A Loving, Faithful Animal

by Josephine Rowe

Overview

“A Loving, Faithful Animal lured me in with astonishing, poetic prose... But the true thrill of the novel is the carousel of haunting characters Josephine Rowe creates with unbelievable precision. An unflinching look at the ways we fail the people we love, at the cruelty of family, its toxicity, and beauty.” —Stephanie Danler, New York Times bestselling author of Sweetbitter

It is New Year’s Eve 1990, in a small town in southeast Australia. Ru’s father, Jack, one of thousands of Australians once conscripted to serve in the Vietnam War, has disappeared. This time Ru thinks he might be gone for good. As rumors spread of a huge black cat stalking the landscape beyond their door, the rest of the family is barely holding on. Ru’s sister, Lani, is throwing herself into sex, drugs, and dangerous company. Their mother, Evelyn, is escaping into memories of a more vibrant youth. And meanwhile there is Les, Jack’s inscrutable brother, who seems to move through their lives like a ghost, earning both trust and suspicion.

A Loving, Faithful Animal is an incandescent portrait of one family searching for what may yet be redeemable from the ruins of war. Tender, brutal, and heart-stopping in its beauty, this novel marks the arrival in the United States of Josephine Rowe, the winner of the 2016 Elizabeth Jolley Prize and one of Australia’s most extraordinary young writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936787586
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	09/12/2017
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Josephine Rowe was born in 1984 in Rockhampton, Australia, and grew up in Melbourne. In the United States her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Iowa Review, The Paris Review Daily, and other publications. She holds fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Program in fiction at Stanford University, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Omi International Arts Center, and Yaddo. In 2016, her fiction won the Elizabeth Jolley Prize in Australia. She currently lives in Tasmania.
Josephine Rowe was born in 1984 in Rockhampton, Australia, and grew up in Melbourne. In the U.S. her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Narrative, The Scofield, and the Paris Review Daily. She holds fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Program in fiction at Stanford University, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Omi International Arts Center, and Yaddo. In 2016, her fiction won the Elizabeth Jolley Prize in Australia. She lives in Tasmania.au

Read an Excerpt

Lani was born shaking into Evelyn’s arms in the middle of that decade, and would not stop shaking until the beginning of the ’80s. Evelyn tries to remember this shaking whenever she runs in with the rangy, foul-mouthed creature who haunts the room at the end of the hallway, shut in there with the throb of something dreary. Tries to remember the trembling of the little spine felt through terry-towelling jumpersuits, the vulnerable blossom mouth, as she stares at the poster tacked up and torn at the corner nearest the doorknob. The band members look like they’re all dying of the same disease. Behind the poster, Lani’s door is all splinters and strips of packing tape. She knocks and waits before trying the handle, knowing it’ll be locked whether her oldest daughter is in there or not. No energy for a row this afternoon; she just follows the routine disarmament the two of them have fallen into over the last few years. These shitty locks; they’re mostly cosmetic anyway. Won’t really keep anyone out, will just slow them down long enough so that whoever’s on the other side has time to get their pants up. She worries at the snib with a butterknife, and Lani’s door swings open on an empty room, gauzy curtains drawn back to reveal the flyscreen with its escape hatch sliced into one corner. Gone then. Today and forever. Even when she comes back this afternoon, or tonight—tomorrow morning; who knows?—Evelyn will find no way of reaching her, no way of getting her to listen. Through threats or through fists, neither works now. Lately she’s astonished herself with her own ferocity, how it closes over her, suffocates reason. How the marks on her daughter’s body have begun to mirror her own. Lani that morning, reaching for a high spot with the paint scraper, and her pyjama top hiking up to show a familiar purpling at the hip, door-handle height. Law of Conservation. Absorption and emission. Ev tries to remember what she learnt in fifth-form science. How it all has to go somewhere. How light becomes heat and heat becomes—what?

