Book Review: Animal
Lisa Taddeo’s 2019 non-fiction debut, Three Women, was an astounding achievement in how deeply it burrowed into its subjects’ inner worlds. The author spent years with the titular women, following them across America, asking prying questions about their sex lives, and even tailing them to their romantic meet-ups to drink in every detail about their locations.
The result was a granular and unforgettable study of the women and their relationship to men. It seemed impossible that she could so deftly crack into each subject’s skull and unspool their desires and humiliations onto the page. Could this really not be fiction?
It’s no surprise then that Animal, Taddeo’s debut novel, feels like a natural extension of this project. (Taddeo herself says the book was written concurrently to its non-fiction predecessor, and features many of the stories she couldn’t include in Three Women.)
The premise of Animal is unapologetically bloody from its first passage. After witnessing a former lover commit suicide - a public, gruesome performance seemingly intended to permanently mark her with the tragedy - Joan drives out of New York to a sweltering rented house on the outskirts of Los Angeles. She seeks out and craftily befriends Alice, an enigmatic woman who holds the key to Joan’s childhood trauma.
If Three Women was about women’s desire, Animal turns its focus to women’s rage. Joan’s wanting - for sex, for love, for family - is so forceful and unrelenting, it’s difficult to pinpoint the moments it warps into fury. She ricochets between longing to be held by the people around her and the urge to kill them. Although the plot sometimes slows, the novel is pushed along by electric, visceral prose. Even in its darkest scenes, the narrator doesn’t shy away from sounds, smells or tastes. Readers of this novel will not find themselves coddled.
Taddeo is refreshingly daring and unapologetic in her representation of gender politics. Once again, she manages to take unwritten rules often shared between women and articulate them. Recognising your own innermost thoughts in her writing is an unsettling magic trick.
The novel is certainly a study of sexual violence, but it would be a mistake to attempt to neatly categorise it as “#metoo” literature. All the women in Animal, including its protagonist, are victims of sex. They also brandish it, weaponise it, hate it, love it, and seek it. Joan is hunted by men, but she is also a hunter. “Women have the upper hand,” she announces. “It’s taken me half a lifetime to realise it.”
Nonetheless, it’s undeniable that readers with histories of sexual assault or family violence would likely struggle with the book, and one haunting scene in particular could be an unbearable read for anyone who has experienced pregnancy loss.
Animal circles the question of whether men - yes, all men, it posits - are capable of terrible things. Which parts of this novel came from Taddeo’s discussions with real women, all those years she was compiling her first biography? Which horrors are scenes from real marriages, real childhoods? It’s too awful to guess, and yet each of them feels uncomfortably familiar.
Animal by Lisa Taddeo is available to purchase from Bloomsbury now.