Wild Life
One of the many pleasures of Molly Gloss's extraordinary third  novel is watching it repeatedly change shape and direction before your  eyes--a feat all the more wonderful since the narrative consists almost  entirely of the fictional diaries of one woman. Charlotte Bridger  Drummond--an early-20th-century single mother who supports five young  sons in the just-tamed wilderness fringe of western Oregon by writing  pulp fiction--presents herself as a bluff, free-thinking feminist, the  kind of woman who would tumble her youngest son off her lap and onto  the floor for whining. When her housekeeper's frail young granddaughter  disappears from a logging camp, Charlotte unhesitatingly sets out to  join the inept search parties. So, within 90 pages, Molly Gloss (The Dazzle of DayandThe Jump-Off  Creek) whisks us from pitch-perfect historical fiction to  unsentimental lament over the devastation of the "dark and supernatural  woods" of the Pacific Northwest to a kind of wild and woolly mystery  story.All of this is immensely engaging, mostly because Charlotte herself is  such excellent if occasionally astringent company. But the book really  catches fire when Charlotte herself gets lost in the woods. The diary  continues through the harrowing days of wet, cold, hunger, hope,  despair, and then her fantastic rescue by a band of semihuman giants of  the deep woods. Introducing the Sasquatch legend into an otherwise  scrupulously realistic historical novel might seem like a risky  narrative ploy, but Gloss brilliantly pulls it off. Indeed, so deft is  her fusing of the fantastic and the actual that by the end, the  narrative transmogrifies once more into a profound and troubling  meditation on wildness, nature, and human nature.Wild Lifebrings to mind the works of Jean M. Auel, Marilynne  Robinson, Ken Kesey (that dank Oregon setting ofSometimes a Great  Notion), and more distantly Willa Cather--but the breadth and  daring of Gloss's imagination really puts it in a class of its own. In  a sense, unifying all of the many strands of this fictional tour de  force is a fiercely candid portrait of the artist, an artist who in  Charlotte's words fears "coming face-to-face with my Self on the  printed page--it would chill me through to the heart," but who does it  anyway.--David Laskin--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.