the deserts of the American southwest where it makes a living feeding on the nectar of night-blooming flowers. John uses M. sexta as a model system to explore sex pheromones and the brain organization of odor perception in insects. He has just been elected to a three-year term on the governing Council of the National Academy of Sciences. The interview by Daniel Stolte reveals what drew John to the field as a kid.



P.S. John Hildebrands writes to remind me that M. sexta is found from northern Argentina to southern Canada in all sorts of biomes, not just deserts. That’s why it is commonly known, esp. on tobacco plantations in the southeast, as the tobacco hornworm moth. Duh.

Personality and Smell: A Two-way Street

I recently blogged about a study linking personality to body odor. Specifically, people sniffing previously worn T-shirts could accurately estimate the wearer’s level of extraversion, neuroticism, and dominance. In other words, your BO contains clues to your personality.

It turns out that your personality is also related to your sense of smell. The Big Five theory of personality holds that agreeable people score highly on being “cooperative, considerate, empathic, generous and kind.” And according to a team of German sensory scientists, agreeable people also have greater odor sensitivity. That is to say, agreeableness as measured by the NEO-FFI questionnaire is positively correlated with lower thresholds for odor detection.

In addition, people who score highly on the Big Five factor of neuroticism, which tracks anxiety, hostility, depression, self-consciousness, impulsiveness and vulnerability to stress, tend to be more sensitive to trigeminal chemosensory stimulation, (aka the hot in chili pepper or the sting in ammonia).

Researchers in Dresden had 124 people fill out the NEO-FFI, a briefer form of the Big Five personality test. Then they ran the volunteers through a battery of sensory tests including odor, taste, trigeminal stimulation, pain, and electrical thresholds. There was a statistically non-significant tendency for highly conscientious people to have enhanced tolerance for pain. The taste measures—detection thresholds for perception of salty and sour—were unrelated to personality measures.

This is a well-executed and straightforward study: measure personality, measure sensory thresholds, and look for correlations. Therein lies the rub: correlations are just that—they do not prove causation. Nevertheless, the authors spend a lot of time editorializing for the idea that sensory thresholds determine the development of one’s personality. Perhaps. But the opposite case can also be made: that being considerate and empathic toward other people disposes one to develop more finely tuned sensory abilities.

Not to be disagreeable, but I’d trust their data and skip the sermon.

The study discussed here is “Agreeable smellers and sensitive neurotics—correlations among personality traits and sensory thresholds,” by Ilona Croy, Maria Springborn, Jörn Lötsch, Amy N.B. Johnston, and Thomas Hummel. It was published in PLoS One 6:18701, 2011, and is available here.

A Random Walk

Last night I walked around the burb just after the sun set.

The sky in the west was a robin’s egg blue.

Passing one house I smelled the intense odor of patchouli.

The sky became deeper electric blue, like a movie screen.

A few blocks on there was a strong aroma of baby eggplant in garlic sauce, Chinese style.

A half mile on it was frying hamburgers.

Then sharp wood smoke from a fireplace.

I can’t find the connection.

Body Odor and the Big Five

Those of you for whom Psych. 1 is a dim memory may be surprised at the current state of personality theory. Robert McCrae’s five-factor model has, since its debut in the 1980s, become the dominant theoretical framework for research into personality.

Extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience are now regarded as the major dimensions of personality. They are quantified in a questionnaire that comes in a long or short version. Each factor is a cluster of traits that tend to occur together. For example, people who score high on the extraversion factor tend to be sociable, cheerful, energetic, and assertive.

The five dimensions transcend culture and upbringing, according to a highly cited 2005 study by McCrae that spanned 50 different cultures. Extraverts, introverts and the rest are found in all cultures, a finding these traits speak to the deeply biological roots of personality.

It has also become apparent that people can accurately judge another’s personality from a brief interaction, from a video clip of behavior, or even from a photograph. The ability to use non-verbal cues to infer personality led a trio of Polish psychologists to speculate that body odor might also contain useful cues.

They designed a clever experiment based on the now-standard smelly T-shirt technique. Thirty men and thirty women—the odor donors—filled out the long version of McCrae’s test plus a test of social dominance. They then wore a T-shirt to bed for three nights in a row, while avoiding perfume, cigarettes, etc. The shirts were put in frozen storage until being rated by a panel of odor judges.

The judges were 100 men and 100 women, each of whom evaluated 10 shirts apiece. They guessed the age and sex of the odor donor, and rated the donor on the Big Five factors plus dominance.

The €64,000 question was this: how well did the average odor-based personality rating match up to the self-reported personality traits of the odor donors?

The answer: pretty damn well.

The main finding . . . is that a few personality traits can be assessed with some degree of accuracy based on olfactory cues. For all assessments of all donors, the correlation between self-assessed personality traits and judgments based on body odour was strongest for extraversion, neuroticism and dominance.

The authors note that olfactory evaluations of extraversion and neuroticism were as accurate or more accurate than evaluations in other studies based on viewing behavior on video. Not bad for a quick sniff of a soiled T-shirt.

Odor judges also performed significantly above chance in guessing the sex and age of the odor donor. Interestingly, when it came to guessing the sex of the odor donor, women did better with shirts worn by men than with shirts worn by women; men showed the opposite result. Seems like everyone’s noses are tuned for mating.

The study discussed here is “Does personality smell? Accuracy of personality assessments based on body odour,” by Agnieszka Sorokowska, Piotr Sorokowski, and Andrzej Szmajke, published in the European Journal of Personality, 2011; DOI 10.1002/per.848