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]

(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.)