Animals in upstate New York [a review]

In a world with many lifetimes of worthwhile reading always a few keystrokes away, I cherish the slim volume. A book weighing in under 200 pages provides an impetus all of its own. Like the running trail whose length matches your evening energy and leaves you eager to strap on the shoes again tomorrow. Sure, the work has to be promising. But for me, the thought always creeps in: "I could read that in an afternoon."



Justin Torres' debut work, "We the Animals," is about as promising as they come. Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, called it a "dark jewel of a book." Marilynne Robinson thought it was "brilliant, poised and pure." Both have won Pulitzer prizes.  The book comes in at a featherweight 125 pages, even with comfortable margins and ample line spacing. I did not, however, read it in a single sitting. 



Density was not the issue. Torres deploys simple, unadorned language in tracing the coming of age of a half-white, half-Puerto Rican boy and his two older brothers in upstate New York amid the often violent gyrations of their parents'  relationship. (Torres has called the work "semi-autobiographical": he is a child of a Puerto Rican father and white mother, one of three boys, and was raised in, where else, upstate New York). The book captures the wondrous discovery and exuberance of youth: dancing with dad in the kitchen, watching through the shower curtain from the tub as his parents make love. Yet there is much more pain. He sees the aftermath of his father's beatings, he listens to his mother's pleas as his father rapes her. Despite it all, or perhaps because of it, his world is ethereal, translucent. And amid the mist, with such minimal narrative guidance, one must travel slowly. 

While it bears the label "a novel" on its cover, the book might better be called something like a narrative poem. Torres layers on the detail through the accumulation of stories, without the traditional threads pulling the mass into a more recognizable narrative tapestry. But such delicate grace transcends structure. Such a tale of woe would feel heavy in hands of many a writer. That it is so light makes it all the more haunting.