{"id":13994,"date":"2014-08-19T00:01:39","date_gmt":"2014-08-19T04:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=13994"},"modified":"2014-08-18T14:34:43","modified_gmt":"2014-08-18T18:34:43","slug":"karen-joy-fowler-we-are-all-completely-beside-ourselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2014\/08\/19\/karen-joy-fowler-we-are-all-completely-beside-ourselves\/","title":{"rendered":"Karen Joy Fowler: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n

When you think of a Booker Prize book, what springs to mind?\u00a0A Luminaries<\/em>, perhaps: a copious word-mountain of benevolent, Dickensian heft. (Sounds like The Goldfinch<\/em>.) A Wolf Hall<\/em>: cleverly extrapolated historical resurrection. The Remains of the Day<\/em>: deep emotional potency wrought out of suffocation and poignantly funny misconception. All recognizably Bookerish\u00a0(although to be honest I always think, when mention of any of those are made, of the books I preferred that missed out). <\/span>Of course, this year the goalposts have been shifted, and touchdowns are now admissible. I’m one of the few people, still, who feel the switch to include U.S. authors, in particular, was a shot in the arm for a latterly ailing award, and a chance to drag-up the overall standard of the books in the running. I think the United States has a disproportionate number of the best writers around, as has been the case for a very long time, and whilst it would be good to believe that the old format might find better judges and chairs in the future to delve amongst the best of Commonwealth fiction, simply having that glut of U.S. books in the mix can only be a good thing, for me.<\/span><\/p>\n

And despite all that we have a strange old\u00a0longlist\u00a0this time. I won’t bother running through what I see as scandalous omissions. I’ll just get straight onto one of the first four ever U.S.-longlisted\u00a0titles, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves<\/em> (2014), a book I enjoyed in many ways but which doesn’t strike me as anything like a potential Booker winner.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"We<\/p>\n

Karen Joy Fowler, incidentally, is plentifully blessed with a lot of the attributes that I find irresistible when it comes to American fiction. She seems indefatigable — that is, her prose is\u00a0amped up and restlessly abundant\u00a0and her paragraphs feel spring-loaded, vehemently persuasive and zestful. You hang onto her characters and are pulled through rapidly negotiated pages, and the pace and energy of We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves<\/em>\u00a0is simply something identifiably North American (and I include Canadian writers like\u00a0Mordechai\u00a0Richler and Douglas Coupland\u00a0in that observation, a kind of neurotic all-inclusiveness that would seem to characterize a lot of\u00a0their prose, as though the world experienced by writers from those environs has provoked a kind of\u00a0imminent-apocalypse garrulousness, a\u00a0determination to go toe-to-toe with the vast spinning sweep of everything. In the right hands, I\u2019ve always found such an approach addictive and generous and just plain old exhilarating).<\/span><\/p>\n

Our omniscient protagonist,\u00a0Rosemary,\u00a0is a fairly troubled kid: an early scene has her picked up from jail, her having exhibited a spot of highly impetuous and inappropriate\u00a0(and carefully construed for a re-read as very much\u00a0monkeyish)\u00a0solidarity\u00a0with a\u00a0loose cannon. We get, from her very familiar disappointed-yet-defiant hangdog-on-caffeine voice (a kind of tone and assumed register I’m a sucker for, and, I pause before potential over emphasis,\u00a0an entirely U.S. writer thing: Martin Amis built a career out of stealing it and adding fascinated disgust) a very acute and quickly established sense of\u00a0who she is: she’s out of control, she’s automatically empathetic, she’s a vulnerable\u00a0motormouth, she’s an emblematic outsider who doesn’t belong inside but nonetheless rails at her occlusion.<\/span><\/p>\n

You discover her family:\u00a0also troubled. Mum is intermittently catatonic and grief-stricken (we will discover why); dad is an aggrieved but stoic psychologist\u00a0(animal behavior of particular interest. Of less interest: a well-adjusted family)\u00a0with a weakness for whiskey. An adored\u00a0brother, Lowell, is somewhat mercurial and, latterly,\u00a0absent\u00a0(with the FBI on his tail following a bit of highly relevant mischief), and a sister, Fern, is also absent, for somewhat different reasons — she’s a chimpanzee\u00a0and,\u00a0not only that: she was brought up as one of two makeshift\u00a0inter-special “twins” along with Rosemary\u00a0(Fern is now in the clutches of a nefarious scientist, Dr\u00a0Uljevik, who seems\u00a0busy ruthlessly reintegrating her as a chimp following her stint as a “human”), who is not only dealing with the wrenching loss of her mirror, partner in climb and sister, but with the gulf that now exists between her and peer humans, who she can’t really connect with, having learned all kinds of tricky-to-relinquish and entirely inappropriate behavior, for a nascent human at least, and as part of a mass-observed experiment used to indulgent, inordinate attention to boot.<\/span><\/p>\n

