We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler

[rachelmanija]

Rosemary once was a child in a family with a sister, Fern, and a brother, Lowell. Now she's in college, palling around with a manic pixie dream girl named Harlow and trying not to think about the mysterious event that caused Fern to vanish and Lowell's life to go off the rails. The novel switches between Rosemary's childhood and adulthood as she comes to grips with whatever happened.

This novel has a possibly surprising plot twist about a fifth of the way in; I say possibly because I learned of it in a review, and there are other elements of the novel itself which may make it immediately evident. However, I will keep it a surprise for the benefit of those who don't want to be spoiled. I'll put it behind a cut.

Fowler is a highly skilled author whose books, unfortunately, never appeal to me anywhere near as much as they appeal to others. She always has intriguing premises and her novels always get rave reviews, so I keep checking them out. To date, I have never much liked any of them. Something about her prose style, characterization, and tone always strikes me as distant and chilly. This book was no exception. It involves a lot of potentially interesting and moving elements, but I found it dry and unsatisfying. However, I am in the minority in this, so you may well love this or any other of her books.

That being said, if you are at all sensitive to animal harm, avoid this book. It is centrally concerned with cruelty to animals, and contains multiple graphic depictions of it. (I didn't know this when I started, or I would not have read it.)

Great title, though.

Fern is a chimpanzee, raised in the household and treated as Rosemary's sister. She's then taken away to a lab, where she is considered an animal and conditions are cruel bordering on sadistic. I was primarily interested in what it would be like to see an animal as a sister, and the book did deal with that, but it was more about how chimpanzee experiments are cruel even if they're not intended to be.

What I meant by spoilery elements in the book itself is the chimp on the cover, plus a highly relevant epigraph.

By Karen Joy Fowler We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Comments

[boxofdelights]

I was reading this while I visited my daughter at Reed College, where she is studying psychology. I told her that I loved it, that I thought she'd like it too, because it was so good and because it was exploring memory, how our memories shape our identities and and how our memories get shaped by our identities, what happens with the ones we reject because we can't accept them as parts of ourselves.

Then I got to about page 200 and said, "I'm not recommending this anymore. It's still good, but I can't recommend that anyone feel the way I feel right now."

The only way I know how to live with the knowledge that such cruelty exists is mostly not to think about it. I agree with Fowler that it is morally wrong to know it exists and refuse to think about it, but what else can I do?

[rachelmanija]

You could donate money to animal rights organizations, or volunteer for them, or some such. But I'm not sure you need to read graphic accounts of animal cruelty in order to do that.

I counsel rape survivors, but I don't go out of my way to read fiction with graphic rape scenes.

[pauraque]

I definitely won't read this because of the cruelty element, which is too bad because the premise is well worth exploring. I did somehow make it all the way through Project Nim, a very good and very difficult-to-watch documentary which deals with the same situation in real life (probably the inspiration for this novel, I would guess).

I don't know how the novel treats the time period before Fern is taken away, but one of the many devastating things about Project Nim is that even when Nim was being raised in a human family who loved him, and were doing their best, and were in no way cruel, it was painfully obvious that being treated as a human child was not healthy for him. They wanted him to be a human — perhaps he even wanted to be one, on some level — but he couldn't, because he wasn't. It was a horrible and impossible situation to put him in, and clearly never should have been done. I'm curious what Fowler's take on that is?

[rachelmanija]

Fowler's take is that the entire thing was wrong and that chimpanzees should not be taken out of the wild.

[vass]

Argh. Thank you for the warning. I will not be reading that book, and it was on my to-read list.

[rachelmanija]

It's unfortunate that the main reason why many people probably would like to avoid it tends to get buried beneath a spoiler cut. "Contains graphic animal cruelty as a central plot element" is high on my list of reasons to avoid a book.

[vass]

There was a long time in my life when I would have felt like it was my duty to read it and absorb it and yes, be triggered by it. Not any more.

[kore]

AUGH REALLY? I've heard it lauded to the skies, but I really can't deal with graphic cruelty to animals in any kind of book.

[rachelmanija]

If you don't like reading about animal cruelty, avoid this book. Multiple, graphic, depressing scenes.

[kore]

Are they skippable? Are there chapters with big chunks or are they kind of woven through a big part of the story?

[rachelmanija]

They are an integral and crucial part of the story. You might be able to skip some bits, but you'd also have to just not read the entire last half or third of the book.

Also, graphic violent kitten death which is also a crucial part of the story.

[kore]

graphic kitten death

*****ULTIMATE DEAL-BREAKER THANK YOU FOR THE WARNING*****

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Maybe you don't want to put this in comments, because of the spoiler thing, but I would really love to hear more about Rosemary's relationship with her sister. That really *is* interesting. If not in comments, then in email? I'm probably not going to read the book, so it's not like you'll be ruining anything for me. (Or I might read the book, and you still wouldn't have ruined anything to me. But I probably won't.)

SPOILERS

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

It's already revealed in the spoiler-cut.

While Fern and Rosemary were raised as twins, they were separated at age five. So while there are some scenes of them interacting (which were by far my favorite parts of the book) it's not really about their relationship, because that ended when Rosemary was so young.

Rosemary was too young for most of the relationship to really get exactly how different Fern was at first, and they parted just as she was beginning to understand that. Rosemary was also influenced by Fern, enough that her body language was weird to her school classmates. She thought Fern could do a lot of stuff better than her, so she was jealous, and hated her for making Rosemary an outcast. They had a love-hate relationship going.

Fern killed a kitten that Rosemary gave her, and Rosemary was upset but also saw an opportunity to get rid of Fern. So she told her parents Fern scared her, which Rosemary thought was a lie but which probably was also true to some degree, and Fern was sent to the lab. Rosemary then blamed herself for the whole thing.

