Karen Joy Fowler and Jonathan Lethem
I have neglected to mention two quite extraordinary books that I read recently--extraordinary in quite different ways.
Karen Joy Fowler's novel is entitled "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves," and the Lethem book is "Motherless Brooklyn."
For convenience, let's call the Fowler book WAACBO. The narrator, Rosemary, had a brother and a twin sister, Fern, but both vanished from her life--her sister when she was quite young, and her brother later in her childhood. All the reviews felt compelled to divulge a fact that only appears when one is well into the book--that the twin sister was a chimpanzee, brought into her family by her father, an academic psychologist at Indiana University, who is investigating the chimp's social development in relation to his own children. And then a point came when the chimpanzee had to go--and Fern disappeared from Rosemary's life.
The novel’s narrator, Rosemary, is an ideal informant: witty,
skeptical, and damaged by the loss of her twin. Her storytelling is very engaging. She occasionally switches to a wisecracking use of the second person to draw in the reader. She has lived an observed life from the start, in a long household experiment with the chimpanzee as a twin sister. Where other children had preschool and baby sitters, Rosemary had lab exercises and grad students, and the omnipresent, amber-eyed, diaper-wearing Fern, a hairy, wiry whirlwind of a sister who funnels her lips and scales furniture in a trice.
We meet Rosemary in later life, looking back over these childhood events. WAAACBO is a fascinating book, very well written, and the author has drawn on numerous accounts of experiments in which baby chimps have been brought up alongside human children.Lethem is, of course, a very accomplished writer, and in "Motherless Brooklyn" he takes on a task--at which he succeeds brilliantly--of having a first-person narrator who suffers from Tourettes Syndrome: Lionel Essrog has all sort tics beside the standard one of suddenly shouting out inappropriate phrases, or obscenities, or mashing up one set of words into another that sounds similar: Grand Central Station might become Sand General Tension. He obsessively touches things, and numbers play a big role in his thinking. He and a couple of other boys--orphans from an orphanage--are recruited into a hapless detective agency, or is it a car service?, run by one Frank Minna, and the novel opens with Lionel and another of Minna's 'boys' trailing Minna on some mysterious assignment that leads to his death. The novel then follows Lionel as he solves the mystery of Minna's death--a quest that involves the convoluted past history of Minna's life, and that of his wife, his brother's embrace of Buddhism, Japanese businessmen buying sea-food in Maine...and much else.
But you have to keep reading, and you have to admire how Lethem sustains the Tourettish (can one say that?) narration.
Some readers might get a bit tired of the Tourettes schtick, or the seemingly endless twists and turns of the story line: but I certainly enjoyed the book and stuck with it until the end.