One day, every word I said was data, and carefully recorded for further study and discussion. The next, I was just a little girl, strange in her way, but of no scientific interest to anyone.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fowler throughout wrests odd, often uneasy laughs from Rosemary\u2019s necessary adherence to non-chimp ways in order to successfully ingratiate herself with other infants.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here are some things my mother worked with me on, prior to sending me off to school: Standing up straight.\u00a0Keeping my hands still when I talked.\u00a0Not putting my fingers into anyone else\u2019s mouth or hair. Not biting anyone, ever. No matter how much the situation warranted it. Muting my excitement over tasty food, and not\u00a0staring fixedly at someone else\u2019s cupcake. Not jumping on the tables and desks when I was playing. I remembered these things, most of the time.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our “conditioning,” as such, is oft touched upon by Fowler, but it tends to feel a little forced, a little Oprah.\u00a0There is\u00a0also plenty\u00a0mentioned regarding humans developing through mimicry\u00a0far more than any other animal, and as such, her success at being accepted as a human and not the remorselessly tormented “monkey-girl” would, as her dad (he\u2019s got it covered alright: never mind the savage bullying that his little experiment has resulted in!) has it, rests on artificially applying such knowledge.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dad gave me some tips designed to improve my social standing. People, he said, liked to have their movements mirrored. When someone leaned in to talk to me, I should likewise lean in. Cross my legs if they did, smile when they smiled, etc. I should try this (but be subtle about it. It wouldn\u2019t work if anyone saw I was doing it) with the kids at school. Well-meant advice, but it turned out badly, played too readily into the monkey-girl narrative — monkey see, monkey do.\u00a0Which also meant I\u2019d blown the subtlety part.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All such potentially interesting commentary is a little too mawkishly delivered to hit home in the head, and the heart, in any case, is the real target.<\/span><\/p>\n

We don’t, by the way,\u00a0find that\u00a0aforementioned key, momentous\u00a0“sis was a chimp” plot point out until 70-odd pages in: we are offered clues here and there (Rosemary climbing the bars of her cell, for example) but you get the impression that, apart from being a decent talking point (the twist!), simply stating the nature of the beast from the off might’ve been a turn-off for the kind of readers this is really geared to.\u00a0A novel about a chimp and her human sister and the fallout?\u00a0Best bury the simian reveal well into the book, sell it as an A.M. Homes-esque\u00a0suburban disaster comedy and see what gives when they find out . . .<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
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And the resulting response: everyone seems charmed, including Grayling and co. Because of the\u00a0“twist” it’s\u00a0a\u00a0much more palatable\u00a0proposition, I\u2019d argue. I’m not suggesting that any of this\u00a0necessarily\u00a0renders the book better or worse, but it does, to me, add a layer of contrivance upon an already opaque bank of disbelief, which I was\u00a0more than\u00a0happy to suspend for the sake of entertainment but which got in the way of\u00a0my being convinced by Fowler\u2019s true intent. That it’s notionally\u00a0about chimps v. humans is genuinely interesting: what it does with that premise is less interesting, more didactic and\u00a0less revelatory than you’d hope, and I ended up with a sense that the idea was built into and molded across a kind of Lorrie Moore fictional world, rather than forming any real genesis for sincere debate and evolving out of serious philosophical design.<\/span><\/p>\n

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the book:\u00a0it’s\u00a0great fun.\u00a0Fowler gets away with all kinds of authorial liberty, playing around metafictionally\u00a0and occasionally interjecting to dismiss your potential inclination or warning you not to bother with the odd passing character — \u201cSuch a sweetheart. But don\u2019t get attached to him; he\u2019s not really part of the story.\u201d — in\u00a0a way that\u2019s seamlessly employed. And\u00a0I’m always happy to see a wide selection of eccentric, addled, compromised and\u00a0funny characters run amok. Rosemary is more than agreeable company,\u00a0often left to her own devices, wandering the streets as a toddler, unfazed and endangered by her warped childhood, and subsequently affably odd as a teenager and adult. One or two scenes that recount the very early days for both Rosemary and Fern and their burgeoning sisterhood\u00a0are touching and affecting, and the occasions when Rosemary understands Fern’s actions\u00a0as fearful, as everyone else misconstrues\u00a0her\u00a0behavior as\u00a0an endearing\u00a0hoot,\u00a0are intriguing, particular\u00a0as they hint at what\u00a0might have been\u00a0had Fowler followed a more digressive, soberly interesting direction with\u00a0the book.<\/span><\/p>\n