Re: SPOILERS

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Is there anything about her communication with Fern? Because five-year-olds can talk, and I wonder about how she remembered talking/not talking with Fern.

Yeah, just reading this is making me mentally push the story far, far away. I couldn't read that.

Re: SPOILERS

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

They communicated through body language and sign. Again, the most interesting part of the book. But it was only a small portion of the book.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Oh, what a relief. I found this intellectually interesting(-ish; I honestly didn't find the engagement with animal research very impressive, but I know I'm kind of a specialty audience on that front) but emotionally it left me cold.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I thought it was much more of a polemic against than an engagement with animal experimentation.

And yeah. I was totally unmoved. That has been my experience with all of Fowler's work: intellectually interesting, emotionally cold.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I thought it was much more of a polemic against than an engagement with animal experimentation.

Yeeeeeeeeeep.

Which, it's not that I find the position unsympathetic. I just -- had expected something else based on the raves.

Oh, well!

[jorrie-spencer.livejournal.com]

Such a different reaction to my read of it! But very interesting to read. (I did find The Jane Austen Book Club pretty cold but somehow entered into this one—and a short story whose title completely escapes me—very differently. i.e. completely engaged.)

[boxofdelights]

"What I Didn't See"? Thematically related, and won a Nebula.

[jorrie-spencer.livejournal.com]

I suspect not, but honestly, I don't know how I came about reading it, and I don't remember much about it beyond relationships among a daughter, father and grandmother—who becomes ill at some point. There might be a boat in there somehow. (It starts to get scary, how much I forget.)

[pameladean]

This was my experience I pretty much completely failed to appreciate The Jane Austen Book Club, to my dismay and astonishment; but I found this one impossible to put down and extremely gripping. I went into it with essentially no spoilers and in fact a misapprehension: my partner had read aloud three very funny bits, and I knew Fowler was capable of being very funny. I don't usually look at book covers or read blurbs because I don't like spoilers; also it was a library book and some of the cover art was concealed. So it was all a total surprise to me and the bad parts were very shocking, but I felt they were worth it.

I have several writers that I react to as Rachel does to Fowler, chief among them Lisa Goldstein, whom I always feel I am reading through a thick sheet of glass that dulls hearing, sensation, and thought. Drives me crazy because I should absolutely love her books. Reading is very odd, when you think about it.

P.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Reading is very odd, when you think about it.

I find this too. You can guess about genre or style to some extent... but then actual likes and dislikes can diverge in strange ways.

[jorrie-spencer.livejournal.com]

Book-reader chemistry is a real thing, that's for sure! I know what you mean about the sheet of glass.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Another unmoved by Jane Austen Book Club. (Except when it irritated me.)

Yeah, on Lisa Goldstein. Part of my problem with her work is when she dips into history, from a resolutely modern perspective. Kind of all one voice. Like her, though, and what she wants to say.

[sovay]

Fowler is a highly skilled author whose books, unfortunately, never appeal to me anywhere near as much as they appeal to others.

I have trouble mentally distinguishing Karen Joy Fowler and Joyce Carol Oates.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I have exactly the same reaction to Joyce Carol Oates, come to think of it.

[sovay]

I have exactly the same reaction to Joyce Carol Oates, come to think of it.

I feel better.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

The thing I find really neat about this book is that it is literally a subgenre of SF I have never seen anything else do: science we could have done, but did not. There's a lot of SF about science we can't do yet (set in the future or the past), and a lot about science we probably can't do ever, and there are counterfactuals (what if x experiment had turned out differently, or what if x theory were different).

But this is the only book I know where there was, in fact, a very definite time frame during which this particular experiment could well have been approved, when that was the sort of thing people were doing. And that time is over, and this particular experiment could not and would not be approved nowadays. It was totally plausible. We just never went there. And it's not as though we got the exact same results in some other way-- we got different results about different things that made us not want to run the experiment, but we do not actually know how the experiment would have turned out.

The other thing I think is really interesting about this book, which is related to the first thing, is that it wasn't marketed as SF. If you know Fowler as an SF writer, you expect that of her, but a lot of people only know her from The Jane Austen Book Club. So I have literally met people who assumed the cover art and front quote were setting up metaphors the way they would be in mainstream literary fiction, because that is where this book was shelved when it came out. And when they get to the spoiler? They don't read it as SF! It's so fascinating, every one of these people that I've talked to about this has assumed it was based on a real case, like back in the seventies or something, they assume it was a real case that happened that Fowler has fictionalized. Because if it were mainstream litfic, that would probably be true, that's a classical way that litfic writers work.

So when I read this book, I find myself critiquing the worldbuilding, as SF-- it's very good worldbuilding, I really find a lot of the ways the family interacts believable, the one real caveat I have is that I don't quite buy the narrator having so much trouble with human body language in later life but as I said we don't have the data-- but when the litfic people read the book, they critique the animal stuff as metaphor, as symbolism for the undercurrents of the underlying character conflicts the way it would be in, oh, Margaret Drabble. And the amazing thing is that each side thinks of it as about the same quality of book, it works equally well from either direction.

As a piece of genrefuck, it's one of the finest I've ever run across.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

(To clarify-- the element we could have done and didn't is raising a human child of the same age alongside a chimpanzee, as a sibling. We have raised chimps as humans. It goes badly.)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was going to add that clarification. There've been a couple of horrible--I won't call them exposés because there was never anything hidden to begin with, but maybe simply news stories? Or whatever you want to call This American Life style reportage--reports on cases where families had the chimpanzee, it got to be too much trouble, and they just dumped it at a medical facility or back out in the wild even (I may be mixing things up; maybe the family didn't directly dump the chimpanzee back in the wild, but it ended up there somehow, lonely and totally unable to cope.)