Unlikely Animals

“Just this once, maybe, someone would cheat death, edge the Grim Reaper out by a nose.”

The possibility that Emma might miraculously save Clive is raised repeatedly in the book. Ultimately, it is not Clive but Crystal and Isabella who return from the dead.

“It is miraculous how the green-clad land has returned to its virgin state, and the folds of the blue hills inspire restful dreams. When you consider that men have been getting further away from nature for decades, wearing fine clothes and living in cities, it all seems a horrid mistake.”

On his way to interview Harold, the journalist contemplates the pristine natural beauty of the park, comparing it to the decay and corruption of the “civilized” world. In the “return,” the journalist omits that the lush greenery and space itself is man-made, thus blurring the line between the wild and the domestic.

“A reboot. A fresh start. There’s lots of words for something like that, when someone needs to make a comeback after a major fall. ‘Resurrection’ is another one, although of course that word means something else to us at Maple Street, and a resurrection was really much more than anyone would ever expect.”

As well as healing her father, Emma needs to heal herself, recovering from the depressed, lethargic state into which she has fallen. This is one of several passages drawing implicit associations between Emma and Christ as healers. As the novel progresses, Emma and her family will learn to be more moderate in their expectations, no longer expecting supernatural miracles but rather appreciating the miraculous nature of human life, however brief.

“We don’t know if there’s anything after this. Maybe nothing. Maybe this patch of dirt and grass and ice and snow is all there is.”

The chorus of the dead who narrate the novel live in the graveyard, from where they observe the lives of the residents of Everton. The dead spirits disappear if they meddle in human affairs or if they cease to care about their living counterparts. The existence of a further afterlife remains a mystery in the novel.

“Isn’t that the rule? The hero can’t die, at least not until the very end of the story.”

Clive’s impending death casts a shadow over the whole narrative. Although he is incurably ill, the question remains as to whether he will survive to see the end of the school year, the opening of the musical, and the return of Crystal.

“It was instrumental to my life as a naturalist, in that it greatly deepened my sympathy with the wild creatures whose daily portion it is to face the possibility of death and tragedy at every corner.”

Here, Harold is commenting on how the animal world can teach humans about mortality and impermanence. In the novel, the abrupt and violent killing of Mavis Spooner and Ulysses the rooster by Jack the bear and Rasputin the fox serve as a reminder of the fragility of life and the brutality of nature.

“Emma remembered the elaborate bedtime stories her dad used to tell, stories that almost always ended with one of her mean classmates left to the jaws of the crocodiles of Corbin Park. If Emma’s mother was in earshot, she would say that here had never been crocodiles in the park, even if Rudyard Kipling had said there were. Kipling had lived in the area for a few years with his American wife in the late 1800s, around the time the park opened, and he said the park was full of ‘lions an’ tigers an’ bears an’ buffalo an’ crocodiles an’ such all.’ Ingrid insisted a crocodile would never survive a New England winter.”

This passage illustrates the difference in outlook between the poetry professor, Clive, and his historian wife, Ingrid. Clive is fascinated by Corbin Park primarily as an idea and as a prompt for the imagination. He is charmed by Kipling’s exotic narrative and has no interest in whether or not it is true. Ingrid, instead, is more concerned with demonstrable facts.

“One thing we’ve learned from one another, chattering away as we do, is that a good story doesn’t always follow an arrow, sometimes it meanders a little instead, so we hope you’ll excuse this tangent about Mavis and her bears. It might seem unrelated, but sometimes a minor character doesn’t become important until later, so don’t forget Mavis Spooner. The lives of the living often get tangled up in unexpected ways, especially in a town as small as ours, even when an eight-foot electrified fence splits it up.”

Following an apparent digression describing Mavis Spooner’s interactions with her bears, Jack and Jill, the narrators issue this brief apology, suggesting that all the residents of Everton are interconnected, and no character is truly marginal. Interconnectedness and community emerge as a recurrent motif in the novel. Solidarity, compassion and empathy are presented as an antidote to the inevitability of death and to the bleak social backdrop of the opioid crisis.

“Moses had heard the Starlings say several times that Clive was not supposed to be left alone, and yet they all kept leaving him unattended, going out of the house, doing whatever it is people do without their dogs. Moses was not a fancy, trained service dog, but he was a Great Pyrenees mix, a breed whose job was guarding livestock, known to be a trustworthy dog with the defenseless creatures of the world. He was very happy to guard Clive.”

This passage compares the simple and instinctive behavior of Moses to the more complex lives and emotions of Clive’s family. At least at this stage of the novel, Moses is, paradoxically, a more effective caregiver than Clive’s wife or children. The dog is driven by his domesticated instinct to protect, while Emma, Ingrid, and Auggie and pulled in different directions by emotional, professional, and social pressures.