And, it should be said: Karen Joy Fowler often musters\u00a0superb dialogue exchanges.\u00a0Her comic timing and acid eloquence is consistently glorious, particularly early on. She’s a bit like Nora\u00a0Ephron, spiky and heartfelt, and seems to do what\u00a0the aforementioned\u00a0Lorrie Moore does a little better in sketching out character through barbed, defensive verbal tennis. Although, on the few occasions that such zestful mordancy palls, it becomes a little like Karen Russell off-cuts.<\/span><\/p>\n

The book is certainly at its best when not being pithily pedagogic. It often zips by in a snappily\u00a0sardonic, engaging way, and its lack of caution, both in voice and narrative expedience, is exactly why the Americans are more than welcome on the Booker\u00a0longlist. It doesn’t flag too any great degree, merely becomes temporarily syrupy and over-emphatically pious, as though the comedy has been checked lest we forget to keep our brows furrowed, and were its heart kept out of sight quite a lot more as opposed to on its sleeve and in your\u00a0face,\u00a0it might’ve been a worthy contender.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, the parallels Fowler draws between chimps and humans are often invasively overstated. The basic premise of the book — that by one remove, by looking at the plight of chimps brought into a human environment and then wrenched out of it, we can understand how unevolved we are, how delusional and\u00a0chimplike\u00a0we still are, how potentially savage and vulnerable, etc. — is not allowed to unfold without nut fragments flying as a big blurry sledgehammer smashes them across most of the pages. This isn’t subtle: it has a message and it has a loudspeaker with which to make sure you hear it. It’s a book that makes your ears hurt.\u00a0It’s\u00a0designs are heavily, ostentatiously signposted in a too-cloying manner too often: a shame in an otherwise\u00a0pawky, entertaining read. For an example of Fowler\u2019s facile\u00a0(but funny)\u00a0shoehorning of chimp\/human parallels, try:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhatev,\u201d\u00a0Abbie\u00a0said, which in 1992 meant you didn\u2019t really care no matter how much it had sounded as if you did.\u00a0She didn\u2019t just say this; she used a hand sign as well — index fingers up, hands joined at the thumbs into a W. That we had forced her to\u00a0whatev<\/span>\u00a0us made our silence so much worse.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whatev<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>was the first hand sign I learned at college, but there were several popular then. There was the\u00a0thumb-and-index-finger L held against the forehead, which meant\u00a0L<\/span>oser<\/span>.\u00a0<\/span>The\u00a0whatev<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>W could be flipped up and down, W to M to W to M, in\u00a0which case it meant Whatever<\/span>, your mother works at McDonalds.\u00a0<\/span>\u2018Cause that\u2019s the way we rolled back in \u201992.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So college students often resemble chimpanzees! I\u2019ll say they do. Regardless, the preceding excerpt is a good barometer for whether or not such heavy-handed postulations come\u00a0with the necessary sprinkling of sugar for your tastes.\u00a0Fowler avers plentifully\u00a0via Rosemary,\u00a0not so much with a nudge as with a largely forgivable elbow, \u201cNot only am I, your product-of-an-entirely-cruel experiment protagonist, understandably chimplike, everyone is, when you get down to it.\u201d She perpetually underlines the pomposity and accepted savagery of the master race, the selfishness, the chaotic tendencies, and attempts to bridge the gap between evolutionary cousins.\u00a0The problem with the method of inducing any such comparison in the manner that Fowler has chosen is that the scatty feel of the book ultimately mangles the seriousness of her intent. There\u2019s too much levity, too little heft. The potentially powerful moments, when they arrive, feel like a lurch too far from the established tone of slick satire. It\u2019s tricky to shift gears from Sarah Silverman to serious sermon, and therein, I think,\u00a0lies\u00a0the book\u2019s main weakness. I bemoaned the insistent preachiness, at times, and yearned for more of the loquacious froth that\u2019s so much fun. Without the awkward moralizing, the novel would slip down a lot easier.\u00a0But then, it wouldn\u2019t be on the Booker\u00a0longlist. It\u2019s an “issue” piece, a book with a supposedly provocative stance, but for this reader it\u2019s much better taken as a light bit of superbly executed comedy with clunky gravitas bolted on. And a bad ending straight out of the slush pile. Good, then, not great.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ultimately, as a means of getting plenty of gently pointed laughs about chimp\/human similarity, the book is a success. In terms of using the symbiotic relationship in the book, the “twinness” of Rosemary and Fern, it over eggs it. It\u2019s a clever surge through the lives of a dysfunctional family, not thesis-worthy intellectual insight. Or: it\u2019s Cameron Crowe\u2019s version of Project Nim.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lee reviews Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves<\/em>, longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":11802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Lee reviews Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves http:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-3DI","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[660],"tags":[551],"coauthors":[516],"class_list":["post-13994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-karen-joy-fowler","tag-booker-prize"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/We-Are-All-Completely-Beside-Ourselves.jpg?fit=948%2C1432&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-3DI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13994"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14017,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13994\/revisions\/14017"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13994"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=13994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}