Wild Life: A Novel [Hardcover]

Molly Gloss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 8, 2000

It is the early 1900s and Charlotte Bridger Drummond is a thoroughly modern woman. The sole provider for her five young boys, Charlotte is a fiercely independent, freethinking woman of the West who fully embraces the scientific spirit that is sweeping the nation at the dawn of the industrial age. Thumbing her nose at convention, she dresses in men's clothes, avoids housework whenever possible, and proudly supports her family by writing popular women's adventure stories. Ready to show off her knowledge of the local flora and fauna and have an adventure of her own, Charlotte joins a search party for a child who has disappeared in the deepwood wilderness on the border between Oregon and Washington. But when she gets lost herself, she is thrust into a mysterious world that not only tests her courage but challenges her entire concept of reality.

Starving and half dead from exposure, Charlotte is rescued by a band of elusive, quasi-human beasts. As she becomes a part of the creatures' extended family, Charlotte is forced to reconsider her previous notions about the differences between animals and humans, men and women, and above all, between wilderness and civilization.

Beautifully written and historically accurate, Wild Life is a highly original tale set at the very edge of civilization, where one woman takes on the untamed world of nature, and in the process, discovers much about the deepest recesses of her very own human nature.

Putting a surprising, revitalizing, feminine spin on the classic legend of Tarzan and other wildman sagas, award-winning novelist Molly Gloss delivers a rich portrait of America's northwestern frontier at the start of the twentieth century.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

One of the many pleasures of Molly Gloss's extraordinary third novel is watching it repeatedly change shape and direction before your eyes--a feat all the more wonderful since the narrative consists almost entirely of the fictional diaries of one woman. Charlotte Bridger Drummond--an early-20th-century single mother who supports five young sons in the just-tamed wilderness fringe of western Oregon by writing pulp fiction--presents herself as a bluff, free-thinking feminist, the kind of woman who would tumble her youngest son off her lap and onto the floor for whining. When her housekeeper's frail young granddaughter disappears from a logging camp, Charlotte unhesitatingly sets out to join the inept search parties. So, within 90 pages, Molly Gloss (The Dazzle of Day and The Jump-Off Creek) whisks us from pitch-perfect historical fiction to unsentimental lament over the devastation of the "dark and supernatural woods" of the Pacific Northwest to a kind of wild and woolly mystery story.

All of this is immensely engaging, mostly because Charlotte herself is such excellent if occasionally astringent company. But the book really catches fire when Charlotte herself gets lost in the woods. The diary continues through the harrowing days of wet, cold, hunger, hope, despair, and then her fantastic rescue by a band of semihuman giants of the deep woods. Introducing the Sasquatch legend into an otherwise scrupulously realistic historical novel might seem like a risky narrative ploy, but Gloss brilliantly pulls it off. Indeed, so deft is her fusing of the fantastic and the actual that by the end, the narrative transmogrifies once more into a profound and troubling meditation on wildness, nature, and human nature.

Wild Life brings to mind the works of Jean M. Auel, Marilynne Robinson, Ken Kesey (that dank Oregon setting of Sometimes a Great Notion), and more distantly Willa Cather--but the breadth and daring of Gloss's imagination really puts it in a class of its own. In a sense, unifying all of the many strands of this fictional tour de force is a fiercely candid portrait of the artist, an artist who in Charlotte's words fears "coming face-to-face with my Self on the printed page--it would chill me through to the heart," but who does it anyway. --David Laskin

From Publishers Weekly

Gloss twines just enough intellectual fiber around the sleek cord of a great adventure story to offer up a truly satisfying read. Presented as the 1905 journal of the fictional dime novelist Charlotte Bridger Drummond, Gloss's third novel (after The Jump-Off Creek and The Dazzle of Day) tells the tale of a self-avowed feminist and Freethinker and her sojourn in the wilderness of Washington's Cascade mountains. Abandoned by her husband, Charlotte supports her five boys and her housekeeper, Melba, by churning out "romantic tales of girl-heroes who are both brave and desirable." When Melba's granddaughter goes missing in the woods, Charlotte sets out, as would her heroines, to join the search party. But after days of searching, Charlotte finds herself last, for weeks managing to survive only by insinuating herself into a family of "apes or erect bears of immense size." Knowingly, Gloss plays with one of our deepest fearsDlost in the wilderness, will we be saved?Dand the myths that have grown from it. Interleaved between Charlotte's notebook entries are passages she has clipped from journals (e.g., of Samuel Butler, Willa Cather, Oscar Wilde) and excerpts from her published and unpublished fiction. Inserted among these are brief scenesDportraits, reallyDthat could be construed as Charlotte's most serious attempts to write, or as Gloss telling us what Charlotte cannot. While Gloss generates heat and humor from the friction between early 20th-century and early 21st-century attitudes, her prose is most satisfying when she describes Charlotte's housekeeper ironing or Charlotte's patient suitor batting a homemade baseball. Deep into the book, Charlotte describes the "lowbrow scientific romances" she fancies: "[M]y preference is for the writer whose language is gorgeous, whose characters are real as life, and whose stories take my poor little assumptions and give them back to me transformed." Gloss couldn't have written a better description of her own novel: the writing is gorgeous, the characters real and vivid, and the story transforming. Agent, Wendy Weil. (June) FYI: Gloss received a 1996 Whiting Award, as well as the PEN Center West Fiction Prize.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1ST edition (June 8, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684867982
• ISBN-13: 978-0684867984
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #733,864 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

How I got started writing, etc., is a long story you can read on my website. But here are the highlights of my writing life: In 1996 I received a prestigious Whiting Writers Award--sort of a MacArthur grant in a minor key. But nobody knows what the heck it is, so how did it come to be prestigious?! Probably it's the substantial chunk of change they drop on your head without warning. ("Substantial" of course being a relative term. It's not MacArthur substantial. But we paid off our house!) The Jump-Off Creek is usually referred to as "a Pacific Northwest classic" and was winner of an Oregon Book Award and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. The Dazzle of Day, which is a science fiction novel, received the PEN West Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fairly unusual for a science fiction novel to win a major PEN prize, but the Notable Book thing, not so much--it was Notable only within the ghetto of science fiction. Go figure. Wild Life, set in the woods and mountains of Washington State at the turn of the 20th century, won the James Tiptree Award for literary fantasy, although at the time I wrote it I didn't think I was writing anything fantastical. My newest, The Hearts of Horses, has been the most popular of any of my works. Not sure why. Is it that attention-grabbing cover? or "horses" in the title?!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A major novel about the West, November 3, 2000

By 

Brian Attebery (Pocatello, Idaho USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wild Life: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A delightful and original story, April 20, 2001

By 

Lynn Adler - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wild Life: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wild Life is a feral read!, February 11, 2001

By 

Rebecca Brown "rebeccasreads" (Clallam Bay, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wild Life: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.