We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Pen/Faulkner Award - Fiction)

by Karen Joy Fowler

Narrator, Rosemary Cook, begins her story in the middle. "I spent the first eighteen years of my life defined by this one fact: I was raised with a chimpanzee," she tells us. "It's never going to be the first thing I share with someone. I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren't thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern's expulsion, I'd scarcely known a moment alone. She was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half, and I loved her as a sister." Rosemary was not yet six when Fern was removed. Over the years, she's managed to block a lot of memories. She's smart, vulnerable, innocent, and culpable. With some guile, she guides us through the darkness, penetrating secrets and unearthing memories, leading us deeper into the mystery she has dangled before us from the start. Stripping off the protective masks that have hidden truths too painful to acknowledge, in the end, "Rosemary" truly is for remembrance.

• ISBN10: 0399162097
• ISBN13: 9780399162091
• Publish Date: 30 May 2013
• Publish Status: Remaindered
• Imprint: Marian Wood Books/Putnam
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 320
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

2.5* rounded up.

I live under a rock. I do. Otherwise, I would have probably known what the big twist in this book was all about. But I didn't, and that was ok.

However, even not knowing that there even is a twist didn't help me enjoy the book more than I did, and here is why:

The beginning of the story was awesome - the MC, Rosemary Cooke, is inadvertently arrested when another woman goes mental on her ex-boyfriend in a cafeteria.
What a great start to a story!

Unfortunately, from there on the book lost momentum while Rosemary tells about her childhood and introduces us to her family, and how her and her family's lives have fallen apart after her sister and brother disappeared. There is also the "big reveal", after which the book continues in search for a conclusion.

Fowler takes up an interesting story full of thoughtful observations and quirky dialogue, but I could not help feeling that the issues Fowler tried to address where over-written and drawn out to an extent where I lost interest. What's more, even my usual enthusiasm for animal welfare issues and philosophy near enough extinguished over the question what the book was trying to do.
Did the interjections of literary and philosophical quotations try to aid the message of the book or were they meant to lend an air of validation to what would have otherwise been a perfectly good coming of age story or family saga?

I know this book has received a lot of praise but it just did not do much for me.

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

First and foremost, I must advise this review will contain a slight spoiler about Rosemary’s sister Fern. I did try to write this review spoiler free but it proved impossible to talk about what made this book interesting without mentioning Fern. I am not sure if this is a real spoiler, as some covers and synopsis I have read give away that Fern is in fact a chimpanzee.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves begins in the middle of the story; Rosemary is in college, her brother Lowell is a fugitive, wanted by the FBI for domestic terrorism and her sister Fern has disappeared. As the novel progresses in a non-linear format, the puzzle starts to make a lot more sense. Karen Joy Fowler’s novel takes the tragic story of a dysfunctional family and makes it a little more complicated.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Karen Joy Fowler, all I knew about this author was the fact she wrote The Jane Austen Book Club, which I got the impression was a chick-lit but it is a book about books so I plan to read it. After a little research I found that Fowler likes to blend genres; historical fiction with fantasy (Sarah Canary) and chick-lit with mystery (Wit’s End). Having now read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves I know I need to experience her writing again. She appears to be an author that is willing to try something different and give the reader a different experience every time.

While the novel doesn’t begin at the start, the story really begins in the 1970’s when an ordinary Midwestern family take on a baby chimpanzee and raise it as Rosemary’s sister. The two toddlers grow up together, but this makes life a little complicated for Rosemary. While Fern did develop some human social skills; there were some negative effects for Rosemary. No, Rosemary didn’t start flinging poop at people, but her social skills cause plenty of problems when she went to school. They were close sisters despite some problems, but then Fern was taken away; the term ‘went to the farm’ was mentioned which is messed up.

This novel takes on a very complex subject and the mental and psychological effects on a primate in a human behavioural study but also the family involved. The book moves erratically over forty years of Rosemary’s life and the reader is subjected to the scars and damage this whole situation had on her. We are confronted with the difficult subject of advancing science and where we should draw the ethical line in the sand. However, you have Rosemary’s father who has a doctorate in physiological behaviours on one end of the spectrum and then her brother who is part of the Animal Liberation Front on the other side.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves becomes a novel not only full of psychological drama but also about how we treat animals and the environment. There are plenty of complex issues that the reader has to work through but I found that Karen Joy Fowler presented her argument perfectly. Not just jamming her ideals down our throats, she told a story and let us she just how damaging the situation can be. Each part begins with a quote from Franz Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” (“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie”) which is about an ape called Red Peter who learns how to behave as a human and presents his report to an academy of his transformation. This tiny little addition to the book really help seal the deal for me, as this is a satire on the Jews’ assimilation into Western culture as well as a look at evolutionary theory.

