I Appear To Be Having a Human Emotion: A Review of Kristen Arnett's Mostly Dead Things

I’m not a crier. Not at all. It’s a matter of principle. And self-control. I’ve been accused of being emotionally constipated on more than one occasion; it’s usually my mother leveling those accusations. Cries have to sneak up on me from behind and surprise me, conking me over the head. And so when I reached the final act of Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett, at the scene where our protagonist, Jessa, breaks in to her childhood home to care for her grieving and traumatized mother—bathing her, holding her, literally picking her up off of the floor—I was startled to note that tears had begun dripping off the tip of my nose and onto the page. The book had enticed me with it’s strangeness and it’s hilarity, but had come round behind and made me feel things. Sneaky.

I began by laughing and delighting in the weird, breathtakingly specific world created by the taxidermy shop, the run-down and odd Central Florida town, and the Morton family home. In the middle part of the novel my emotions morphed into a prurient, morbid fascination at the slow-motion disaster underway amongst this cast of characters. And by the end I was aching for everyone in the story. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a story in which grief and childhood and how we are loved and damaged by our loved ones are more devastatingly examined. I certainly can’t think of one. It got me right in my soft, meaty bits.

Everyone is awful and wonderful: so human that the book aches with it. At one point Jessa’s mother remarks that: “It’s hard to talk about the ugly parts. How we can be that terrible and still worthy of love.” This feels right. This feels like so much of the point. Everyone is fucked up but everyone is trying so hard. And there’s a real beauty and tenderness in that trying.

There’s also a very specific kind of beauty in the unvarnished realness with this the place of the novel is rendered. It’s so specific and so evocative. I can smell the beer, the unwashed hair, the fried chicken, the roadkill. I can feel the heavy, Florida heat and hear the crickets. The Morton house is like every house I spent any measure of time in as a child. I admit I have no prior context for gators, but the writing is sure enough that I don’t need one to see and smell and hear it all. Nothing in this world is gleaming and moneyed and perfect—nothing is heightened to the unreality of wishful thinking you often find in fiction—it is lime buildup on the shower heads, and crumbs rubbed in to old carpets, and water drunk hot and chemical tasting from a hose. Wash cloths are faded. Clothes are dirty. Bodies have stretch marks and fat and skin tags and blackheads and odors.

On the surface Mostly Dead Things is a story in two tracks. One: a family headed by Jessa—an emotionally unavailable Floridian taxidermist and frustrated lesbian who inherited the family business—dealing with the aftermath and grief of the father’s suicide, the grieving mother’s madcap, sexed taxidermy art, and the abandonment by Brynn—Jessa’s sister in law and also the only woman she, or her brother, have ever really loved. Two: the story of how the family got to that point.

Mostly Dead Things brings the dead things early. “How we slice the skin:” is how the novel opens, and what follows with a detailed description of how one might prep a dead animal carcass for preserving and taxidermy. And the “dead things” in the novel do start as the animals in the family taxidermy shop being worked over by Jessa and her dad, and even at times her brother and her niece and nephew and mother. And the detail with which the act of taxidermy is described is right on the money—trust me, I’m an (amateur) taxidermist. But soon the dead things are the grieving family, their intimacy and love (“Our intimacy was an uprooted plant, shriveled and withered.”), Jessa herself (“Nostalgia carved out my insides, padding my bones until my limbs stuck, splayed. Frozen in time, refusing to live.”), and those lost to them.

And still this novel about loss and pain and actual dead things ends on a hopeful note. A pretty odd one, involving two siblings giving a trio of taxidermied peacocks a beer-soaked “Viking funeral” at the gator-infested lake in the local park, but a hopeful one. Or maybe a human one. And damnit it made me cry (just a tiny bit) again.

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett is out with Tin House Books in June of this year (2019). I promise: it will surprise you.

Death Envelops This Book Like A Turtleneck Sweater: A Review of Jim Krusoe's Girl Factory

Girl Factory starts with an incident to which we can all relate. Jonathan, a lowly employee at a yogurt shop, frees a dog from the pound and it immediately kills a boy scout. I hate when that happens.

In Jim Krusoe’s world, every decision we make is life or death. I was thinking about Girl Factory a few weeks ago as I stood behind a moving car and calmly told the driver to go ahead and hit me. In that moment, it was crucial that I stop this car from stealing the parking spot I was saving for my brother. For a brief moment, I was the kind of guy that was prepared to get flattened over something really, really stupid.

It turns out that Jonathan is the type of guy who will forego his own future to save six women trapped in suspended animation in the basement of the yogurt shop where he works. Warning:  This book contains naked women immersed in giant cylinders of yogurt. It’s also laugh out loud funny and very dark.

Jonathan is looking for a cause, something to believe in. In the opening chapter, he reads about a genetically enhanced dog that is being held at the pound. (Later, this same dog will help a blind man count cards in Vegas.) Jonathan doesn’t consider any options before deciding to rescue him. In his rashness, he releases the wrong dog and we already know what happened to the boy scout.

We learn about Jonathan’s old girlfriend, who may or may not be one of the women in the basement, and their college group honoring extinct animals. We meet a strange cast of characters including the owner of the yogurt shop (who is beaten to death) and Jonathan’s neighbor Captain Bloxheim (who dies alone in his apartment). Death envelops this book like a turtleneck sweater.

By now you’re probably wondering: Why are women submersed in yogurt in the basement of the yogurt shop? You might even be wondering why the yogurt shop has a basement. In Jonathan’s search for meaning, these questions are irrelevant. All that matters is that he save the women. And this involves a very elaborate process of getting them out of the yogurt cylinders and into a solution of water and liquid detergent in precisely the right amount of time. It’s so crazy that it almost makes sense.

With the whole death being a turtleneck sweater thing, you’re probably able to guess the success of Jonathan’s efforts. In one of the most telling moments of the book, he imagines he’s talking to the customers coming into the yogurt shop:

“You think you are looking at a contented employee of a comfortable suburban yogurt shop, but you are wrong, wrong wrong. Because the person you are looking at has been given only one thing to do, out of the countless things people can accomplish in life, and guess what? He can’t even do that.”

Despite all of the strangeness, Krusoe hits these moments of human frailty perfectly. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to save women floating in yogurt or a parking spot for your brother, every action is an opportunity to find out what you stand for. What if Jonathan had rescued the correct dog at the beginning? It would have been him that took Vegas for four hundred thousand dollars with a card-counting canine instead of that blind guy. And maybe his boss wouldn’t have been beaten to death before he could explain the women in the basement to Jonathan. And just maybe, he would have never found out about the women in the first place. The most trivial decision you make could change your whole life.

Or you might kill a boy scout.