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The Study of Animal Languages: A Novel - Hardcover

Stern, Lindsay

 
9780525557432: The Study of Animal Languages: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525557431 ISBN 13: 9780525557432
Verlag: Viking, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

"An unabashedly smart and affecting portrait of the strains of a marriage." —Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie 

Meet Ivan and Prue: a married couple - both experts in language and communication - who nevertheless cannot seem to communicate with each other

Ivan is a tightly wound philosophy professor whose reverence for logic and order governs not only his academic interests, but also his closest relationships. His wife, Prue, is quite the opposite: a pioneer in the emerging field of biolinguistics, she is bold and vibrant, full of life and feeling. Thus far, they have managed to weather their differences. But lately, an odd distance has settled in between them. Might it have something to do with the arrival of the college's dashing but insufferable new writer-in-residence, whose novel Prue always seems to be reading?

Into this delicate moment barrels Ivan's unstable father-in-law, Frank, in town to hear Prue deliver a lecture on birdsong that is set to cement her tenure application. But the talk doesn't go as planned, unleashing a series of crises that force Ivan to finally confront the problems in his marriage, and to begin to fight - at last - for what he holds dear.

A dazzlingly insightful and entertaining novel about the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand each other and ourselves, The Study of Animal Languages marks the debut of a brilliant new voice in fiction.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers magazine. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University. The Study of Animal Languages is her first novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One
 

All my life I’ve been waiting,” says my father-in-law, through the stall door. We have stopped at a rest area along the in- terstate, halfway between our homes. I would meet him back in the car, if only he would stop waxing poetic.

“Frank?” I face the mirror, smoothing the hair over my thin- ning spot. “I’ll be—”

“First for school to end,” he interrupts. “Then for my twen- ties, then for success. Marriage, children, et cetera. For them to leave. For their children. Then the waiting became less conspic- uous. Waiting for the cry of boiled water. For the paper. For spring. It took a mighty long time to understand that what I’d been waiting for wasn’t each thing, actually, but the chance to wait for whatever came next.”

The toilet sounds, mercifully. It is not Frank’s, however, but the door of the adjoining stall that swings open. An elderly woman advances, angles toward the sink. She has been listening. She rinses her hands.

“Sorry,” I volunteer. “Men’s is out of order.”

Through the mirror she delivers a qualified smile, snaps her wrists over the drain, and departs. When I look up Frank is shuffling toward  me, coaxing the tongue of his belt into its loop. His shirt is too broad for his shoulders, and his face appears, as it usually does, to harbor some inconvenient hope.


He follows me back into  the food mart, where  I pay for a lukewarm coffee and  the  packaged  croissant he's selected. My watch reads half past five.

"Looks  about time for your meds," I say.
 
Grimacing, he turns away, pushing open the glass door. Out­ side a shy rain has started, colder than it looks.

"You know  what  it does to me,  right?"  he says, as we fold ourselves into the car.

"Come on. I promised your daughter." "Promised  her what?"

"That you'd be comfortable." I stab the ignition, but the car resists. "She wants you comfortable."

Prue hadn't wanted  him to come at all, in fact. He's unstable, she'd said again this morning, as I downloaded  an audiobook-a biography of Noam  Chomsky  I should have read long ago-for the drive up. This  was an exaggeration,  though  Frank  has been less predictable, lately, than  in the six years I have known  him, phoning Prue at odd hours to kvetch about the government, or to solicit her "scientific opinion"  on matters completely outside her purview. She had tried to convince him to cancel the trip, but he had insisted. She would be delivering the College's annual  public lecture in the Life Sciences tomorrow, and he was determined to attend.  With  Prue  scrambling to finish  her  tenure dossier, and with  Frank  lacking  both  a car and  the  money to rent one, the task of ferrying him from his studio in Chester, Vermont, to our home in Rhode Island had fallen to me.
The engine sputters  to life. I swing an arm  behind  his seat, glancing back to find  a Labrador  between our taillights, towing a woman  in heels. I slam the brakes. She flips me off and stag­ gers after the dog, tenting a newspaper over her hair.

