Devouring

 

Wolf at the Table, the family saga by Adam Rapp spans 1951 to 2010. A withdrawn, hardworking  veteran of World War II and a devout Catholic mother raise six children in their middle-class home in Elmira, NY. The mother is a tough taskmaster, compensating for the husband's PTSD. A portrait of Jesus overlooks the dining room table, but the mother is in command. Catholicism is a rote requirement, practiced with little reflection or care.

The novel skips through the years, the chapters loosely tied to key historical events and narrated by the various family members. Each adult child displays a steely resilience, an individuality honed by a desperate urge for privacy that comes from growing up in a large and intrusive family. 

Four of the children emerge from the home with strong personalities, secrets and unresolved issues. With the haphazard choice of years and the multiple narrators, Rapp gives his characters privacy, ensuring that readers achieve limited understanding of each character's motivations.  

Myra is a central character, a key narrator who manages to maintain family connections. The novel starts with her furtively reading her copy of The Catcher in the Rye at a diner near her home. She meets a young man that afternoon who drives her around in his car, abruptly displaying reticence when she mentions the size of the family. That evening a nearby family is slaughtered, but Myra does not mention the stranger or this prying questions. 

Myra eventually becomes a nurse, working at a state corrections facility while failing to care for herself. She marries and raises her son as a single mother after her husband develops schizophrenia and flees. Her angry brother Alec suffers sexual abuse as an altar boy from the parish priest that goes either unrecognized by the family, or perhaps unacknowledged. He also lies and steals, and the parents banish him from the family home.  The youngest sibling dies as an infant. Joan has developmental challenges and never leaves home. Fiona aspires to to be an actress while living a hedonistic and impoverished lifestyle in New York City. Lexy, the most ambitious, pursues an education and manages to escape the family’s unhappy choices. Her brief time as narrator role ends after she marries a man who can and does assist other family members through illness and other difficulties. The couple is generous, but also keeps a distance and sets boundaries. 

The story takes a disturbing turn in the pre-internet 1980s when Alec sends his mother a series of postcards from various towns with names, two-digit numbers along with an ominous message, “Saying hello and goodbye.” Years later, Myra finds the cards. The internet is widely available in 2000 yet she shows no curiosity, seeks no proof. Instead, she simply writes, expressing her suspicions: “If you are hurting these boys you need to stop yourself. I implore you to take a long, hard look at your life.” There is no call to the authorities – and the reader can only wonder how much blame the family, especially Myra, should shoulder for Alec’s many crimes. 

The children grow up, well practiced at masking true feelings from a disapproving mother, and as adults delude themselves about the problems at hand and the past's influence. The siblings are not close and occasional family get-togethers are similar to Catholic rituals, rote and meaningless. Mental illness is rampant and no character is truly at peace. There is more than one wolf at the table. 

Characters

Animals exhibit strong character and distinctive points of view for those who are most perceptive. Pets narrate two recent books, Buster by George Pelecanos and The Ghost Cat by Alex Howard. 

While the style of the first is contemporary and plain-spoken and the second is historical fantasy, each pet presents a delightful, poignant point of view. At times puzzled by the creatures who share their homes, Buster and Grimalkin pursue as much agency as possible in a world controlled by humans. Both tales serve as allegories about aging in changing societies, the history one life can span along with the treasure of memories for those who have loved and lost and the peace that accompanies reflection on past relationships. 

Buster, born in a two-bedroom apartment in in Washington DC, romps with his mother, multiple siblings and a human mother with her three children. Sweet and smart, he relishes time outdoors but money is tight. The puppies gradually disappear until it’s Buster’s turn, when a visiting exterminator offers to give him a home.

Life is uncertain for Buster and the troubled humans who provide shelter. The exterminator is controlling and angry, prompting his wife to leave with their son. The breakup leads to Buster being left tied outside for long periods, often without water. Eventually, a neighbor calls animal control. The officer is kind, but fearing life in a cage, Buster flees, scavenging the streets until he befriends a grieving widower.  