Editorial Reviews

This is a highly interior book, in which gorgeous, precise language encourages inner storms as the surface remains calm, and Rowe—introducing notions of airline flights, runaways, fast cars and motorcycles—asks whether we ever move fast enough to escape this deep damage. Like the best of Breece D'J Pancake or W. G. Sebald, Rowe plants small moments from history as a soldier might bury land mines. What lies dormant beneath us? A massacre, a dead pet, a crime unchallenged. Rowe then waits for her characters to stumble home drunk or tired one night, tripping that memory wire, while we as readers watch the world explode.

The New York Times Book Review - Samantha Hunt

07/10/2017
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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for A LOVING, FAITHFUL ANIMAL

"A slim beauty . . . I found myself considering those rare things only books can do, feats outside the purview of film or fine art . . . A work of such well–defined characters, each so carefully drawn as to breathe, and a work so full of stark emotional moments . . . Gorgeous, precise language encourages inner storms . . . Like the best of Breece D'J Pancake or W.G. Sebald, Rowe plants small moments from history as a soldier might bury landmines." —Samantha Hunt, The New York Times Book Review

"A heartbreaking and memorable hero. . . . A rich, kaleidoscopic depiction of inherited trauma in stunning prose." —Kirkus Reviews

"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. entrée." —Booklist

"Stunning, gorgeously written . . . While the presence of pain never leaves this story, the beauty and compassion with which it's told, the deep understanding of the fierce love and shared toxicity that bind families together, makes the pain bearable, makes it important to bear witness to this tragic, gorgeously wrought story." —Kristin Iverson, Nylon

"[A] devastating piece of literature crafted by an exceptionally talented writer who tears the lives of her characters asunder and then charts their path back together. . . . Rowe is, and this can’t be said enough, a remarkable writer. Her prose is a mixture of Denis Johnson’s tough guy prattle and the deft, character painting of Stephen King." —East Bay Review

“Exquisite.” —The Millions, “The Millions Most Anticipated”

“A subtle and haunting meditation on childhood, escape, the bonds and the limits of family, and the long reach of trauma. Rowe is a serious talent, and her debut novel is both gorgeous and stunning.” —Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven

“A Loving, Faithful Animal lured me in with astonishing, poetic prose, and a glimpse of an Australia I don’t always see in fiction. But the true thrill of the novel is the carousel of haunting characters Josephine Rowe creates with unbelievable precision. An unflinching look at the ways we fail the people we love, at the cruelty of family, its toxicity, and beauty. The book is a deep, multi–faceted portrait of the inheritance of damage, one that left me aching and inspired.” —Stephanie Danler, New York Times bestselling author of Sweetbitter

"Josephine Rowe writes like someone who, having been quiet a long time, has thought carefully and viciously about what must be said. In this flinty debut, Rowe fashions a string of refractory surfaces—the family members of a veteran—to remind us just how far, into love and time, the atrocity of war will reach."" —Kathleen Alcott, author of Infinite Home

"A slim novel packed with delicious prose, easy to lose yourself in and hard to leave behind."" —Amelia Gray, author of Gutshot

"One of the smarter, most lyrically written stories you’ll read about a fracturing family."" —Library Journal

“Rowe’s language is trance–inducing. Do right by yourself, nest down and prepare to be swept away by these characters, their respective dilapidations, in this mesmerizing, incandescent novel. Masterful.” —Brendan Jones, author of The Alaskan Laundry

“Deft, lyrical and deeply moving.” —Wayne Macauley, author of The Cook

“With poetic prose, Josephine Rowe creates a memorable cast of characters.” —World Literature Today

“A compelling and singular emotional experience ... Haunting ... Rowe makes it clear from the first paragraph of this clenched, resolute study of family damage that sentiment has no place here. She will reveal something harder and truer.” —Kate Holden, Australian Book Review

“Rowe's much–anticipated debut novel dives into the heart of a family attempting to salvage themselves from the scars of the past. Brutal and tender, this is a dark domestic drama battling with the wreckage of the Vietnam War.” —Robert Bound, Monocle magazine

From the Publisher

★ 10/15/2017
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.

Library Journal