“I think there’s some instinct to head to the woods to die. That shit’s primeval.”

A mysterious, impenetrable forest, Corbin Park is associated with death by Clive and, here, by Brayden. When Clive finally makes his way into the park, he will restore Isabella and Crystal, both of whom everyone assumes to be dead, to life.

“They’d all had several good long cries about it, because they all loved Ralph, but most of the Starlings knew Ralph would have loved the way he died. A better story than the lovers who died in the Sunset Acres hot tub.”

While Ingrid is devastated by Ralph’s death, the rest of his family cannot but appreciate the humorous side of what has happened, considering that he himself would have found his demise hilarious. This balance between the tragic and the comic, absurdity and pathos, is characteristic of Hartnett’s novel.

“You spend years thinking you’re the golden girl, and you find out that you’re a giant grouper. A big ugly fish.”

Emma’s night-time conversation with her brother Auggie the night after Ralph Kelsey’s funeral makes her realize that she has been lacking in empathy in her relations with her brother and best friend and causes her to drastically reassess her self-perception and how she is perceived by those around her. She has always assumed that she is superior to and idolized by her family and local community.

“She knew what her roommates in L.A. would say about this, how it was cruel, or inhumane, disgustingly selfish and entitled, and a big part of Emma felt that way, too, that wild animals are meant to be left wild. The other part of her felt a pure childish delight at the idea of a fox as a pet, who smiled and chuckled and wagged his big brush tail at her touch.”

Looking at Rasputin, Emma is torn between her instinctive “childish delight” and her more logical, intellectual disapproval of her father spending vast sums of money on what should be a wild animal. The tension between spontaneous joy (the joy of children, animals and the increasingly child-like Clive) and rationality is a recurring motif in Hartnett’s novel.

“‘Rasputin didn’t write War and Peace,’ Clive said, looking disappointed at his son. ‘He was a Russian monk who had magic healing powers, and he was a sexual deviant […] And he rose from the dead. Amazing guy.’”

Rasputin’s alleged powers of healing and resurrection resemble those that are attributed to Emma. In naming his pet after a historical figure associated with healing and resurrection (a failed assassination attempt), Clive is engaging in wish-fulfilment. Rasputin’s sexual proclivities further associate him with Clive, the serial womanizer. Clive’s descriptions of Rasputin tend to overlook the more scandalous and shadowy aspects of his story. It has been suggested that Rasputin’s sinister reputation and perceived excessive influence over the Romanovs precipitated their overthrow and the Russian Revolution.

“Those conversations, those rituals, were the kinds of things that make up a life. The things Ingrid was missing now.”

Ingrid has abandoned her marriage and her caring role in her family to live with the “handsome, young and healthy” Dr. Wheeler (258), but finds that she is missing her husband and the everyday rituals of her married life. Throughout the novel, Hartnett repeatedly celebrates the apparently mundane over that which is more obviously miraculous or romantic.

“Clive would have liked to see Corbin Park. But he was also a recently retired poetry professor, and he understood that a secret forest was an obvious metaphor for death, something his college students could have come up with. When Clive was ready to die, Harold would take him to Corbin Park, and there Clive would finally meet the ghost of The Sprite, Harold’s pet fox that Clive had only seen once at the edge of the woods. The Sprite was the Grim Reaper in this metaphor. ‘I’m not ready yet,’ Clive decided. ‘Maybe once the snow melts.’”

Here, again, Corbin Park emerges as a metaphor for death. It is significant that Clive conceives of Corbin Park more as a rich source of metaphor than as of a real place. Clive is convinced that the ghost of The Sprite exists and that he has already caught a glimpse of him, whereas the narrative chorus of the dead state that animals have no worldly after-life. This contradiction opens up a degree of mystery: Perhaps Clive is seeing something that the ghosts cannot, or maybe he is hallucinating or has simply seen a real-live fox on the edge of the woods.

“Anticipatory grief, it’s called, when you’re sad about something that hasn’t happened yet. Oh man, we thought at Maple Street, how we missed the excruciating pain of being alive.”

Emma is heartbroken when her father speculates that he will probably not live past the spring. The dead narrators sympathize with her feelings but also envy them. The painful awareness of transience and impending loss is a precious characteristic of “being alive.”

“We’d all stopped celebrating birthdays long ago at Maple Street, even though everyone’s birthday is written right there on our tombstones. Our birthdays were one of the earthly things we forgot about, the way we all forget what cake tastes like, or what exactly it feels like to be hugged. We’d love to be hugged again, but we can’t quite recreate the sensation in our minds. A hug must be so comforting, we think, and warm.”

