It's called "phantosmia," the hallucination that one is smelling a substance that isn't in one's vicinity--burning rubber, for example, or pungent chemicals. In the case of the unnamed protagonist of Cold Fusion, the first novel by Paul Grimstad, the scent is chlorine, "accompanied by an itch in my sinuses and a glowing haze over my left eye." Life is tough enough when one is about to enter college. Incoming freshmen don't need olfactory stressors to add to the misery. But that's just one of the issues facing the poor guy at the center of this sympathetic work.
If Grimstad's name sounds familiar, it's because he had roles in two films from 2025: Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another and Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme. "Battle" is a good way to describe the struggles of the first-person narrator arriving at a Wisconsin university circa 1992. The stench of chlorine during his frequent episodes is so intense that prescription pills don't help. The only respite comes from the "mentholated coolness" of the Noxzema he slathers all over his face until the smell subsides. Circumstances have given him ample reason to keep a huge supply on hand. His father, a lawyer, recently died. Despite the narrator's interest in astronomy, he hasn't signed up for classes yet. The university assigns his dorm room to someone else. His mother, who pressures him to review her estate plan because he's her sole heir, arranges for him to live at the Hyatt Regency. She also orders him to connect with Lawrence Winslow, a fellow student around whom he grew up. Winslow, however, is hard to find. He spends much of his time, a classmate says, "playing with his mirrors and cathodes" and working in a lab "where they're trying to figure out what happens inside the sun."
What follows in this multivariate coming-of-age work is one young man's trek not only across Wisconsin in search of his acquaintance but also through the realities of adulthood. He visits the "fixer-upper" of an old church where Winslow reportedly lives, attends the "perpetual cocktail hour" that nonconformist classmates attend, hires limos to take him to campus, meets with a concerned dean who is perplexed by the narrator's apathy, and more. Anyone who has ever gone to college is likely to identify with the narrator's plight. Expect to nod along in recognition with Grimstad's winningly confessional novel. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer
Shelf Talker: Paul Grimstad's Cold Fusion, set in the 1990s, is a heartfelt novel about a college freshman grieving his father's death and hallucinating the smell of chlorine whenever he's stressed out.