Customer Reviews

Wild Life

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

In Wild Life, Molly Gloss has combined interests from her previous fiction: western history, women's lives, and the fantastic. The result is a fascinating, beautifully written, thought-provoking meditation on wildness of all sorts. Gloss's main character is a turn-of-the-century writer of scientific romances; her life and her writing are transformed when she ventures away from her Columbia River home to look for a lost child in the forests of the Cascade Mountains. The book alters, too, from light-hearted satire to desperate adventure to re-entry into the human community. Gloss has much to say about the way people in the West come to terms with the natural environment and with their own darker impulses. A beautiful book.

This highly original and astonishing novel begins with two sisters communicating about a threadbare, almost illegible diary that belonged to their grandmother, wondering how much is real and how much out of grandmother's imagination as a writer. We are thrown back a hundred years to find out. What comes out is a clever admixture of the main narrative as well as essays and adventure stories that sometimes parallel the actual, all of it ostensibly Charlotte's diary.

Although the main plot is not so believable, that is besides the point. Once that is understood, the reader gets eagerly caught up. The plot is really a backdrop or window dressing to the rest.

A quick outline: Charlotte is an educated woman, age 35, and already a widow with five sons, living in a backwater in the State of Washington near the border with Oregon. She is a writer and a feisty feminist, highly stubborn and independent, who defies as much convention as she can get away, but her neighbors are used to that. When Charlotte gets word that her housekeeper's young granddaughter is missing in the vicinity of a remote mountainous logging camp, she sets out on a long journey to find her, although others have failed. What ends in a foregone tragic conclusion for the child almost ends in one for Charlotte as well, as she becomes hopelessly lost in the woods and becomes the companion of wild animals. This is the point where the story actually comes into its own. Charlotte must now not only draw on a philosophy of life, but confront something within herself that is at once exhilarating and frightening, and will forever change her.

As we travel with Charlotte, scenes of the Northwest and the wild American frontier merge with Charlotte's reflections on spirituality, the struggle between preservation of natural resources and the encroachment of civilization, animal rights, modern inventions, independence for women, popular culture and art versus quality, as well as her adventure stories that sometimes strangely parallel her own life or at least her fantasy life. The well-documented and researched descriptions of early settlements of Washington and Oregon, and especially the evocative and haunting wilderness segments coupled with the voice of Charlotte, speak loudly to us across time. This is truly a one-of-a kind book that will pull you under its spell.

Early in the 1900s Charlotte Bridger Drummond, a thoroughly modern woman & a writer of popular women's adventures, sets out with a search party to rescue a lost child in the wilderness between Oregon & Washington.

In the beginning, Wild Life is written in a dense & informative narrative style, reminiscent of the literature of that era & Molly Gloss has captured the transformation of a self-assured pioneer woman, confident in her knowledge of the local flora & fauna, until she becomes separated from the search party.

Then Wild Life changes to short entries of despair & longer ones when the observer, the scientist in Charlotte, overtakes the pampered housewife.

When Charlotte wanders into the territory of band of elusive, seemingly human creatures & is accepted as part of their extended family, she must re-think her modern, patronizing opinion of wild animals & learn the secrets to a contented life. Then the unthinkable happens: a battle between modern men & the wild creatures she has befriended & suddenly all the layers of that revered civilization are peeled away.

Wild Life is both a joy & a labor, a remarkably absorbing, thought-provoking & endearing read. Do check out my site for my full review.

You get a lot with this book: mystery, comedy, a clear picture of pioneer life at the mouth of the Columbia river at the start of the 20th century. I was completely engrossed; I lost sleep because of this book. Outstanding prose that in itself is a pleasure to read, but the tale is so well told you feel as if you're in it rather than reading. The journal style of the book works great, in my opinion. The first half or so of the book is gritty and realistic while towards the end the book takes on a more adventurous and fantastical air. That's a word of warning to approach the book knowing that the plot may take an eyebrow-raising turn or two.

If you enjoy this book I urge you to get Diane Smith's Letters from Yellowstone. You would think these books are from the same author. Similar style, similar turn of the century wilderness setting, a focus on nature, and colorful characters featuring spitfire pioneer women. I'm off to the library for more Molly Gloss books.

