Josephine Rowe’s high-risk narrative strategy in ‘A Loving, Faithful Animal’

Spoiler alert: This posting contains spoilers for A Loving, Faithful Animal by Josephine Rowe.

In his essay The Art of Fiction, Henry James asserted that “The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.”

Texts on how to write a novel often offer up a sure-fire recipe for shaping a novel’s ‘story’: create a protagonist whose self-concept is significantly challenged at the outset of the novel, then use the rest of the novel to explore how far (if at all) the protagonist’s self-concept alters as a result of facing this challenge.

Jack Bickham’s Elements of Fiction Writing — Scene & Structure presents one version of this approach. Here is Bickham in chapter two of his text outlining what he suggests are key facts about readers that novelists need to keep in mind:

1. They are fascinated and threatened by significant change.
2. They want the story to start with such a change.
3. They want to have a story question to worry about.
4. They want the story question answered in the story ending.
5. They will quickly lose patience with everything but material that relates to the story question.

Reading Josephine Rowe’s debut A Loving, Faithful Animal recently caused me to reflect on ways a novel can be ‘interesting’, and to ask myself whether Bickham’s recipe is necessarily the only way an author can create narrative interest.

From the opening of A Loving, Faithful Animal we find ourselves in the hands of a narrator darting from one tart observation to another.

That was the summer a sperm whale drifted sick into the bay, washed up dead at Mount Martha, and there were many terrible jokes about fertility. It was the summer that all the best cartoons went off the air, swapped for Gulf War broadcasts in infra-red snippets, and your mother started saying things like, I used to be pretty, you know? Christ, I used to be brave. But you thought brave was not crying when the neighbour girl dug her sharp red fingernails into your arm, until the skin broke and bled, and she cried out herself in disgust. You were still dumb enough to think that was winning.

The exposition is heavy on backstory, and at times veers dangerously close to a short-story-ish way of proceeding where everything a character experiences just happens to trigger a flood of memories that constitute the narrative’s backstory.

Here is Evelyn, for example, standing in her living room, taking a pause as she clears away Christmas decorations:

The heat, the light today. There’s something about it. Here she is stranded, miles inland, but it still calls up the sandstone coast of her youth. The stickiness of that salt air as she walked towards the ocean baths, to the pool cut right into coastal rock. Every summer morning of her teens and into her twenty-first year. Drifting home with seawater drying on her skin, leaving delicate scuffs of salt dust, fine as baking soda beneath the fine blonde hair on her arms.

That’s a lot of memories for ‘the heat, the light today’ to be conjuring up. Standing there in her living room, Evelyn is soon recalling more from the days of her youth:

The swimsuits she’d owned then, she could chart the whole decade on them. A new one every year, just about. ’66 the lemon-butter yellow with pink flamingos at the hips. ’67 the emerald green two-piece with the starry thread running through. ’68 the sophisticated navy blue Jantzen with its white piping and keystone.

Evelyn goes on to remember seeing a stingray on the bottom of a swimming pool, “quietly lifting its edges like an egg in a pan” as she floated over it,

staring down through the nine feet of water to where it rested, immense and blue-granite coloured with a constellation of white speckles. A map of a distant galaxy, it seemed. And its wings — was it right to call them wings? She didn’t know — had the span of a Chinese kite.

Does anyone really remember the past in quite such an elaborate and literary way on so slim a pretext? I have my doubts. Rowe’s prose, though, is regularly interlaced with taut, sassy gems that are vivid and surprising. Here are a few examples (they’re not one continuous passage):

Christmas was the same tired cracker jokes and picking at a cold Safeway chook with the TV murmured to itself disconsolately in the lounge.

Aunt Stell sent a card that said It Is Better To Have Loved And Lost Than To Live With A Psycho Forever. Your mother liked it so much she put it up on top of the fridge and it stayed there, all through Christmas, the smallest of her small revenges, roosting amidst the cards with snow and camels and reindeer.

you finish tucking the old mercury-glass Father Christmases into their crumbling styrofoam coffins

You push on further, past the ruined hayshed where Matthew Collins got his fingers into Renee Tillman, and where the old dredge and dragline is crumbling into the ground like a dead mastodon.

There is so much to like here.

And yet, reading the opening chapters about the clenched Ruby, and her mother, regretful Evelyn, I did find myself starting to to get antsy. Just as Bickham has suggested can happen, I was starting to lose patience with this novel because no story question seemed to be emerging. What was A Loving, Faithful Animal actually about, I was wondering.