The chorus of the dead again express their nostalgia for bodily life. Their longing for simple, bodily pleasures and human contact permeates the narrative.

“Emma had never realized it before, but the movie was about grief. It’s about the loss of the main character’s mother, how the pain of her absence follows him around, like a seven-foot-tall rabbit. And the beat part of the movie is towards the end, when his sister says she can see the rabbit too. When Jimmie Stewart is not all alone in the world with his grief […] Or actually, Emma thought, maybe Harvey is an enormous invisible rabbit. Maybe it’s not a metaphor at all. Sometimes magic might just be magic.”

One important facet of the animals depicted in the book is the way in which they act as symbolic vehicles for the characters’ emotions (e.g., also The Sprite as a symbol for death and the plastic frog as a carrier for Emma’s complex emotions regarding Crystal). Here, Emma reads the James Stewart classic, Harvey, as an allegory for grief, with the imaginary rabbit personifying the leading character’s pain. In a manner characteristic of this novel, which constantly pits spontaneous wonder against rationality, she immediately backtracks and favors letting “magic just be magic.”

“She stared at the frog on her desk. It stared back at her with its plastic black eyes. Crystal Nash hadn’t even been Emma’s friend when she’d gone missing, yet she was someone Emma felt she’d desperately miss all her life. No one ever stops loving their high school best friend, no matter how we lose them. Some of us at Maple Street had lost out our childhood best friends to world wars, to polio, to childbirth, to other violent ends, or just to plain old boring time and separation, but we’d all taken a piece of that love to the grave. That first love. It had shaped us all.

It had been a strange form of grief for Emma since she’d come home, losing someone whose friendship she had already lost. There wasn’t a name for it, the death of a best friend who wasn’t your friend anymore. Someone you had failed to always be there for, like you’d sworn you would, sworn best friends forever and ever, two halves of the same heart, unable to survive without the other. Someone who you hadn’t been able to help, in the end. There was no name for that mixture of grief and guilt and shame. But here was a name. It was Terry.”

The novel focuses a great deal on the childhood friendships between Crystal and Emma and between Leanne and Isabella. Indeed, these friendships are given more space than the adult romantic relationships in the text. This reflects the novel’s emphasis on childhood authenticity and spontaneity. Emma and Leanne’s use of the frog as a talisman for her complex feelings is another example of animals being used as emotional symbols and vehicles.

“Who was she bargaining with? She had always said she was an atheist, or at least an agnostic, whenever the topic came up, but secretly she thought it would be nice to believe in God sometimes, really go whole hog on the Jesus thing. It would be so great if you really felt like there was someone out there who listened to your bargains, your pleas, your promises to yourself. Like someone somewhere was keeping a lookout. We’re here, we told her, as we often did.”

Emma is surprised to find herself praying to a God she has never believed in for her father to survive until the end of term. Despite always having been an atheist, she feels a nostalgia for the religious certainties of the past. The ghosts at the cemetery silently reassure her that they are present and watching. Throughout Hartnett’s novel, the compassion and solidarity of the earthbound ghosts replaces the omnipotence and omniscience of an interventionist God. The existence of an afterlife or a supernatural realm beyond the cemetery remains a mystery.

“At Maple Street, we knew there was no ghost of the fox, no little red grim reaper waiting for Clive in the woods. In fact, Harold hadn’t seen The Sprite in over a hundred years; not since 1911, when the fox had been ten years old. It’s another one of the mysteries of the universe, what happens to animals when they die. We like to think all the animals are waiting for us, somewhere off this earthly plane, once we let go of the rule of Caring for the People of Everton. We can imagine a place beyond Maple Street, but we can’t risk letting go. Not yet. The people of Everton need us here, watching them. Cheering them on. They need to have that occasional eerie sense that someone, somewhere, is keeping a lookout.”

The ghosts of Maple Street are tied to “this earthly plane” in part because they cannot let go of worldly connections and human sympathies. Animals, who tend to live in the present, do not have a worldly afterlife. The text remains ambiguous as to the existence of an otherworldly afterlife beyond the cemetery.

“Rasputin had saved the life of the son of the Russian tsar by demanding the doctors get away from the boy, throwing all their medicine in the fire. It is now believed that the boy had hemophilia, and so the medicine they were giving him, aspirin, really was killing the poor kid.”

The Nature of Healing is a central concern in the novel. This anecdote from a biography of Rasputin, together with the backdrop of the opioid crisis, is illustrative of how actions that are supposed to heal can be terribly harmful.