"It evicts me," Frank  says, "from  my goddamn skin. Turns me into a sleeping and eating machine,  is what it does."

The  Clozaril, he means. Prescribed for schizophrenia and, in rare cases-among them, Frank's-bipolar disorder.

"Like there's a twelve-foot margin between me and the world, is what it's like," he adds. "Between me and my own head."

"You seem present enough  to me," I say. He has complained about  the side effects of Clozaril  before-the night sweats, the vertigo-but never this obliquely.

"Nothing like when  I'm off them,"  he says. "When I'm off them, I'm myself. Only trouble is the gaps."

We coast onto the highway. To our left a Christmas tree shudders by, lashed to a van.

"Gaps in normality, and whatnot." He pins the plastic sleeve of the croissant between his knees. "In my ability ... "

The sleeve pops open, releasing a stale, buttery odor. I breathe through  my mouth, feeling the swill of irritation  and fatigue he so often compels in me.

"My ability to summon the cast of mind required  to shop and chat and pay bills," he concludes.
 
You can flush the pills, as for as I'm concerned, I do not say. While  I haven't confessed as much to Prue,  I have always taken Frank's diagnosis with a grain  of salt. Part of my skepticism has to do with  that increasing  bloated leviathan,  the psychiatric in­ dustry, whose ever-expanding DSM has become so lengthy that most  people will qualify  for one disorder  or  another  over the course of a lifetime, making sanity  itself a form  of deviance. It doesn't help that Prue invokes it every time Frank  strikes a nerve, as though  his provocations were nothing but the illness, ventrilo­ quized. Not since her childhood, at least as far as I know, has he suffered   the  pivots  from  elation  to  despair  that  characterize manic depression. What she calls his "mania" strikes me more as a weakness for grandstanding.


"It's not that I see things  or anything, when the gaps set in," Frank  continues, through a mouthful of croissant. "And it's not depression. It's that everything ... how to put it ... signifies."

Feeling his eyes on me, I say, ''I'm not sure what you mean  by that, Frank."

"Have you ever been to Grand  Central Station?"
"Sure."

"When  you walk in, what do you hear?"

I blow out my cheeks, defeated-as usual-by his passionate sincerity. "I don't know ... footsteps?"
"Voices, kid." He throws  up his arms, showering  my lap with crumbs.  "Imagine  that  you could  comprehend-couldn't  help but comprehend-every conversation  taking  place in that  hall. That the voices untangled into words, hundreds  of words, each one significant."

"Fuck," I mutter, so distracted  I've missed our exit. Traffic  is mounting. The  detour will cost us half an hour, at least.

"... what it felt like," Frank  is saying now. "I could have been walking down any godforsaken street, sober as hell, and become suddenly aware of the wind, the vowel called 'wind,' aware of the trees and  their dances, and it's not that I could have named  the language they spoke, or report on it now, except to say that every­thing, everything, meant."
Through the mist a row of flashing  lights comes into view, indicating the source of the gridlock: a totaled van-half-scorched, despite the drizzle. Shallow flames lap at the engine.

"You look  tired,"  Frank   erupts,  clapping  my  shoulder  so firmly that I swerve. "What's  on your plate these days, kiddo?"

''I'm doing fine, Frank."
"Work?  Trouble in paradise?"
"Prue's fine. We're fine."

With a spurt of dread, I wonder  whether it sounds as though I am protesting too much. Things have been strained  between us lately-inevitably, I suppose,  given the  stress of her  upcoming tenure decision, though  that can't be all it is. We have never been this out of sync before. Last week, if only to set myself at ease, I bought  us discount tickets to the Gal:ipagos for...

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Verlag
Viking
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525557431
ISBN 13 
9780525557432
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
VIKING
https://www.penguin.com/overview-vikingbooks/

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