Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

Memory and absence are at the center of this novel: the narrator, Jessa-Lynn, is dealing (or not dealing) with her father’s death, and also with the absence from her life of her first/only love, Brynn (who’d been close with Jessa and her brother, Milo, since they were all kids, and who later ended up marrying Milo, before leaving him with their daughter and her son from another relationship). Jessa numbs herself with work (she’s running the family taxidermy business) and alcohol, and doesn’t really see any problem with that: she just wants to keep powering through her days, tiring herself out, doing the work she’s always done. When her mom starts making art installations featuring taxidermied animals in sexual scenarios, Jessa is weirded out: she expects her mom to be stable and domestic, not edgy. She can only see her mom’s art as a problematic/upsetting/wrong expression of her grief, and she’s appalled when a local gallery owner wants her mom to collaborate on a show. (Meanwhile, she find herself attracted to the gallery owner, Lucinda, while also being completely incapable of having a functional relationship.)

The book alternates between Jessa’s current experiences and her memories of childhood/her teen years/her earlier adulthood; the memories let us see Jessa’s past interactions with Brynn and also with her dad, as well as more of her dynamic with Milo (who was always closer to their mom, while Jessa was always closer to their dad). I like the way the past and present narratives fit together, and I like Arnett’s writing, though it’s often describing unpleasant things (dysfunction and humidity and sweat; animal guts and insects). Here’s a rare passage describing some kind of nice smells, when Jessa is driving after the rain: “The world cracked open and smelled fresh cut, seeping green over everything. I drove with the windows down and inhaled the world: the dank scent of wet dirt at a construction site, orange clay smoothed into wet puddles at the high school baseball field, the fruity shampoo as my hair whipped around my face” (69). At first, I wasn’t sure how into this book I was: family dramas aren’t always my thing. But as the book progressed, I found myself totally into it; a chapter near the end definitely made me cry, and now I definitely want to read Arnett’s new novel, With Teeth.


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