By Popular Demand: 'Animal'
Shirley gives Lisa Taddeo's big summer novel a rating of...
Hello, and welcome to a brand new Shirley feature: By Popular Demand, in which I answer a reader’s request to assess a Big Book. (You can expect it to be a bit looser than other Shirley posts.) In this first installment, I’m looking at what has quickly become the Big Book of the Summer Amongst a Certain Set (BBSACS), Animal, by Lisa Taddeo. Not one, but two Shirley readers asked me about the suspenseful debut novel; one, my dear friend Colu, even gifted me a copy, which is a very good way to get me to read a book. Let’s open it up 👇
Even if you haven’t heard of Lisa Taddeo, I promise that you have. She’s the author of Three Women, the 2019 New York Times bestseller about the sex and emotional lives of, you guessed it, three women. It’s currently being developed as a Showtime series. While writing this post, I also learned Taddeo wrote one of my favorite features of all time in New York magazine, which is saying a lot. It is a sprawling and engrossing 2010 piece about Rachel Uchitel and the rise of the VIP host, and I spent most of the time I’d set aside to write this post rereading that article (oops).
Now, onto Animal: Taddeo is a captivating writer, full stop. By page 2, I felt like I’d been transported to a feeling as much as to a story. That feeling, in a word, was feral. Anyone who’s ever walked down a city street at night by themselves and felt the urge to turn into a dive bar, order a Maker’s neat, drink it, leave some bills under the empty glass, and walk back out into the night again—restless and powerful and vulnerable all at once—knows exactly what I’m talking about. This is a mood-ring of a book—one that, once you slip it on, will conjure a deep part of yourself and reflect it back to you. (My deep parts just happen to involve drinking whiskey at Great Jones Bar.)
Is this mood ring for the faint of heart? Why, I think you already know the answer, smarty pants! Animal starts with a married man shooting himself in the face in front of our narrator Joan while she’s on a date with another married man who she likes much more. (Not a spoiler, it’s the first paragraph.) The man is her former boss Vic, whom she’s had a years-long, half-hearted affair with—he’s all infatuated and kind of stalker-y; she’s all meh and kind of stuck. That catalyst—along with the steady beat of foreshadowed violence and the unpacking of Joan’s tragic past, plus, you know, the everyday cruelties coming her way as a woman—gives the story a mythic quality, unfolding with a sense of fate. Joan begins to stand in for all women.
That becomes pretty exhilarating as a vengeful Joan flees NYC for LA with the mysterious, epic-like mission of hunting down and befriending a woman named Alice. Alice is apparently the key Joan needs to both unlock her past and stop the traumatic, misogynistic, violent cycle that began in her childhood—no biggie. All the while Joan is narrating her efforts to a person we take to be her future daughter, and staying in a dilapidated former commune in Topanga Canyon that is constantly being circled by coyotes looking for blood. It’s all very suspenseful. And dusty. And hot. (And combines two of my favorite types of books: New York books and LA books.) Reading it in the summer will give you a Method reading vibe, which is something I made up, but is kind of like being a Method actor without having to be an asshole.
At one point, I started to worry the book would turn schlocky. It doesn’t. There are a few uneven elements, but the sentences are tight, and the observations of sex, dating, relationships, and what it means to be a hetero woman in the 21st century are crazy good and gut-punchy. Examples:
“I can tell you a lot about sex with a man to whom you are not attracted. It becomes all about your own performance, your own body and how it looks on the outside, the way it moves above this man who, for you, is only a spectator.”
“I’ve been called a whore. I’ve been judged not only by the things I’ve done unto others but, cruelly, by the things that have happened to me.”
Some of these observations are also very funny. Example:
“I suppose, like anyone, I’ve never lost the hope for perfect love to come out of nowhere. River was not brilliant but he was physically perfect and kind and a life with him would be like a Grateful Dead t-shirt.”
Speeding along here: Joan finds Alice and at some point, their conversations begin to take on a disembodied quality, which is a pretty amazing trick for a book that deals so heavily in carnality. I think this may be my favorite thing about it. At times, it reminded me a bit of reading Nicholson Baker’s Vox or another one of my favorites, Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, even though its concerns are so very different. (Or are they?)
Much will probably be made of Joan being an unlikable character (she is a woman, after all, and a home wrecker (clutch those pearls), and maybe a murderer), but that’s kind of the point here. Then again, I tend to find unlikable characters extremely likable, to the point that I can’t always determine if they were “supposed” to be likable or unlikable in the first place. (I also find people who use the “unlikable character” argument against a work of fiction to be noncritical thinkers who are (perhaps unwittingly) advancing patriarchal reading norms, and I usually tune these people out when it comes to listening to their opinions on books.)
Related: How annoying is it to be reading something in public and have a stranger ask you what you’re reading, only to have them answer that they haven’t heard of it, but they know a book that you would love and it is called: some awful, boring book written by some awful, boring dude. ❤️ this post if you know what I’m talking about.
Animal doesn’t play it safe even when it would have been easier to, which I deeply admire. It is also very fun to read and will spur many a conversation amongst its readers who may come to consider themselves kindred spirits of sorts. I’m calling this one (blurb alert!) a literary thriller, summer-reading dream.
Rating: 4 out of 5 books 📖 📖 📖 📖
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