The Dominant Animal: Stories by Kathryn Scanlan
Reviews
By Wilson McBee
Kathryn Scanlan writes sentences so delicious that you want to roll them around your mouth like an expensive chocolate. Each of the pristine, compact stories in her debut collection, The Dominant Animal, links one ingenious grammatical construction to another in a chain of virtuosic prose. Scanlan follows in the tradition of earlier meticulous sentence-crafters such as Diane Williams, Barry Hannah, and Gary Lutz, employing a self-conscious, stylized mode of expression that is especially attendant to the sounds of words and juxtaposition and that is, above all, concerned with the avoidance of clichés and all well-worn phrases. All writers revise, naturally—and revise, and revise, and revise—but reading The Dominant Animal one gets the sense that every sentence has been worked over and polished to an extreme degree.
At just over 130 pages, The Dominant Animal could be read in a couple hours, but I wouldn’t recommend it. There are forty stories packed in here, and they take time to digest. It’s almost as if each one needs to be read first for the pure physical pleasure of Scanlan’s language, and a second time to get at what she is intending to convey through the characters and situations described. The narrator of “Mother’s Teeth,” Brenda, has come home to take care of her cancer-suffering mother. As Brenda takes her mother to the doctor, runs errands for her, and helps around the house, long-dormant conflicts emerge. One recurring disagreement has to do with food. Since Brenda’s mother has opted for a more expensive version of chemo that doesn’t affect your stomach, she can badger Brenda about her birdlike appetite. Tucking her mother into bed, Brenda sums up their relationship with a horrifying memory: “Here she was—the woman who made me eat until I puked, then made me eat the puke.” A paragraph near the beginning of the story that describes the search for Brenda’s mother’s false teeth is a showcase for how Scanlan’s fine-tuned attention to diction and sentence structure inflects her underlying meaning. The passage is such a marvel of anaphora, alliteration, and consonance that it needs to be quoted in full:
They were not in her hutch of collectible china or her cabinet of costly curios. They were not in the closet where she kept the expensive clothes she wore. They were not in the closet where she kept the more expensive clothes she did not wear. They were not in the small, sodden bag of garbage beneath the kitchen sink or in the garbage, in the larger bin of garbage that smelled like the corpse of an animal.
Each sentence here turns on a felicitous repetition of sounds: the ch and hard c in the first sentence, the cl and short e vowel sound in the second and third sentences, and the hard b and g sounds in the last. Even though the teeth are not found in this moment—they turn out to be right where they should be: in Brenda’s mother’s mouth—the paragraph nevertheless winds to an important destination, the phrase corpse of an animal, which is all the more shocking for the fact that the words themselves fail to fit into the surrounding pattern. The paragraph, then, serves as both a premonition of the story’s ending, as well as an encapsulation of its thematic concerns—the unsettling vectors that connect eating, corpulence, and death.
Connections between material wealth and eating, key in “Mother’s Teeth,” recur frequently in The Dominant Animal. Nearly all of the characters here are comfortable if not upper class. The settings are mostly suburban. Wolfing down food—the oldest form of conspicuous consumption—becomes a way of giving life meaning, while the contrasting states of hunger or indigestion reflect a deep personal trouble. In “Salad Days,” a couple discover a connection between the free lunch buffet at a new casino in town and their ability to be successful at the slots and on the golf course. But when a new chef is hired, and the menu changes, their luck changes, and they are suddenly at odds with each other. In “Please,” the narrator and her partner vacation in Rome, but the narrator finds herself touring the city on her own when her partner falls victim to a bad case of constipation. The image of a pigeon shitting on a statue becomes a wry symbol for her situation, “releasing from its underneath carriage a loose white drib that slid down the woman’s cheek like a teardrop.” At times the book seems to present itself as a fanatical experiment in proving that you are what you eat. And the frequent unflinching references to the digestive system’s rude conclusions imply a darkly realistic perspective on where an obsession with the fleeting joys of consumption will lead you.
Drinking, eating, shitting, fucking: these are our most animalistic behaviors, and it’s no coincidence that animals come up a lot in these stories. While a hardcore animal-rights activist might seek to prove to you how animals are like people, Scanlan shows how people are like animals. In the final line of “Florida for Lovers,” the narrator finds herself being squeezed by a lover the same way she used to squeeze a pet bird. “Small Pink Female” describes dinner dates as “protracted sessions of mastication.” Parents often value their pets above their children, as in “Colonial Revival”: “In addition to the show cats and gray mare, many other animals came and went, dogs and parakeets and barn cats and different horses—and they had several children, too.” Each of the three sections in the collection’s title story revolves around an encounter between the narrator and a dog, and in each instance a man, a potential lover, appears alongside the canine as a comparative example of carnality. In the final scene, the narrator leads a man into the path of a full moon, where he starts to howl, a canine version of foreplay.
The danger in equating people with animals in fiction is that you might begin to treat the consciousness of people and that of animals the same way, as ultimately unknowable. But the biggest difference between animals and humans is that even as we succumb to many of the same primal urges, we are at least able to examine ourselves and try to make sense of our actions. With their bizarre scenarios, vibrant imagery, and insightful metaphors, the stories in The Dominant Animal operate as exquisite specimens of high literary art. If they falter, it is in their habitual refusal to let us into the minds of their characters. What is the narrator of “The Dominant Animal” seeking as she lures the wolfman into the woods at night? Is she a victim or a seducer—or something in between? What emotions does Brenda feel as her mother fades away? In the effort to create one startlingly precise turn of phrase after another while bowling the reader over with the potency of her metaphors, Scanlan too often overlooks the internal, necessarily prosaic grappling with life that gives characters dimension. She leaves us on the outside of these characters, looking at them the same we way look at our pets, asking ourselves, “What are they thinking now?”
Wilson McBee is a staff writer for SwR. He is currently working on a novel.
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