Hot Animal Love: Tales of Modern Romance (Paperback)

by Scott Bradfield (Author) "Of course I respected Sammy..." (more)
Key Phrases: quack quack quack quack, fellow dogs, day clerk, Whistling Pete, Papa Bear, Merry Christmas (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Bradfield (Good Girl Wants It Bad) hopes to elevate "interspecies harassment" to high art in this collection of allegorical stories, most of which have animals for protagonists. But like a dog that won't stop barking, these stories echo the same themes—of cheating men and the women who love them, the ridiculousness of academia and the inability of language to communicate our deep desires. Bradfield tries for misanthropic satire of feel-good psychology: in "Men and Women in Love," a psychotic woman tells her would-be lover, seconds before she smashes his head with a golf club, that "Some things are really real." Told as a series of documentary interviews, "Angry Duck" mourns the passing of Sammy the duck, who shot to stardom as a poet with lines like "quack quack quack (ad infinitum)... SHUT UP!" Since "compelling natural odors are not convertible into rich text format," two clever canines electronically conspire to make their owners fall in love so that the dogs might be together forever in "Doggy Love." George Orwell's animals proclaimed "Four legs good, two legs bad"; Bradfield and his creatures seek to eradicate the "false dichotomy of humans-slash-animals," only to wind up howling at the wind.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Animals have important lessons to teach us about nature and the simple joys of life. Or do they? If they were afforded the social mobility, credit and literary aspirations of humans, perhaps they'd try their paws at Internet dating, too -- or worse, follow the path of Sammy the Duck, a bitter alcoholic poet teaching at a New England College and trying desperately to finish his second book of verse.

Like Aesop for a multicultural age, Scott Bradfield plumbs these muddled anthropomorphic depths in Hot Animal Love. Bradfield, the author of The History of Luminous Motion and the Orwellian Animal Planet, is a master chronicler of the absurdity, emptiness and beauty that riddle modern life. With this collection, he continues his meditation on rudderless humans and only slightly less ambivalent talking animals. These tales read like a tragicomic romp through society's most sensitive subjects, including the inescapability of mortality and the imprecision of language.

In a subtle racial parable, Sammy the Duck meets what we can only imagine is a gruesome end after unwisely wandering the streets of Singapore. He believes that the copy of Rilke he carries under his wing might let him pass as an intellectual in a human world that sees duck as an entree.

The characters in the people-only stories are less accessible than the animals. Bradfield's women, especially, are enraged and disassociated. In "Queen of Apocalypse," Harriet, a self-mutilator, connects with her long-deadened emotions through the pain of childbirth. Bradfield does better with a lighter touch. He delivers more incisive commentary on the disconnect of modern life when two characters visit an al fresco coffee bar that provides the sophistication of a European outdoor café in an indoor mall.

Like most academics, Bradfield, an English professor at the University of Connecticut, cannot resist poking fun at his milieu. Quips on "the cosmic Blakean nature of being a, you know, a duck" probably go over well with core readers of literary animal fiction, whoever they might be, but sometimes he comes uncomfortably close to being just flip. Bradfield is at his weakest when he offers glib cultural commentary at the expense of developed characters.

In his animal stories, Bradfield seems best able to lift above clever misanthropy and aim for something transcendent. One of the most affecting tales, "Penguins for Lunch," follows Whistling Pete, a married middle-aged penguin who seduces countless penguinettes in a promiscuous bid for immortality. Moored in his middle-class penguin life, Pete can't fly, but he's trying in all sorts of ways to lift off. Imaginative, deeply compassionate and impossible to reduce to simple parable -- what more can you ask of a penguin story?

Reviewed by Caroline Hsu
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf (August 16, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786715766
• ISBN-13: 978-0786715763
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,527,939 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
  
  (Publishers and authors: Improve Your Sales)