Portland, OR: Tin House Books, 2019. 366 pages. $24.95.
If there were ever a question of what a novel decked with pieces from Walter Potter’s Victorian taxidermy collection but set in a contemporary Florida and adorned with more sex than whimsy would look like, Mostly Dead Things offers a shockingly accurate and deeply entrancing answer. Kristen Arnett’s debut novel begins by dissecting the body of a deer, but soon goes on to open up the bodies, loves, and flaws of its human cast as well. Following a family-run taxidermy shop after the suicide of the father who ran it, Arnett’s narrative centers on the family’s daughter, Jessa-Lynn Morton, as she copes and struggles to continue the business. As Jessa works to piece together a “life from the remnants of death,” she can be found stitching together the hide of a roadkill raccoon or parsing the lines in her father’s suicide note with the same core desire: to make something whole out of loss.
Jessa presents her life with a guarded narration, allowing the novel’s truths to be slowly unraveled rather than immediately given. Readers, too, are invited into the task of slowly making a whole story out of a narrative that begins by serving incomplete truths. Prentice’s suicide note, for example, is never shown in its entirety and only sparsely quoted from before it’s destroyed by Jessa’s mother, Libby. With these conscious emotional omissions set alongside moments of intense physical exposure, dead animals are often made into the sites for communication between characters. What can’t be spoken—what gets set down in writing the reader never gets to see or what remains incommunicable about dying in general— becomes something “mapped out in gristle” rather than speech.
To suggest that the personal investment in taxidermy is a method of emotional displacement for the characters who engage in it like Jessa, Prentice, and Libby might be accurate, but it is also a significant minimization of what’s actually going on. As Jessa says of the taxidermists, “our heart was in the curve of a well-rendered lip smoothed over painted teeth” and that she could see her “father’s hand in the ears of the rabbit he created for [her] brother.” In this way, the works of taxidermy come to contain embodied pieces of the people who made them. This care and delicacy which Jessa invests in taxidermy, the love which lets her understand the animals as a conduit for human connection, is also what makes her vulnerable to one of the novel’s core conflicts.
While Jessa’s mourning for her father takes place mostly on workshop tables and in beer bottles, her mother’s grief leads Libby to construct sex scenes from mutilated pieces of taxidermy and sex toys, simultaneously exploring the repression and the dedication of her marriage. In Libby’s admittedly horrifying work, Jessa is forced to confront what is wrong, painful, and uncommunicated in her family rather than merely revere and idealize her father. Jessa explains that her mother’s work “perverted all the things” she “loved about taxidermy.” As Jessa’s mourning manifests in direct contradiction to her mother’s, she is forced to confront what she does and doesn’t know about her father’s life and corpse, a body she calls “the animal in front of me” when she first finds him dead in his workshop. Dealing with this “animal,” those around Prentice’s death are pushed to navigate their own lives, bodies, and repression in front of and alongside one another.
Much of Arnett’s talent rests in depicting the places where her characters hover between seclusion and exposure, between never talking to the people around them to revealing their sex lives in a menagerie to their family members. Between the big and little deaths, Arnett presents her readers with this family who Jessa thought would “always stay the same—a family encased in the skin [she’d] stretched over them, ill-fitting and irregular.” But the Mortons are continually bucking the confines of their own skins to embrace and abrase the lives of one another. They are mutually incapable of the placid stillness that Jessa puts into her taxidermy or the sensational and mangled postures that Libby puts into hers. When it comes to the animal bodies, whether it’s in Jessa’s painstaking and near-invisible stitches under peacock feathers or Libby’s “parade of animals decked out in lingerie and posed in front of boudoir mirrors,” the acts of bodily preservation performed by Arnett’s characters speak to more than carefully-arranged tail feathers and alligator skulls with ball-gags. They speak to the sincerity and absurdity of love, death, Florida, and family. At the intersection of animal and attempted-human preservation, Arnett has placed the Mortons, whose sensations and investments extend far beyond the borders of their own bodies, leaking into everything from one another’s well-being to the wire-wrought pose of wild boar.
Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things suggests that the dead and gone aren’t simply those things alone, that they are also impossibly and undeniably still linked with the living. The departed cannot reliably be kept in the containers of their corpses, but instead rear up in the bodies of everything from deer to daughters. As the Mortons each experience a different set of pains and joys, they are forced to start talking to one another in ways that don’t resemble gutting a bass (though this communication continues as well and maintains its own significance). Family itself becomes something that must be chosen and consciously preserved rather than plainly given on the basis of genetics. Burdened and privileged with this new task of reconstructing human relationships, Jessa and her family start to talk beyond the gristle and slowly manage to get to the heart of things. Mostly Dead Things holds no punches and, between running over peacocks with golf carts and skinning cancerous quadrupeds, finds a messy and believable love that depends on enduring the repulsive and rapturous in the same collection of nerves.
What elevates Mostly Dead Things beyond a post-funeral rumination with a background of stuffed fauna is Arnett’s ability to complicate what death means. This novel favors presenting death in a way that privileges the personal over the universalizing or pedantic. While Jessa struggles with Prentice’s absence caused by his death, she also knows that death allows for possession as well as loss. Jessa admits that “a small, black part” inside of her knows that she is “the kind of person who’d wish death on a creature” so she could keep it with her in a taxidermied reincarnation. What death does to animals, making them possessable, appears to run in opposition to what it does to human beings, making them irrevocably gone. But Mostly Dead Things goes beyond even this fascinating dichotomy of how we understand and treat different bodies to suggest that death does not end a person entirely. What proves the most difficult about Prentice’s death and the departure of Brynn, a family friend who was a lover to both Jessa and the wife to her brother Milo, is potently similar for all of the Mortons. This difficulty is the question of who can own, replicate, miniaturize, summarize, or present anything about a loved one who is no longer physically present. Arnett’s characters struggle to own their father’s lingering influence, Brynn’s love, and even their own physical selves. The problem with death in Mostly Dead Things is not its finality, rather, it’s what death still leaves open, what bodies it does not allow to be posed in static and reverent recreation.