Then, in a chapter told through the eyes of Jack, the violent ex-Vietnam veteran, I began to see what life has looked like for Ruby and Lana’s father up to the point where he walked out on his family the day after the family’s pet dog was shredded by an unknown predator — and for the first time I began to understand viscerally, rather than in my head, the original cause of this family’s misery.

It’s clear from the novel’s opening that Jack has been metaphorically scarred by his war experiences, and that the damage he has suffered has spilled into violence against his wife, leaving the whole family traumatised — but there’s something about being inside Jack’s head for the first time, and experiencing glimpses of what he has been through in the war that left me not merely ‘interested’ (James’ term) but shocked and spinning and dazed. After spending two chapters in the presence of a mother and daughter who seemed to be protecting themselves with shells of ‘attitude’, I felt like I’d fallen through into hell.

On its own, the quality of Rowe’s prose in the opening two chapters was not enough to allay my concern that no story seemed to be emerging — but as I began to see the family situation through Jack’s eyes, I felt myself gripped, not by a ‘story question’, but something that felt more primal than that: a sense that I was now eye witness to the ripping apart of a human being (ie, Jack).

Immediately following these revelations, we have a chapter seen through Lana’s eyes in which we are pulled through a debauched and druggy New Year’s Eve party and out the other side to a time — in fact a series of times eight, eleven, sixteen years later — when Lana, now a flight attendant, feeds and waters passengers at 30,000 feet before retreats to an aircraft bathroom cubicle where she can

arrange the dark wedge of her fringe to hide all the trouble going on underneath… The jaundiced light ageing her by half a decade. It’s under such lights, several timezones from sleep, that her mother appears, looking out, like some storybook queen, from the treacherous architecture of her own features… These hours when her own body feels stateless, drifting mothlike from guide light to guide light, between the soft dings that summon peanuts and tonic water, but otherwise beholden to no one person, no one place. Beholden to nothing greater out there than the great dark that holds and keeps the plane. Earth far below, and real life down there with it, the self left unfixed and undefended. And so the ghosts float up, slip through.

It’s an extraordinary moment — actually spanning several pages —at once transcendent and desperately sad, and it seems to me the whole novel hangs from this moment the way an old merry-go-round hangs from a single pivot. We suddenly understand that the future holds some kind of transformation for Lana, some kind of escape, even if that alteration in her situation may feel, for Lana herself, as if it is not even skin deep, and the ghosts of the past will still be able to ‘slip through’.

Surely, we hope, this future life of Lana’s will have to be better than what she has known before. There must be an escape route for people in Lana’s situation  — some way through? And for the other’s in Lana’s family, too, perhaps? What will happen to them?

Immediately after this startling, unexpected flash forward we are returned to Lana drunk and injured at the New Year’s Eve party, from which she skulks home only to find her mother asleep before a TV playing infomercials. We’re now nearly two thirds of the way through the novel, and in one sense nothing that might potentially cause immediate consequences has happened at all, except that Jack has left his family. In terms of ‘interest’, though (James’ term again), we’ve now been jolted into a keen sense of curiosity as to the potential fates of all the main characters.

The remainder of the novel speaks directly to our curiosity on this question. I don’t wish to address Rowe’s actual resolution here except to say that the final chapters of A Loving, Faithful Animal do represent a clearly articulated and nuanced answer to the question I’ve alluded to, and in this sense represent a conventional denouement that leaves us with a sense of completion, a sense that the novel really has ended.

I found this resolution credible and compelling, even though it rounds out a narrative that does not whole-heartedly respect the ‘facts’ about readers that Bickham lays down in Elements of Fiction Writing — Scene & Structure.

It could even be said that A Loving, Faithful Animal defies the maxim that a novel should have a beginning, a middle and an end. Rowe appears to have taken the highly risky approach of presenting us with a novel that essentially comprises a situation, a backstory and an afterword, delaying the arrival of a story question until quite late in her narrative, but then ultimately answering this question most movingly.

At the same time, though, I must acknowledge that Bickham really could have had me in mind when he suggests that readers generally do want to have a story question to worry about, and are likely to lose patience when presented with material that doesn’t relate to such a question.

From now on, I think I’m going to need to be a bit more conscious of how this question of establishing and maintaining narrative interest is handled in works of fiction that I’m reading. My gut feeling is that I have probably found ‘interest’ in reading quite a few books that have at least partly failed the Bickham test, not least because I tend to persist with a book once I have started with it, even if it does test my patience in places.

Such an approach has its dangers, of course, but also its rewards, and these are certainly evident for anyone reading A Loving Faithful Animal beyond its opening chapters.