I recently finished reading Animal by Lisa Taddeo. I wasn’t sure I would like it but I ended up thinking it was an amazing book. I’m pretty sure, though, that many of you won’t like it and, in fact, won’t get past the first 20 pages. For those who do, it’s an interesting and propulsive novel that races to its end and that some might find erotic.
The novel focuses on our narrator, Joan, who is fleeing New York after having watched her married lover, Vic, shoot himself while she was out to dinner with his replacement. “If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use.”, Joan tells us. Joan is addicted to love and its analogues — in particular, the adoration of men who happen to be married to someone else.
Joan’s affair with Vic is expedient. He is her boss at an ad agency and he mentors, promotes, beds, spoils and stalks her after she stops having sex with him. She found the affair expedient. “At a certain point, I began to rely on Vic for everything,” she admits. “At first I enjoyed all the praise and then I started to feel like I deserved everything I got, that he had nothing to do with it.”
Joan heads to California, stopping off in Texas to have sex with a man there. “Along the drive I had been wanting to sleep with a real cowboy, someone without social media,” she explains.
She rents a house in Topanga Canyon on a large piece of property that is also home to a well-known rapper, a hot guy in a yurt, and a wealthy older man who has recently lost his wife. Once unpacked, she almost immediately runs into the person she went there looking for—a young woman named Alice, who she believes can help her understand what happened to Joan’s parents who, we learn, killed themselves separately when she was ten.
In Los Angeles her days are filled with ruminating and shoplifting. She gets a job as a barista and meets a variety of men who want to sleep with her, including Lenny, her senile landlord, and River, the 22-year-old dropout who lives in the yurt. She pops pills and answers text messages from Vic’s angry widow.
Taddeo balances the sex, violence, and melodrama of her plot with insightful character development. Joan is almost impossible to look away from on every page. “When I saw boys in the streets with their low-slung backpacks, I thought of the girls they liked, the girls who got to be eleven and twelve and thirteen, with unicorn stickers and slap bracelets. I did not get to be any of those ages. I was ten and then I was thirty, and then I was thirty-seven.”
Alice, it turns out, is Joan’s half-sister, the product of her father’s extramarital affair. Alice is unaware of this and they become friends, but what friends! Taddeo does not craft a likable heroine. Instead, she does more or less the opposite. Joan takes a perverse pleasure in exposing the ugliest parts of herself. Her worldview is primal, opportunistic, hypersexualized: All men are sexual prospects and all women are rivals, even her new bestie Alice. “She wore no makeup and I wanted to kill her,” Joan recalls. “But first I wanted to put her in a cage, fatten her up, feed her hormones and pig cheeks and Fanta. Knock her teeth out and shave her eyebrows. I wanted her to die ugly.”
Taddeo is not a subtle writer. “Animal” is a story about trauma, how the psychic wounds of childhood draw the blueprint for a lifetime of emotional carnage and, eventually, physical violence. In the course of the novel, Joan suffers, commits or bears witness to rapes, child molestation, suicide and murder. In the midst of the financial crisis of 2008, a Wall Street trader pays her a thousand dollars to kick him in the testicles.
I know this sounds terrible but Joan’s voice is so sharp and magnetic that the reader will follow her anywhere — even to the dark and increasingly unbelievable depths her creator sends her. Joan’s values remain consistent throughout. Every husband cheats, and every adultery results in mortal injury or death. Little girls are warped by a culture that views them as sexual objects almost from birth. Joan remembers of a family friend: “His Zippo had a pinup girl on it. Long brown hair with bangs and a pink bikini. My youth was marked by such images — seeing them on playing cards or drawn crudely on bathroom stalls.”
I was about ninety percent through the book when I realized who Joan was telling her story to and it kind of changed my perspective of the whole book. The story goes a bit off the rails at the end, but the questions it asks are satisfyingly answered.
As I said at the beginning, this book is not for everyone. But it’s quite a story and Taddeo can craft some killer narrative and has a great gift for aphorisms. When I first started the book, I wasn’t sure I would finish it but, as I got into it, I felt I needed to see what happened next and I’m glad I finished it.
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