I have to admit from the beginning of this novel I wasn’t sure what to expect, beginning the book in the middle was interesting but I was sceptical on how it would work. Karen Joy Fowler handled every delicate issue with such confidence and ease; I was on board with what she was doing really quickly. Yet again I am left with the feeling that I need to learn the literary theories in the psychoanalytical field, I think there is so much worth exploring. Even if you are not interested into a deep dive into psychology, this contemporary novel is fantastic and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in some good fiction.

This review originally appeared on my blog: http://literary-exploration.com/2014/11/28/we-are-all-completely-beside-ourselves-by-karen-joy-fowler/

[girlinthepages]

I didn’t really know what to expect from this book when I picked it up. It was generously gifted to me by some English professors and I was curious as I had not heard of the title nor read anything by the author previously. This book ended up being a mixed bag for me- it kept me interested in the story but I didn’t feel overwhelmingly attached to any of the characters.

The protagonist, Rosemary, has the self-proclaimed habit of telling stories starting in the middle, so when the novel beings she is attending UC Davis, though it is revealed later in the novel that the story has actually been narrated by an older adult Rosemary. Though I enjoyed reading about Rosemary’s quirky family, with her psychologist father and her eccentric relationships with both sides of her grandparents, it was a bit dizzying to read, as the narrative jumped from college to flashbacks of her childhood to mentions of the present. Fowler’s writing style was also a bit choppy, and by the end of the book I had become irritated with it.

It’s disclosed early on in the book (and on the back cover, so I don’t know why it’s not mentioned in the Goodreads Synopsis) that Rosemary grew up with a “twin” sister Fern, who is a chimpanzee, as her parents were participating in what were apparently rather popular studies in the 1970s of raising human children alongside chimpanzees in order to study growth, development, and behavior patterns and similarities. It was really interesting to learn about these studies, and often times heartbreaking, as the novel was honest about addressing the mistreatment that many animals suffer at the hands of science and research in order to make advancements for humans, especially in the field of immunology. I think that’s what kept me reading the book, even when the writing style or the characters had turned me off- the important awareness and exposure of the mistreatment of animals in research that is happening even at many universities. Rosemary’s relationship with Fern is heart wrenching and the end of the novel left me feeling conflicted, as I didn’t know whether to be relieved or upset at the trauma incurred during the duration of the novel.

What lessened by enjoyment of the book were the characters themselves. I couldn’t really find a single major or secondary character that I related to or that didn’t irritate me. The protagonist Rosemary narrates the entire book but is almost devoid of personality (this is probably somewhat due to the fact that she admits she has largely stopped talking openly with people after a scarring event during her childhood, but considering her inner monologue is narrating I expected a bit more liveliness) and the secondary characters (Harlow, her brother Lowell) seemed almost overbearing and annoying to compensate for Rosemary’s listlessness. There were a few what I suppose you could call “third tier” characters that I enjoyed (her overzealous apartment manager Ezra, her roommate Todd) that I enjoyed, but the reader barely gets any page time with them. Fowler also threw in a lot of scientific and psychological terms and references without a lot of explanation that went way over my head as someone with just a basic background in those fields, and it was annoying to feel as though I was missing out on things, and didn’t want to have to google them just for the sake of understanding one passage.

Favorite Quotes:

“…the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.” (pg 25)

“But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.” (pg 274)

Overall this book’s lower rating isn’t indicative that it was a bad read, rather that it just wasn’t aligned with many of my interests and I couldn’t really relate to it or find enjoyment in the characters. It’s an interesting story and definitely brings awareness to important issues regarding animal abuse and animal rights in a intriguing family narrative format, and I would recommend this novel to anyone interested in those fields as well as in psychology in a fiction-based format. Though I was turned off by the writing style of this novel, I’m still hoping to read The Jane Austen Book Club by the same author, which I’ve heard good things about.