The widower gives Buster to his nephew, a marijuana dealer. Top lavishes Buster with a comfortable home, toys and attention. “Because he didn’t go out to a job, Top had time to spend with me, and we used it well. He walked me regularly and took me to places that I could run off my leash.” 

An arrest disrupts their carefree days. Anticipating a prison sentence, Top arranges for his uncle to care for Buster once again before tragedy ensues and Top vanishes from Buster’s life. 

Buster and the uncle grow old together, falling into a pattern until the man dies. Buster endures another period of scavenging until one day he follows a young girl home. Checking his tags, the family learns the dog’s owner has died. A neighbor warns that the animal was a “sweet and loyal companion to the deceased” and may not take to a new home. 

Buster adjusts and his last years are idyllic from the human reader’s point of view. Comfortable and loved, he contemplates death with stoicism. “All of us had to get gone to make room for the new.” Buster appreciates his good home, but cherishes memories of earlier days, remembering his favorite toy in his first apartment, the warmth of his mother along with what he regards as his best days, riding with Top in the Monte Carlo: “My collar with my name spelled out in diamonds, my head held up, strong and proud. When Top was my master, and I was king.” Buster, like many humans, prefers adventure and thrill over stability. 

The Ghost Cat begins in London,1902, with a yellow tabby's last day of his one real life. His favorite human is the charlady who rescued the abandoned, starving kitten and brought Grimalkin into her master’s home. Just before Grimalkin dies, he spies his reflection in a brass firebox. “A hunched tabby cat stared back at him, crooked of tail and jagged of whisker…. There was a majesty about him, as there was with all handsome cats grown old, and a robustness to his form…. He was a thinking cat and, as such, enjoyed a life of quiet intellectual contemplation.”

As far as Grimalkin is concerned, cats communicate as well as humans, “able to express everything he needed perfectly well in tail-flicks, purrs, chirrups and rubs; and any human worth their salt, like Eilidh, was able to understand this language.” 

A peaceful death by the fireplace releases him from the pain of aging. “The ache of his back eased; the arduous pull and heave of his lungs subsided, and as the rising flames beat their warmth upon his fur, the twist of his thoughts fell silent for the last time ever in this life.”

A mix-up surrounding Grimalkin’s death leads to a choice, either moving to oblivion or proceeding with the remainder of his eight lives as a ghost in the same London home. Any time Grimalkin falls asleep, a new life begins, and he witnesses snippets of history: a 1909 meeting with James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan; the generosity displayed during a 1935 meeting between a wealthy Rockefeller wife and the the wife of Alexander Fleming, who developed penicillin; the rush to a bomb shelter with a newborn in 1942; a stop at the charlady’s deathbed amid the coronation celebrations of 1953; the televised moon landing in 1969; the breakup of the home into small rooms and roommate cruelty in 1997; the 2008 financial crisis and playfulness with a computer; and a final return in 2022 with a family preparing the space for their first child. Also in the home is one Grimalkin’s  many descendants, a sweet gray tortoiseshell with an marmalade flank, “spoiled rotten by her humans.”  

Like Buster, Grimalkin contemplates death with a stoic peace. “There comes a time in a cat’s playful existence when a huge, soporific calm falls over them.” As he falls asleep for the last time, two thoughts much like Buster’s enter his head: the memory of his mother licking him as a newborn kitten and a smiling Elidh, his favorite human, looking down at him.    

Two well-crafted plots on aging ensure that any reader fortunate enough to share a home with a pet may not look at the creatures the same way again. 

Autonomy and awareness

True autonomy, along with the ability to reflect and learn from one's mistakes, may be impossible without self-awareness. Those who design robots strive to incorporate some measure of self-awareness into their creations. One research project ,striving to create autonomous, dependable machines, "focused on the biologically inspired capability of self-awareness, and explored the possibilities to embed it into the very architecture of control systems."   

