Meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; as a young woman, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover. Something happened, something so awful she has buried it in the recesses of her mind.

Now her adored older brother is a fugitive, wanted by the FBI for domestic terrorism. And her once lively mother is a shell of her former self, her clever and imperious father now a distant, brooding man.

And Fern, Rosemary’s beloved sister, her accomplice in all their childhood mischief? Fern’s is a fate the family, in all their innocence, could never have imagined.

THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES

 

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a difficult book to review.

It’s a sentiment I’ve seen echoed by a number of critics caught between the rock of wanting to tease and unpack the novel’s thematic layers and the hard place of not wanting to give away the book’s major revelation.  I appreciate the conundrum.  This is a novel that’s been manufactured and molded around its twist.  Not in a O’Henry, thriller sort of way – OH MY GOD THE KID WAS TALKING TO A DEAD GUY ALL ALONG!!!! – but in how the themes come together once this important puzzle piece is revealed.

That said, a reluctance to spoil Fern’s identity is not the reason why I found it so tough to organise my thoughts about the book.  Conflicting emotions kept getting in the way of the criticism.  I certainly loved the novel.  If I’d read it in 2013, it’s year of publication, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves would have been my favorite book of the year.  But it’s also a book that made me so very angry; especially once it’s revealed that Fern is a chimpanzee, and that her parents decided to bring up their infant daughter, Rosemary, and Fern together as part of an animal human behavior experiment.  Who the fuck does that?!  Was the question I kept asking.  What sort of arrogant selfish parents think it’s a good idea to raise their child with a chimpanzee?!

As a newish father (four years and counting) I know that parenthood is a tough gig.  And that’s when you have a reasonably healthy, normal (whatever that means) child.  You know that every decision you make, ranging from what you feed them to whether you go back to work and send them to daycare, is going to affect their burgeoning personalities and minds.  Because as they’re soaking it in, they can’t helped but be influenced by your decisions.

And fuck me if that isn’t the scariest thing about being a parent.  Destroying your child’s potential because of a stupid decision you made.

As I read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, I grew increasingly angry because it never seems to occur to the Cooke’s that this decision to bring Fern into their family was going to have lifelong consequences for both their children.  Infant Rosemary and their young, idealistic son Lowell.  Even if Rosemary’s recollection of events isn’t entirely clear, and even if she’s spending a good chunk of the novel trying to come to terms with the truth and her own identity, it seems evident that the Cooke’s sacrificed her potential and the health and well being of Fern for what might be gained from a psychological experiment.

And then… then Fowler does something to gut me completely.  The book, I should say, never feels like a polemic against animal experimentation.  Obviously Fowler. through Rosemary, is not supportive of the practice, but there’s a sense that those who experimented with primates, who did psychological experiments like the Cooke’s, loved the animals as much as their own children, and never wanted either to come to harm.  Yes, the lasting message of the book is that animal experimentation is something that as a society we should avoid at all costs.  But Fowler’s novel isn’t in the mood to point fingers and rant.  It’s much smarter than that.

And it’s with that context that I return back to the bit that gutted me.  Toward the end of the novel we hear from Rosemary’s mother, a person who is slowly making amends with her daughter.  And this is what she says:

We’d been talking about raising a chimpanzee for several years.  All very theoretical. I’d always said I wouldn’t have a chimp taken from its mother. I’d always said it had to be a chimp with nowhere else to go. I kind of thought that would be the end of that. I got pregnant with you and we stopped talking about it.

And then we heard about Fern. Some friends of some friends bought her from poachers at a market in Cameroon, because they hoped we’d want her. They said she was all but dead at the time, just as limp as a rag, and filthy, streaked with diarrhea and covered in fleas. They didn’t expect her to live, but they couldn’t bear to walk away and leave her.  She was listless and uninterested in things. Whenever I saw that she was awake, I’d talk to her, but she hardly seemed to notice. I worried that she wasn’t healthy, after all. Or not very bright. Or so traumatized that she’d never recover.

Still, that was the week she took hold of my heart. She was so little and so alone in the world. So frightened and sad. And so much like a baby. So much like you, only with a lot of suffering added. I told your dad I didn’t see how the two of you could be compared when your world had been so gentle and hers so cruel. But there was no turning back by then. I was deeply in love with you both.

It’s not just that the Cooke’s had thought of the possible consequences of what they were doing, it’s that they saw Fern, and they saw how damaged she was and they wanted to help.  They wanted to make her better.  And they genuinely thought they could.  Maybe a naive belief on their part, and yet a decision made completely from love.  Yes, I cried.  But then it’s that sort of book, one that triggers profound, slightly frightening emotions, the sort that are never easy to confront.  Complicated and conflicted but so beautifully written, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a novel that might be difficult to review but is well worth reading.