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A review by shimmer
Wild Life by Kathy Fish
4.0
Kathy Fish's collection Wild Life is divided into halves: first a set of stories gathered under the heading “Wild,” and a second under “Life.” In a surprise to no one familiar with my reading habits/obsessions, I preferred “Wild” to “Life,” which based on a number of other reviews on Goodreads puts me in the minority. The earlier stories are often set in the outdoors, and involve wild places and creatures, but more than that there’s a wildness to the stories themselves. They’re moments of myth-making tucked into what seem like otherwise ordinary lives, featuring events in which characters’ lives point toward stories of themselves larger than what actually happens.
Not to be predictable, but I’d like to offer two bits about bears to show what I mean. In “Land and Sky and Cosmo,” the narrator tells us about a camping trip at a campground owned by her step-uncle:
Later, in “Quantum Physics Forebears,” some friends are spending what seems like an ordinary evening drinking and talking, until the narrator offers us this:
Both of these ursine encounters point toward their own retelling: there’s an awareness of these moments as stories, not in the sense they’re being written but because each of these narrators, we know, is actively revising the story of herself to fit a bear — whether real or imagined — into it. In the first case, there’s a rethinking of the past and what it means to the present and future, and in the second we can almost hear the story this night will become in the retelling — despite learning the “grizzly” is in fact a black bear, surely it will remain a grizzly when our narrator recounts the night later and makes it part of the myth of herself. So these bears loom large (as do other animals and encounters in other stories), symbolically and suggestively, and not only on the page: they’re physically or psychically present enough to feel like more than “just” symbols. The stories, too, are about more than themselves, more than the moment in which they occur — they extend backward and forward into the characters’ lives and into our own like all the best myths or fables or legends. I’ve used these bears to make my point because, well, I really like bears and they’re probably the most vivid examples, but I think the point holds true for all the stories in the first half of Fish’s book.
In the second half of the collection, “Life,” the stories are fittingly more domesticated, less feral. They also seem more contained, by being set mostly indoors but also because they don’t extend as far beyond their own pages. In “Backbone” we’re told of a girl’s ride along with her sisters in her uncle’s “black Ford Falcon,” a drive on which,
These characters are livestock, not wildlife, and even the hawk (not to mention the Falcon) is reduced — by Uncle Jayce, not by Kathy Fish — to a cheap drinking game. That’s a far cry from the mythic, suggestive creatures of the earlier stories. And these characters’ lives are generally smaller, if more familiar and facing more immediate problems (you know, the kinds of things readers want to read about when they aren’t bear-obsessed weirdos). But for me, the character in “Prague” killing time on a youthful visit to that city with the same conversations and boredom that might occur anywhere — which certainly resonates with my own experience of travel — is less compelling than the earlier characters who seem more likely to act than wait.
In “The People Here Are So Hardy And Cheerful,” Tom Bridge is stuck in Denver’s airport, calling someone named Sandy over a poor connection. “Everybody just wants to get out of here,” he tells her, and later, “I hate it here, Sandy.” It’s a compact, powerful image of the literal and metaphorical difficulties of connection and distance, and wholly true to life in a powerful way. I easily understand why some other readers and reviewers have preferred these “Life” stories over the “Wild.” And yet, I prefer the earlier tales that take as their starting point not “I want to escape!” but instead “Off I go!” Less realistic, probably, and less like most of our lives, but I guess I prefer stories more mythic than life instead of stories just like it. So I really appreciated the bifurcation of this collection, and its invitation to think about the difference.
Not to be predictable, but I’d like to offer two bits about bears to show what I mean. In “Land and Sky and Cosmo,” the narrator tells us about a camping trip at a campground owned by her step-uncle:
My boyfriend wondered about the bears and the step-uncle said sure, there are black bears, plenty of them. He said make yourself look bigger, wave your arms and yell and he demonstrated and we saw the forest of his armpits. He warned us about the dangers of leaving scraps. You don't remember me, do you, I said.
Later, in “Quantum Physics Forebears,” some friends are spending what seems like an ordinary evening drinking and talking, until the narrator offers us this:
That's when I see the grizzly bear rummaging around Coop's garbage, light shining on his fur. I point and mutter, point and mutter, ineffectually. TC doesn't even stop yammering, but Coop rearranges his forehead and goes and looks over the edge of the deck. He goes "RAWR" and waves his arms up and down, and the grizzly (the fucking grizzly!) looks at us with uncertainty and runs off with something in its mouth. An orange peel, I think.
Coop saunters back to the table, says, "Black bear. We get them all the time."
Both of these ursine encounters point toward their own retelling: there’s an awareness of these moments as stories, not in the sense they’re being written but because each of these narrators, we know, is actively revising the story of herself to fit a bear — whether real or imagined — into it. In the first case, there’s a rethinking of the past and what it means to the present and future, and in the second we can almost hear the story this night will become in the retelling — despite learning the “grizzly” is in fact a black bear, surely it will remain a grizzly when our narrator recounts the night later and makes it part of the myth of herself. So these bears loom large (as do other animals and encounters in other stories), symbolically and suggestively, and not only on the page: they’re physically or psychically present enough to feel like more than “just” symbols. The stories, too, are about more than themselves, more than the moment in which they occur — they extend backward and forward into the characters’ lives and into our own like all the best myths or fables or legends. I’ve used these bears to make my point because, well, I really like bears and they’re probably the most vivid examples, but I think the point holds true for all the stories in the first half of Fish’s book.
In the second half of the collection, “Life,” the stories are fittingly more domesticated, less feral. They also seem more contained, by being set mostly indoors but also because they don’t extend as far beyond their own pages. In “Backbone” we’re told of a girl’s ride along with her sisters in her uncle’s “black Ford Falcon,” a drive on which,
Uncle Jayce smoked Raleighs and flicked his ashes out the window and they flew back into our faces. He told us to tell him when we saw a red-tailed hawk and when we did, he'd take a sip of something he had in a bottle between his legs.
We were as well-tended as livestock.
These characters are livestock, not wildlife, and even the hawk (not to mention the Falcon) is reduced — by Uncle Jayce, not by Kathy Fish — to a cheap drinking game. That’s a far cry from the mythic, suggestive creatures of the earlier stories. And these characters’ lives are generally smaller, if more familiar and facing more immediate problems (you know, the kinds of things readers want to read about when they aren’t bear-obsessed weirdos). But for me, the character in “Prague” killing time on a youthful visit to that city with the same conversations and boredom that might occur anywhere — which certainly resonates with my own experience of travel — is less compelling than the earlier characters who seem more likely to act than wait.
In “The People Here Are So Hardy And Cheerful,” Tom Bridge is stuck in Denver’s airport, calling someone named Sandy over a poor connection. “Everybody just wants to get out of here,” he tells her, and later, “I hate it here, Sandy.” It’s a compact, powerful image of the literal and metaphorical difficulties of connection and distance, and wholly true to life in a powerful way. I easily understand why some other readers and reviewers have preferred these “Life” stories over the “Wild.” And yet, I prefer the earlier tales that take as their starting point not “I want to escape!” but instead “Off I go!” Less realistic, probably, and less like most of our lives, but I guess I prefer stories more mythic than life instead of stories just like it. So I really appreciated the bifurcation of this collection, and its invitation to think about the difference.