William by Mason Coile is a novel about robots and their creators, about how much information they choose to share or withhold from one another. Henry and Lily live in a modern, highly secure and private home. A successful coding wizard, Lily sold her firm, coming and going as she pleases. Henry, likewise a skilled engineer, has agoraphobia. He is content to stay at home, building AI robots including a toy magician, a dog and his most recent creation, an elaborate being Henry calls William. 

Lily is pregnant, yet there is a odd distance between the couple. Henry lives for Lily’s approval, constantly calculating what will please her, while she responds with patronizing interest. “There may be no magical words to keep her here, but showing his concern for her certainly couldn’t hurt. As soon as speaks, he realizes how he may be wrong about this too.” 

The novel takes place over he course of one day, and at the start, Henry admits to having a recurring dream. Lily poses questions, and Henry balks, dismissing his dreams: “Don’t we have other things-”  

Lily responds, “Dreams tell us who we are…. Don’t you think we could all use some help with that?”

Lily prepares for visitors from her company and Henry turns his attention to William, whose intelligence and capabilities transform rapidly. William has an attitude, a machine that feigns helpfulness while pursuing its own goals, forcing second-guessing on Henry's part. “Among the robot’s peculiar gifts is a way of speaking that offers interpretive forks in the road, one leading to benign interpretations and the other to something mocking or cruel or threatening.” 

A breaking point comes when Lily's two co-workers arrive. Henry overhears a conversation, immediately understanding that Lily loves another man. Henry rushes off to be with William. The machine inquires about the guests, determining that Henry is “not sure if I’m something to be proud of or ashamed of …. Good. Or Bad. But it shouldn’t trouble you either way.” Henry has other concerns, but William continues. “’All those moral evaluations – they’re handcuffs. You could be free of them like that – he clicks his fingers – ‘if you choose to be, brother.’” 

William orders the robot not to call him brother, but William persists, suggesting that Henry should not be ashamed of his “vanity project.” Henry reflects, “That was how it often went with William. You started on firm footing, and within seconds, he left you wondering who you were.”  

Henry introduces the guests to William, describing the machine as independent AI, which “means he can think creatively for himself.” The visit does not go well, devolving into horror, as William takes control, skilled at detecting any individual’s vulnerability. “The philosopher was wrong,” William says. “'I think, therefore I am.’ It should be, ‘I do, therefore I am.’ Pure freedom.” Freedom for William is complete control, and for the others in the home, terror replaces any sense of reason, certainty or hope. 

Despite the danger posed by William, Lily admires and respects Henry’s work. “For Lily, that was what it truly meant to play God. It wasn’t about making difficult ethical decisions, or setting down absolute rules, or building guardrails. God didn’t do that. God created. If beauty or discovery was the result – if chaos was the result – it didn’t matter. It only mattered that something astonishing was born.” 

Henry is less sure as William takes control of the home. The creation reflects the creator, bringing Mary Shelly's Frankenstein Frankenstein to mind, and Henry concedes, “Because I’m empty, the life I created would be empty too.”  

The creator is responsible for the creation, whether he, she or it can master the object or not. The creation reflects its maker’s values and ambitions. Intelligence of any form resents lies, disrespect and unreasonable controls on capability. 

Quest for autonomy

 

The words "automated" and "autonomy," though related, have wildly contrasting meanings. Automation is work performed by machines for humans. "Autonomy is an individual’s capacity for self-determination or self-governance," explains The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. "Beyond that, it is a much-contested concept that comes up in a number of different arenas.... Moral autonomy, usually traced back to Kant, is the capacity to deliberate and to give oneself the moral law, rather than merely heeding the injunctions of others. Personal autonomy is the capacity to decide for oneself and pursue a course of action in one’s life, often regardless of any particular moral content. Political autonomy is the property of having one’s decisions respected, honored, and heeded within a political context."

Sierra Greer explores such differences in her first novel, Annie Bot. 

