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

[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.)