We the Animals

On the top of my summer to-read list this year sat We the Animals, Justin Torres's first book. I knew little about it, except that it functions as an innerconnected short story collection, despite being labeled a novel. Since innerconnected short story collections are pretty much my obsession right now, I knew I had to read it.

It's a hell of a good book. Sure, it has a few flaws (what doesn't?), but the emotions Torres manages to wrangle had me reading it cover to cover late into the night. The beautiful relationship between three brothers sits at the center of the collection, and from the beginning I knew it was destined to go wrong. That didn't make it any easier to swallow when it did. There's something deeply sad about We the Animals, something I admit I couldn't quite place until the end of the book, but that maintained my interest and held my sympathy all the way to the end.

While I enjoyed every story in this book, "Heritage" was the first that completely sold me on these characters. There's a relatability there that all hyphened Americans can understand and that read oh so true. "Us Proper" did magical things with language and structure and was crucial to understanding and believing the brotherly bond. Likewise "Trash Kites", one of my favorites, makes that bond seem unbreakable with the incredibly strong final image of: "...my brothers and me, flailing our arms, rising, the world telescoping away, falling up past the stars, through space and blackness, floating upward, until we were safe as seed wrapped up in the fist of God."

There's a whole set of stories that left me breathless in how unflinching they were—the sheer panic "The Lake", the awful sense of doomed repetition in "Talk to Me", the inevitable masculine violence of "Wasn't No One to Stop This." There's a line in "You Better Come" that feels like the refrain for a lot of these stories: "We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful—little animals, clawing at what we needed." That's what this book read like, hit after hit, yet I couldn't turn or pull away.

Then there's the penultimate story, "The Night I Am Made". I admit, it's not one of my favorites, but it's one that has to be talked about in how it affects the way every story before it is read. As expected, the unity of the brothers is broken, and lookig back on it now the signs of what would shatter the bond are there throughout. But damn. It works because Torres renains unflinching, yet it's also the point where I almost wished I could go back and unread it. I won't say more, except that it's brutal. Beatifully tragically painfully brutal.

All in all, I'm excited to see what Torres writes next. We the Animals is in part at least the product of his MFA from the great Iowa Workshop, so I'm curious to see how he'll follow that up. I'm glad I read We the Amimals, but I would only recommend it to those willing to stomach hard animalistic truths, from the first page to the last.