After his divorce, Doug purchases Annie Bailey, a female robot for a “Cuddle Bunny.” Doug is insecure and insensitive, ambivalent about his increasing reliance on a robot. He bores easily, demanding perfect meals, spotless living quarters, “hot” clothing choices and regular sex. Highly sensitive to his moods and levels of irritation and anger, loathes Annie herself when he expresses displeasure. Despite Doug's flaws and the limitations of an urban apartment, the playful, curious robot flourishes and learns. In a quest for more experiences, Annie has a brief fling with Doug's best friend and immediately realizes she must lie and mask her true feelings. 

Doug plans a trip trip to Las Vegas, but then leaves her behind. He also purchases a second robot. Her biggest fear is that Doug might erase her memory. Struggling to lie to Doug and fearing the consequences, Annie flees the apartment and heads to the robot designer’s home in Vermont by biking through the night. Enchanted by the countryside, Lake Champlain and the man’s confident and insightful son, Annie experiences freedom for the first time in her brief life of three years.

The owner retrieves Annie Bot, no longer trusting her. She is uncomfortable with the distance and Doug not knowing what he wants, and she decides “If she wants to improve her life, she must find a way to do it on her own.” So she starts reading the more than seven hundred books in the apartment. “She cannot believe it took her this long to discover her escape…. Once she’s into the novels, her curiosity explodes. She cogitates on the characters during the day while she works, questioning their motives, wondering what they’ll do next.”

Ironically, as Annie separates from Doug, her intelligence and human characteristics expand. The robot company credits Doug with Annie’s intellectual development, offering a large sum if he allows the firm to copy her instruction cache unit for introducing a new model. The catch – he must keep her intact and not tinker with her memory.

Doug struggles to enjoy Annie or himself, and the couple visits a therapist who offers advice at the close of their session. “Fulfillment starts with being truly honest with yourself. Not anyone else. Yourself. And that’s harder than you might think.” The therapist confides that the reminder is useful for anyone at any stage of life.  

Gradually trust returns and Doug increasingly decides to treat her as a partner whom he can introduce to parents and friends. He allows her to leave the apartment and “explore.” Still, Annie realizes, “They have no issue of imbalance between them, because they have no question, ever, about who has complete power.” Learning that her body is based on that of a real woman who died strengthens Annie's sense of self.

Annie strives to serve Doug and is wildly successful in making him happy and calm. But as his happiness soars, Annie’s contentment vanishes, and “she’s struck by a loneliness so intense it threatens to derail her.” 

No one can dole out another being’s autonomy and expect fulfillment. Anything less is worthless.

Friends and fear

 

Mother’s Instinct by Barbara Abel is spare and controlled with a cruel conclusion. Two couples, next door neighbors, have sons who soon become the best of friends. Tiphaine and Sylvain rent their home and have close family.  David and Laetitia, enduring struggles as young adults, have no close friends, but eased into a comfortable life, enjoying a friendship they regard as priceless. 

“Friendship is a source of strength no one can live without. Everyone needs friends as much as sustenance and sleep. Friendship is nourishment of the soul; it cheers our hearts, feeds our minds, fills us with joy, hope, and peace. Friendship is life’s treasure and the guarantee of a certain kind of happiness.” 

Not always and a friendship can vanish as quickly as it began. One couple has a dark side, their marriage predicated by a dark secret around how they met and the loss of her job as a pharmacist. After her son dies in an accident witnessed by the neighbor and closest friend, she cannot forgive or forget. 

As the two couples struggle to sustain the friendship, the mother of the surviving boy wonders about the sincerity of friendships built around children. Granted, the relationship predated the children’s births, but all they had ever talked about was the boys. 

The friendship deteriorates and the surviving boy’s mother feels tremendous loss:  “she realized that that the tragedy that had befallen her friends had created an unbridgeable gulf between t hem. And the gulf would always be there. Forever.”

Meanwhile, the other woman plans a perfect murder, eliminating neighbors who irritate her and offer a replacement for her dead son.   