Wild Life is the second Molly Gloss novel I've read, having started with her newest, The Hearts of Horses. This book was considerably denser in its nature and construction than Hearts, filled with allusions of such a variety that it was difficult at first to know what the author intended. But somehow these seemingly randomly coupled notes and interspersed quotes from folks like Samuel Butler, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Willa Cather and others all begin to coalesce and make sense in this jumbled and sometimes surrealistic tale of Charlotte Bridger Drummond's odyssey of being lost and finally found in the dark forested mountains of the Pacific Northwest in the nearly forgotten days of the "nineteen-oughts." Filled with finely drawn descriptions of how life was lived in the logged out rugged rivertowns of 1905, Gloss begins early to incorporate mysterious references to the race of giant man-like beings that were rumored even back then to exist in the dark forests and volcanic mountain regions. Think Sasquatch, Bigfoot, folks. But this is also a story of the darkness and complexity of the human heart, which incorporates tragedies both natural and man-made - timbering accidents, drownings, and even murder occur in this complex and meandering tale, which becomes perhaps just a teensy bit tedious in its second half, with its almost endless descriptions of the beauty of the Washington and Oregon rain forests where our heroine finds herself lost. The ending though redeems these long descriptive sections, and I will certainly continue to watch for other Molly Gloss titles, and already have her earlier novel, The Jump-Off Creek, in my shopping basket. - Tim Bazzett, author of ReedCityBoy

This story is sheer joy on so many levels. The protagonist, Charlotte, is a 35 yr old educated and independent widow with 5 sons, living in the pioneer outbacks in the Washington/Oregon area 100 years ago. She's managed to support her family writing "minor" romantic novels. When her housekeeper's little grandaughter disappears while under the care of the father at work in a logging camp deep deep in the forests, she sets off to help find the child. The written language is glorious..I remember my great grandmother using some of the same phrases. Her descriptions of pioneer life, life in the logging camps, the forests, and her obvious love and respect for animals and the environment is nothing short of thrilling. Charlotte becomes separated from her group and lost in the forest, eventually following a family of wild animals in an effort to survive. Very exciting, earthy, sensual, basic..

I found this book a great way to journey to the Lower 48's last wild era, the early 1900s Pacific Northwest. If you read books for their geographical location, this one is great for this region. (like Snow Falling on Cedars)

The author meshes together a journal, "writings" and third-person descriptions to tell her tale, so pay attention to the dates that are listed in each section to see how the experience changed the main character. Also it is interesting that many of the "women's rights" philosophies of the era are in the book without being overbearing. It makes it all the more interesting to see the manners in which the main character remains self-reliant.

As far as the encounter with the "other beings," I was a little put off by the abruptness of the joining and parting of company in these cases. But Gloss does some great descriptions of behaviors that have kept Sasquatch just out of man's reach.

Bottom line, read this book if your interests are the Pacific Northwest, Women's Studies and frontier life. You should like it...

I have a theory about this book. Here goes: the main character, Charlotte, is an author who has always wanted to write "real" fiction, on a par with her hero, Jules Verne. Yet she only writes pulp fiction to support herself and her sons (no mean feat in itself). This book is presented as a found manuscript, really a pile of writings tied up with a string. And the finder, Charlotte's granddaughter, wonders if the events within really happened. My guess is that they didn't "really" happen, and the manuscript is Charlotte's attempt at good, solid art. One clue is the way the story is presented, as a there-and-back-again first-person story, very popular around the time the story takes place. Obviously her notebook couldn't have survived her ordeals, and obviously she wouldn't have bothered to write as she did while trying to remain alive. For me, this was the main reason I kept reading: to figure out if it was real or not. I took special note of the interspersed "cuttings" included by Charlotte. We see what I'm guessing is a first attempt at the same story we are reading (woman gets lost, is found by primitive beings, etc.). We see newspaper clippings, perhaps collected by Charlotte while she was developing the idea for her story. I see these as hints that the story is not really what happened to Charlotte. At one point towards the end, she mentions that her own life was not worth writing about, despite how unusual she truly was. I think she felt that she had to write a fantasy ala Verne or Conan Doyle. That was the idiom she knew and respected, so it is the one she used.

Just my theory. Read it and decide for yourself!

At first, I thought that I was really going to love this book. The main character was funny and irreverent. I particularly liked the passage where she told her maid where the children were ("oh, one's out back playing with knives, another has been kidnapped by Indians, and the third is in the living room playing with the scissors). But once she goes from her life into the forest to search for the lost little girl, the story really does ramble. I was quite bored with it. I finished the book, but only because I wanted to find out if they ever found the lost girl. I was glad to be through when I did finish and could move on to something better.

Gloss not only gives us a wild feminist scrambling to support her family of five boys, but she takes us to the frontier of humanity (what is human nature really like?) at a time when the wild western landscape was already passing away. Where is the wilderness in our world if not in our own hearts? I've been thinking a lot about this since I read Molly Gloss's incomparable adventure story. The story charges right along, but when I absolutely had to put it down, it stayed right with me. This is wonderful read.