A Loving, Faithful Animal

July 10, 2017
Opening on New Year’s Eve in 1990, Rowe’s striking debut novel uses a struggling Australian family to explore the ways love and savagery overlap. Vietnam vet Jack Burroughs is an abusive husband who carries the war inside him like a “cancerlike sickness, busy at some cellular level” and disappears for weeks, even months, at a time. When his beloved dog is torn to pieces by a wild panther, he leaves again. Sensing that he’s now gone permanently, Jack’s wife, Evelyn, and their daughters grapple with his absence and their own unfulfilled longings. Twelve-year-old Ru cherishes Jack’s abandoned tobacco like a talisman that will bring him back, while her older sister, Lani, consoles herself with alcohol, drugs, and sex. Evelyn swings from rage at Lani’s defiance to nostalgia for a past in which she too was free and alluring. Jack’s half-brother, Les, looks sinister thanks to the scars of the index fingers he amputated decades before, ostensibly to avoid fighting in Vietnam, yet he offers a steady, tender presence. Rowe links the novel’s six sections through common characters and imagery—most notably the animal motifs woven throughout—rather than a single dramatic plotline. Balancing poetic language with unsentimental observation, she brings a fierce, inventive vision to her themes of family, legacy, and survival. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment.

July 1, 2017
Rowe's debut novel examines the splintering of a family in rural Australia.The novel begins on New Year's Eve 1990. Evelyn and Jack have two daughters: Lani and Ruby, known as Ru. Jack's brother, the girls' Uncle Tetch, has started "turning up in the garage" to clean it up and try to fix things. It is quickly clear, however, that there is much that is broken. Jack, a Vietnam veteran, lives in a world torn open by the horrors of war. His mind "is a ghost trap. It's all he can do to open his mouth without letting them all howl out." Jack's trauma becomes his family's first major tragedy; he abuses Ev until he leaves one day, probably for good. The chapters each follow a different character with a different sadness in his or her past. This roving narration provides hauntingly intimate accounts, and the poetic style throughout makes each voice compelling and distinct. And yet, the same current of tragedy courses through all of them, leading an adult Ru to wonder, "Are all family scripts so interchangeable?" Ru's two chapters, bookending the novel, are told in an urgent second person so that, in effect, she is absent from her own story. Eclipsed by those she cannot help but still love, Ru is also the novel's true protagonist, a heartbreaking and memorable hero. The readers are made to empathize fully with her as, in the second person, she is also us: "You wonder when your real life will start," she tells us. "You wonder what good all your being good has amounted to." A rich, kaleidoscopic depiction of inherited trauma in stunning prose.

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August 1, 2017
In the first days of 1990, during summer in Australia, the family at the heart of award-winning writer Rowe's debut novel is feeling its way through one member's desertion, which might, this time, be final. Young Ru, her parents' easy child, understands that her once-again disappeared Vietnam vet father, Jack, has a ghost trap for a head but would like to conjure him back nonetheless. Her older sister, Lani, meanwhile, confidently shirks every order the girls' mom, Evelyn, tries to inflict on her, instead riding motorcycles, skipping curfew, and peddling her father's meds to her fellow teen partiers. Evelyn and Jack met and married young, before his severe PTSD fully emerged, and his disease and its many painful reverberations are well explored through all the characters' narratives. Throughout, a panther suspected to be on the loose threatens their small town, the beloved family dog one of its presumed victims. Rowe's richly interiorized characterizations and muscular prose, of the condensed and economic variety that manages to say a lot with a little, herald her exciting U.S. entree.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 15, 2017

In 1990 Australia, Jack Burroughs, an increasingly disturbed Vietnam vet, disappears for what appears to be the last time after his dog is killed by a panther, and his wife, Evelyn, and daughters Ru and Lani struggle to make the best of things. Perhaps it's for the best; charismatic Jack, who had charmed Evelyn away from her well-to-do parents and a life that included a modeling contract and a green Corvette, eventually turned abusive as they downshifted through a sorry, nomadic life. Now Evvie languishes in the past as Lani goes her wild, drug- and sex-fueled way, while Ru watches everything wisely. Meanwhile, Jack's half-brother, Les, who had amputated several fingers to avoid fighting in Vietnam, remains a link to Jack and a quiet source of solace throughout. It's Les who describes Jack as someone who "had come back home as himself but with the war in him like a dormant, cancerlike sickness," and we see how grief spreads beyond the victim like cracked glass. VERDICT This from an Elizabeth Jolley Prize winner is one of the smarter, most lyrically written stories you'll read about a fracturing family.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 27, 2016
Josephine Rowe’s first novel follows her acclaimed story collections How a Moth Becomes a Boat and Tarcutta Wake. Like her stories, A Loving, Faithful Animal distils the small incidents of ordinary life into moments of resonance and grace, but assuredly weaves them together across the longer form. Opening in the summer of 1991, the novel focuses on one family. Father Jack is haunted by his time in Vietnam, and the fury that simmers in him spills out onto his wife Evelyn, and daughters Lani and Ru. As she shifts through the voices of each family member, Rowe allows their individual stories to unspool over the years, revealing the lifelong impact of Jack’s violence and the ways in which war makes monsters of men. Frank depictions of domestic violence and its capacity for damage make for difficult reading, but Rowe’s lyrical writing—which is almost prose-poetry at times—is utterly compelling. The depiction of the PTSD suffered by returned soldiers echoes Chris Womersley’s Bereft, while the gothic Australian landscape and the slow unravelling of trauma recalls Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing. This is a striking and highly original novel for readers of Australian literary fiction. Veronica Sullivan is the prize manager of the Stella Prize and online editor of Kill Your Darlings journal