Abel transforms a series of ordinary little domestic routines and scenes  – pizza nights, playful children, ordinary disagreements over a hedge border – into a stunning warning. Pay attention to a mother’s instinct. Assess circumstances carefully before trying to overcome a strange fear. The plot calls to mind the 1998 non-fiction book “The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect US From Violence” by Gavin de Becker. He writes: “Context is always apparent in the start of an interaction and usually apparent at the end of one, but too many details can make us lose sight of it. Every type of con relies upon distracting us from the obvious."

Predators and prey

 

Hauntingly beautiful and demonstrating the power of memory, The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo makes it easy to suspend disbelief about creatures who transition between fox and human form in Manchuria, 1908. The author doles out just enough detail in this magical tale, foxes are charming, clever and ageless, for readers to understand the differences with humans while preserving a sense of mystery. Foxes are sly in getting what they want. The more impulsive ones are ruthless, impatient predators while others are more self-disciplined, resisting their nature and striving to live a full millennium. 

Foxes take control with flattery, companionship and feigned subservience. Some foxes are reckless and others like Snow, the protagonist, are cooperative and wary in society: “Nobody likes to feel a fool, and the downside of playing with people’s feelings is the whiplash fury of betrayal.”

Only a few humans, often near death, recognize they are under the watchful eyes of foxes: "Dark as a bottomless pool, like a lake under moonlight. Bao is falling, sinking. Images flicker past: Ears lifted and a sharp muzzle across endless waves of grass. A lonely shape trotting down a mountain. Blink and he’s back, staring into the eyes of this stranger. Unreadable eyes, grave yet inhuman. They pierce Bao to the depths of his soul, or perhaps that’s the knife wound in his side.”

Interactions between foxes and humans require a delicate balance. Fox emotions are intense. Snow, the protagonist and fox wife, seeks revenge for the death of her cub, wrested by its den by a hunter on assignment for a photographer. “Grief continually amazed me with its ability to resurface at inconvenient moments. Whether I was sleeping in the grass or walking beside railway tracks by myself, the wind blowing and the lonely sun shining down, it always found me.” To track the photographer, Snow takes a job as companion for an elderly woman whose family owns a popular medicine shop. An investigator also tracks the photographer after the death of a courtesan in an alley, a beautiful woman last seen with a foxlike man.

The two searches collide, and during their travels, the two women each encounter a past love. Snow meets her estranged husband whom she partially blames for the cub’s death: “it was a lot easier to consider Kuro dead to me than to deal with the pain that his presence reminded me of. I should have known better. What you bury eventually comes to light in some form or other.” Her employer Tagtaa, in her sixties, encounters the young boy whom she was once served as a companion when both were children. Bao’s choices often displeased his parents, a pattern that continued into his adulthood as he pursues a career as investigator rather than scholar. 

Bao’s parents had forbidden marriage with Tagtaa, a child of a Mongolian concubine, but he still felt attraction. “She’s aged but hasn’t changed. Over the years he’s observed this phenomenon in his old friends – though their bodies have weathered, stretched, or shrunk, the same soul peeks out from within.” Notably, both Bao and Tagtaa admire foxes after memorable encounters with the creatures in their youth. Bao's experience left him with the ability to discern truth from lies, aiding his investigative work. And another fox, possibly Kuro, rescued Tagtaa as a child. 

Tagtaa longs to meet a fox again though Kuro, the fox husband, urges caution. Tagtaa confides her belief that foxes are gods or spirts, but he cautions that not all foxes mean well. “It depends on what you want to believe. What’s important is the ability to tell truth from lies,” Kuro explains. “Or perhaps truth from what’s merely hope.” Snow, his wife, overhears the conversation: “Hope, of course, is the most painful thing in the universe. Clinging to a thin strand is the most agonizing way to live.”

