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.