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| Subtitle | A Novel |
| First Written | 2000 |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Origin | US |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
| ISBN-10 | 0684867982 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0684867984 |
| My Copy | library copy |
| First Read | November 17, 2017 |
Wild Life
I adored this book. It starts off mostly as a first person diary or epistolic thing, featuring a wise and wordy correspondent - slightly cantankerous but generally benevolent if isolated. It's set in the early 1900s in the pacific northwest frontier, and the first half could have easily been a Marilynne Robinson book sitting somewhere between Gilead and Housekeeping. There's a woman-against-the-world vibe to it that rings quite a bit Helen De Witt's Last Samurai, too. I loved those books, so I loved this. It even surpassed my dislike of American Frontier settings in general.
BUT THEN, the plot takes a turn, and our heroine goes through an experience that undercuts what she knows about the world - but it's done in a relatively gentle, compassionate way. The actual plot picks up here as well, moving this from a wry, measured pace to something larger and broader but ultimately more exciting - from a river to an oceanic current.
Noted on November 17, 2017
I have trouble writing about the experience of this book without divulging any plot details.
Noted on November 17, 2017
This is a rare case where I was first introduced to an author on a strong recommendation but found it a bit underwhelming. But then I picked up a second - Wild Life - and LOVED it.
Noted on November 17, 2017
But I think of Montaigne: "What we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms he has comprised in it."
Quoted on November 17, 2017
I wondered then, as I do now, if he might have been a man hiding his lamp under a basket, so to speak. It's well known that the remote logging camps are scattered with educated men - lawyers, doctors, teachers, men who have held important positions in business - who have turned to the hermit life after legal or personal calamity of one kind or another. I asked him nothing of that kind and offered him nothing of my own history: such is the Western way.
Quoted on November 17, 2017
The Island School, having lost a string of teachers to the custody of lonely bachelors, has lately taken to hiring girls whose principal qualification is their seeming unsuitableness as brides - hard featured and repellent girls of vicious disposition and shiftless intelligence. I expect my sons to become wise through teaching one another the canny sufference of inept teachers.
Quoted on November 17, 2017
[get a load of this word choice] Unlucky, too, has been her experience of childbearing: a miscarriage, then a stillboarn son, then a daughter borne hard and born early, and a surgeon's hysterical removal of her womb.
Quoted on November 17, 2017
He has gotten to be fourteen with no encouragement from me. I believe the perfect age for any son is a certain week in his eleventh year when he balances briefly at the triangular intersection of self-sufficiency, unconditional love, and eagerness to please.
Quoted on November 17, 2017