ON ANIMALS
By Susan Orlean
Three reasons you should read Susan Orlean’s “On Animals” even if, like me, you are a faithful subscriber to The New Yorker and eagerly consumed nearly all of the essays when they first appeared during the more than 25 years this collection spans: (1) Every essay in the book is magnificent. (2) Every essay in the book is magnificent. (3) Every essay in the book is magnificent.
Anyway, be honest: Your memory is not what it used to be (mine isn’t, at least) and revisiting these essays is like reading them anew. That’s not only because of the collision between memory and time. One of the delights of “On Animals” is the way it is so carefully arranged. This elegant curation makes one essay lead to another through manifold connections, some so tiny as to be almost subliminal, some functioning as updates across time, and all working in concert to convey ideas that no one essay could manage on its own.
For readers, the greatest blessing of this kind of book — the opportunity to move on when something doesn’t grab you — is also its greatest danger for writers. Without a narrative line tugging readers through the book, inspiring them to turn one page after another as God intended, it’s too easy to skip around. Or just to skip. Readers of essay collections can be like chickens, running hither and yon and scrambling past the borders that order them.
This would be a better analogy if Susan Orlean were writing it, but don’t feel bad for me: Orlean’s way with a simile is unmatched in the English-speaking world. A show dog’s docked tail is “about the size and shape of a half-smoked stogie.” Homing pigeons arrive at the coop after a hundred-mile race as composed “as if they were performing the finale of a magic trick.” Turkeys follow guests around the farm “like store detectives.” Ducks whose pond is frozen over in winter are in a state of “busy restless anxiety, like slightly overpaid event organizers.”
Clearly, the essay collection as a genre holds no danger for Orlean, who has never written a skippable word in her life.
Part of what makes this book so immensely readable is the coupling of a brilliant essayist’s friendly, funny voice with a committed generalist’s all-embracing curiosity. There appears to be nothing in the world that doesn’t interest Orlean, and she has such a companionable way of conveying her fascinations that readers can’t help being fascinated too.
In this book, dogs and cats are well represented, of course, but also rabbits and chickens and the aforementioned pigeons, oxen and donkeys and mules (note to city folk: not the same creature), as well as lions and tigers and panda bears. Also, one droopy-finned killer whale and an expired but still absorbing answer to the question “Where’s Willy?” Each animal’s turn in the warm spotlight of Orlean’s gaze gives readers a chance to learn something enthralling about even the most ordinary of creatures.
In a collection drawn from work created during more than a quarter-century, it’s inevitable that the facts underpinning some essays are long out of date. At times I found myself pausing to do a quick search to find out what had happened in the years since an essay was first published. Did the teenage pigeon aficionado grow up to race pigeons? What happened to the tiger hoarder in New Jersey? Has the lion hugger finally been eaten? Well, time marches on, and leaving a tale in medias res, as reported essays inevitably do, is of little consequence when the tale itself is mesmerizing, and when the teller’s way with words is half the appeal.
Orlean’s account of what happened to Keiko, the captive killer whale who starred in the low-budget children’s film “Free Willy,” serves as a fine example of the enduring appeal of these essays. This story begins with one of Orlean’s patented, opening-line hooks, so skillfully set that your attention is caught for however long she intends to hold onto you: “It was a hell of a time to be in Iceland, although by most accounts it is always a hell of a time to be in Iceland, where the wind never huffs or puffs but simply blows your house down.”
The unexpected success of “Free Willy” — the film cost $20 million to make but grossed $154 million — generated enormous interest in Keiko, the whale actor who had not been set free, as his fictional counterpart had. Orlean’s report of the drama includes an accounting of the public outcry, an attempt by Michael Jackson to buy Keiko for his personal ranch, a territorial dispute involving the custodial aquarium and the foundation raising money for the whale’s release, the challenges of transporting an adult killer whale by plane to the other side of the Pacific Ocean, a wealthy tech entrepreneur with an interest in promoting ocean health, and one beloved but bedraggled whale with a problematic preference for frozen fish.
Nominally, then, the point of the essay is to provide an update on efforts to free Keiko — but what it actually does is call us to consider the relationship between humans and the other animals who share the planet. “It wasn’t his fault that he was captured to begin with and stuck in a lousy tub in Mexico,” Orlean points out. “It also wasn’t his fault that he didn’t know how to do whale things like blowing a bubble net to trap herring, and it wasn’t his fault that he’d been torn from the bosom of his family at such a young age that now he was a little afraid of wild whales, and that they, in turn, viewed him as a bit of a freak.” It wasn’t Keiko’s fault. It was our fault.
It is impossible to undo the harm that was done to Keiko, no matter how much money was raised to prepare him for the wild. Without in any way writing a polemic, Orlean makes it clear that what we do to animals has ever-extending consequences.
It’s no surprise that a writer whose mind throws out similes like favors from a Mardi Gras parade is a writer who sees crucial connections between animals and people. This emphasis on interconnectedness emerges not just from one essay after another but also from the cumulative effect of the collection as a whole. Even more than the linguistic pyrotechnics, the friendly wit or the mesmerizing storytelling, that’s the true gift of “On Animals.”
For though Orlean does not overtly wade into the thorn field of animal-rights debates, and though many of these essays predate a widespread public recognition of the escalating dangers of climate change and diminishing global biodiversity, what she understands about the human-animal relationship is fundamental to addressing both of those calamities: the fact that we belong to one another. Indeed, there is no human-animal relationship, for we are all animals, and what happens to the least among us on this crowded planet happens to us all.
October 12, 2021 at 11:00AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/books/review/on-animals-susan-orlean.html
Susan Orlean Has an Eye for the Little Creatures - The New York Times
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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