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psocopteraI think We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler, would be a fun book to read unspoiled. I myself did not - that is, I had read reviews and descriptions which gave things away - but if anyone reading this was willing to pick it up purely on my recommendation (or that of SFWA; it was a Nebula nominee this year), I think you would not regret it. Recommended to people who liked Matt Ruff's Set This House In Order or Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, or possibly Summer of My German Soldier/Morning Is A Long Time Coming, or in general, family dramas with narrators with psychologically atypical perspectives.
I'm going to put a spoiler for the premise It's about a woman whose parents adopt an infant chimpanzee and raise it with her as her twin sister as a long-term psychology experiment in language acquisition, and the fallout that this has on her and her family. Might also recommend to people who recall Peter Dickinson's Eva.
Now I'm going to kill time for another paragraph, and then I'm going to use another cut to talk about the ending of the book. If you just clicked to find out about the premise and you're interested in reading it, I strongly recommend you click back promptly because in about twenty more words I'm gonna spoil the whole shebang for you. Are you going? Are you gone yet? Okay, here we go.
I was predicting from somewhat early on that the transgression that led to the disruption of Fern's adoption was going to be sexual in nature; that either the father would be found to be sexually abusing her, or Lowell (the brother) would be caught being incestuous with her. Or, well, also sexually abusive, but I kind of want to dodge the question of whether a pubertal human doing sex with his equally pubertal (chimpanzee puberty is actually more like eight than five (years old) but I didn't know that while reading, just that it was earlier than human puberty), chronologically much younger, physically much stronger little chimpanzee sister would also be sexually abusive if it would be acceptable by chimpanzee mores, because IT DOESN'T HAPPEN IN THE BOOK, that's just where I thought the little hints about estrus were going.
I think this is a big your-mileage-may-vary, but for me, interspecies incest would have felt like much more of a Big Revelation, a major violation changing everything, than the actual act of chimpanzee-on-kitten violence that actually takes place. I've read In the Shadow of Man, the idea of a chimp casually killing and disemboweling a small animal was not particularly surprising to me, nor was it very upsetting, except that the family seemed so unprepared for this not-implausible event. But I get that I'm less sentimental about animals (and especially pet animals) than your average American, so, I don't know, was this supposed to be a bigger gut-punch than it was? (Even further on, the picture gets more complicated, that the kitten was just one of a handful of aggressive incidents.) Anyways, I totally think it makes sense for the plot and theme of the book that nobody in the family was doing anything wrong other than the adoption in the first place (and even that is sort of borderline given the implication that Fern would have died without the adoption), I just thought it was interesting that my mind jumped right to the Shattering Dark Secret place and was then like, oh, okay, nope, just a "you can take the chimp out of the jungle, but" thing. Anyways, I liked it, in the "this was so sad!" kind of way, and I thought the very last scene, with the red chip, was really powerful.
I'm going to put a spoiler for the premise It's about a woman whose parents adopt an infant chimpanzee and raise it with her as her twin sister as a long-term psychology experiment in language acquisition, and the fallout that this has on her and her family. Might also recommend to people who recall Peter Dickinson's Eva.
Now I'm going to kill time for another paragraph, and then I'm going to use another cut to talk about the ending of the book. If you just clicked to find out about the premise and you're interested in reading it, I strongly recommend you click back promptly because in about twenty more words I'm gonna spoil the whole shebang for you. Are you going? Are you gone yet? Okay, here we go.
I was predicting from somewhat early on that the transgression that led to the disruption of Fern's adoption was going to be sexual in nature; that either the father would be found to be sexually abusing her, or Lowell (the brother) would be caught being incestuous with her. Or, well, also sexually abusive, but I kind of want to dodge the question of whether a pubertal human doing sex with his equally pubertal (chimpanzee puberty is actually more like eight than five (years old) but I didn't know that while reading, just that it was earlier than human puberty), chronologically much younger, physically much stronger little chimpanzee sister would also be sexually abusive if it would be acceptable by chimpanzee mores, because IT DOESN'T HAPPEN IN THE BOOK, that's just where I thought the little hints about estrus were going.
I think this is a big your-mileage-may-vary, but for me, interspecies incest would have felt like much more of a Big Revelation, a major violation changing everything, than the actual act of chimpanzee-on-kitten violence that actually takes place. I've read In the Shadow of Man, the idea of a chimp casually killing and disemboweling a small animal was not particularly surprising to me, nor was it very upsetting, except that the family seemed so unprepared for this not-implausible event. But I get that I'm less sentimental about animals (and especially pet animals) than your average American, so, I don't know, was this supposed to be a bigger gut-punch than it was? (Even further on, the picture gets more complicated, that the kitten was just one of a handful of aggressive incidents.) Anyways, I totally think it makes sense for the plot and theme of the book that nobody in the family was doing anything wrong other than the adoption in the first place (and even that is sort of borderline given the implication that Fern would have died without the adoption), I just thought it was interesting that my mind jumped right to the Shattering Dark Secret place and was then like, oh, okay, nope, just a "you can take the chimp out of the jungle, but" thing. Anyways, I liked it, in the "this was so sad!" kind of way, and I thought the very last scene, with the red chip, was really powerful.
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Date: 2014-06-26 06:18 am (UTC)I didn't personally feel like the kitten murder was supposed to be a big gut-punch, or, at least, I thought that it was supposed to be more important in showing things psychologically about Rosemary than it was about showing something about Fern or their parents.
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Date: 2014-07-02 02:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-02 05:30 am (UTC)I did like it! It isn't my favorite thing I've read so far this year, but it may be my favorite novel I've read so far this year - I found it engaging and interesting. I thought the premise was interesting and liked the execution, and I liked the writing style. I also thought Rosemary was an interesting character and appreciated the complexities of the ending.
I didn't actually consider it SF, although obviously it is fiction about science, and even fiction about science that never actually happened. But, on the other hand, genre is a marketing category, and the copy that I picked up was very clearly being marketed as mainstream fiction, and I am not sufficiently up on SF to have remembered that Karen Joy Fowler has also been published as an SF writer. If I'd picked up a copy that had been framed as "By James Tiptree, Jr. Award-Winning author Karen Joy Fowler" and not as "By the author of The Jane Austen Book Club" I would certainly have been primed differently.