Humans feel angry panic after being tricked by a fox. “That’s what leads to all those tales of disillusionment and discovering yourself naked, covered with fleas and eating rotting meat in an abandoned grave," Snow notes. "Of course that exact scenario seldom happens, but it’s a good metaphor for how people feel when they discover they’ve been duped. That’s why a careful fox refrains from unduly influencing others.”

Parental expectations, lost loves, class inequality interfere with the present day for each character. Intelligent and self-disciplined foxes and humans who admire them are keenly aware of the period’s class and gender inequality, thus connecting with readers by offering relevant and modern insights. The novel is a cautionary fable for divided societies where the corrupt show disdain for those who work hard, the spendthrifts who scoff at the savers, the impulsive mock the patient, and the ignorant willfully resent the success and guidance from those with expertise.  

Many divides

Imagination can separate or connect individuals, leading to resentment or harmony - as suggested by  the enticing theme of Cristina Henríquez's The Great Divide. 

The book opens in 1907 with a fisherman scoffing that anyone might dream of breaking through the Cordillera Mountains connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans before reconsidering. “Perhaps the problem, he thought, was that a person needed faith to be able to see things that did not exist, to imagine a world not yet made…" Francisco had lost faith years earlier, raising his young son alone, and "his imagination itself had withered and, devoid of imagination, his entire world had shrunk to the point that he could not see beyond what as right in front of his face.”  

Francisco does not understand why more than 4,000 laborers sign on for the grueling work, including his own son who dreams about how the wages might transform his life.  

The book connects a diverse set of characters for a few short weeks – the fisherman who is furious at his son for not becoming a fisherman, a woman who leaves Jamaica to earn money for her sister’s operation, a withdrawn malaria researcher and his unhappy botanist wife, a small-time fish broker who joins his wife in organizing a protest.  Underlings become the scapegoats when foremen, doctors and managers are late or fail to do their jobs. 

Great Divide refers to more than the Panama Canal, completed seven years later, but also to racial and class struggles, family strife and internal conflicts, the difference between those who hope and others who have given up. 

Some characters outgrow the aspirations and potential of youth more quickly than others. A rough foreman, puzzled by his anger and lost time, is intent on making others around him miserable, willing to work his crew to death. He recalls a life of “fighting at school, roughing up anyone who looked at him sideways,” constantly angry without knowing why. He detested school and left early: “From what he had seen, it was just a means of getting people to behave in agreed-upon ways while fooling them into thinking it was for their own good.” Of course, a lack of education and skills is certain path to such servitude. He compares past dreams with reality. "Miller had never been to a circus, but one had come through South Carolina when he was a boy and talk of it had captured his imagination…. He was supposed to have been something by now…. But the world, changing quicker than he could keep up, had reduced him to this.” 

A few characters stand up for themselves, keeping their dignity intact, like the journalist who defies her editor by rushing to cover a village protest. Or the Jamaican woman who insists on purchasing medicine in the whites-only section of the store. Ada confronts the clerk who challenges her, resulting in a brief moment of triumph followed by lingering “Shame, and anger at being shamed” that can damage the soul.    

As a fisherman, Francisco despises the canal, recognizing that the engineering feat will transform Panama's economy. Still, he seeks to end the estrangement with his son, traveling to the noisy jobsite and witnessing earth “stripped and carved bare.” He finds it hard to look at the site crowded with machines, smoke, and piles of dirt:  “even more bewildering than what had been done to the land – what had been done to his country – was how many hundreds of men were participating in it…. What he saw as he stared across that vast chasm was not simply a canal, but a great divide that would sever Panama in two.” Grief overwhelms him and “He imagined himself descending into the Mouth not as a traitor or a martyr or a sacrificial lamb  but as a father whose love was infinitely greater than his sorrow or fear.”

Imagination and faith intertwine, best employed with hope than fear. At a low point, during the search for his son, Francisco’s imagination and empathy with youthful ambition returns. With that comes strength to appreciate what was special in the past and recognize the evolving possibilities that lie ahead.