"An unabashedly smart and affecting portrait of the strains of a marriage." —Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
Meet Ivan and Prue: a married couple - both experts in language and communication - who nevertheless cannot seem to communicate with each other
Ivan is a tightly wound philosophy professor whose reverence for logic and order governs not only his academic interests, but also his closest relationships. His wife, Prue, is quite the opposite: a pioneer in the emerging field of biolinguistics, she is bold and vibrant, full of life and feeling. Thus far, they have managed to weather their differences. But lately, an odd distance has settled in between them. Might it have something to do with the arrival of the college's dashing but insufferable new writer-in-residence, whose novel Prue always seems to be reading?
Into this delicate moment barrels Ivan's unstable father-in-law, Frank, in town to hear Prue deliver a lecture on birdsong that is set to cement her tenure application. But the talk doesn't go as planned, unleashing a series of crises that force Ivan to finally confront the problems in his marriage, and to begin to fight - at last - for what he holds dear.
A dazzlingly insightful and entertaining novel about the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand each other and ourselves, The Study of Animal Languages marks the debut of a brilliant new voice in fiction.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers magazine. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University. The Study of Animal Languages is her first novel.
One
All my life I’ve been waiting,” says my father-in-law, through the stall door. We have stopped at a rest area along the in- terstate, halfway between our homes. I would meet him back in the car, if only he would stop waxing poetic.
“Frank?” I face the mirror, smoothing the hair over my thin- ning spot. “I’ll be—”
“First for school to end,” he interrupts. “Then for my twen- ties, then for success. Marriage, children, et cetera. For them to leave. For their children. Then the waiting became less conspic- uous. Waiting for the cry of boiled water. For the paper. For spring. It took a mighty long time to understand that what I’d been waiting for wasn’t each thing, actually, but the chance to wait for whatever came next.”
The toilet sounds, mercifully. It is not Frank’s, however, but the door of the adjoining stall that swings open. An elderly woman advances, angles toward the sink. She has been listening. She rinses her hands.
“Sorry,” I volunteer. “Men’s is out of order.”
Through the mirror she delivers a qualified smile, snaps her wrists over the drain, and departs. When I look up Frank is shuffling toward me, coaxing the tongue of his belt into its loop. His shirt is too broad for his shoulders, and his face appears, as it usually does, to harbor some inconvenient hope.
He follows me back into the food mart, where I pay for a lukewarm coffee and the packaged croissant he's selected. My watch reads half past five.
"Looks about time for your meds," I say.
Grimacing, he turns away, pushing open the glass door. Out side a shy rain has started, colder than it looks.
"You know what it does to me, right?" he says, as we fold ourselves into the car.
"Come on. I promised your daughter." "Promised her what?"
"That you'd be comfortable." I stab the ignition, but the car resists. "She wants you comfortable."
Prue hadn't wanted him to come at all, in fact. He's unstable, she'd said again this morning, as I downloaded an audiobook-a biography of Noam Chomsky I should have read long ago-for the drive up. This was an exaggeration, though Frank has been less predictable, lately, than in the six years I have known him, phoning Prue at odd hours to kvetch about the government, or to solicit her "scientific opinion" on matters completely outside her purview. She had tried to convince him to cancel the trip, but he had insisted. She would be delivering the College's annual public lecture in the Life Sciences tomorrow, and he was determined to attend. With Prue scrambling to finish her tenure dossier, and with Frank lacking both a car and the money to rent one, the task of ferrying him from his studio in Chester, Vermont, to our home in Rhode Island had fallen to me.
The engine sputters to life. I swing an arm behind his seat, glancing back to find a Labrador between our taillights, towing a woman in heels. I slam the brakes. She flips me off and stag gers after the dog, tenting a newspaper over her hair.
"It evicts me," Frank says, "from my goddamn skin. Turns me into a sleeping and eating machine, is what it does."
The Clozaril, he means. Prescribed for schizophrenia and, in rare cases-among them, Frank's-bipolar disorder.
"Like there's a twelve-foot margin between me and the world, is what it's like," he adds. "Between me and my own head."
"You seem present enough to me," I say. He has complained about the side effects of Clozaril before-the night sweats, the vertigo-but never this obliquely.
"Nothing like when I'm off them," he says. "When I'm off them, I'm myself. Only trouble is the gaps."
We coast onto the highway. To our left a Christmas tree shudders by, lashed to a van.
"Gaps in normality, and whatnot." He pins the plastic sleeve of the croissant between his knees. "In my ability ... "
The sleeve pops open, releasing a stale, buttery odor. I breathe through my mouth, feeling the swill of irritation and fatigue he so often compels in me.
"My ability to summon the cast of mind required to shop and chat and pay bills," he concludes.
You can flush the pills, as for as I'm concerned, I do not say. While I haven't confessed as much to Prue, I have always taken Frank's diagnosis with a grain of salt. Part of my skepticism has to do with that increasing bloated leviathan, the psychiatric in dustry, whose ever-expanding DSM has become so lengthy that most people will qualify for one disorder or another over the course of a lifetime, making sanity itself a form of deviance. It doesn't help that Prue invokes it every time Frank strikes a nerve, as though his provocations were nothing but the illness, ventrilo quized. Not since her childhood, at least as far as I know, has he suffered the pivots from elation to despair that characterize manic depression. What she calls his "mania" strikes me more as a weakness for grandstanding.
"It's not that I see things or anything, when the gaps set in," Frank continues, through a mouthful of croissant. "And it's not depression. It's that everything ... how to put it ... signifies."
Feeling his eyes on me, I say, ''I'm not sure what you mean by that, Frank."
"Have you ever been to Grand Central Station?"
"Sure."
"When you walk in, what do you hear?"
I blow out my cheeks, defeated-as usual-by his passionate sincerity. "I don't know ... footsteps?"
"Voices, kid." He throws up his arms, showering my lap with crumbs. "Imagine that you could comprehend-couldn't help but comprehend-every conversation taking place in that hall. That the voices untangled into words, hundreds of words, each one significant."
"Fuck," I mutter, so distracted I've missed our exit. Traffic is mounting. The detour will cost us half an hour, at least.
"... what it felt like," Frank is saying now. "I could have been walking down any godforsaken street, sober as hell, and become suddenly aware of the wind, the vowel called 'wind,' aware of the trees and their dances, and it's not that I could have named the language they spoke, or report on it now, except to say that everything, everything, meant."
Through the mist a row of flashing lights comes into view, indicating the source of the gridlock: a totaled van-half-scorched, despite the drizzle. Shallow flames lap at the engine.
"You look tired," Frank erupts, clapping my shoulder so firmly that I swerve. "What's on your plate these days, kiddo?"
''I'm doing fine, Frank."
"Work? Trouble in paradise?"
"Prue's fine. We're fine."
With a spurt of dread, I wonder whether it sounds as though I am protesting too much. Things have been strained between us lately-inevitably, I suppose, given the stress of her upcoming tenure decision, though that can't be all it is. We have never been this out of sync before. Last week, if only to set myself at ease, I bought us discount tickets to the Gal:ipagos for the winter holiday. She wrote her dissertation on the mating rituals of the albatross, and has always dreamed of seeing it in its natural habitat.
To change the subject I add, "She's very touched that you're coming."
This "touched" is an accusation, neither intended nor de served. Frank has been present for most of Prue's triumphs and setbacks. Too present, at times.
"You'll enjoy yourself," I say gently. "There'll be a party at our place after the lecture. Did she tell you? You'll get to meet some of her colleagues, and Walt's bringing May."
Walt is Prue's younger brother, refugee ofEnron's marketing team and a subsequent, financially ruinous divorce. We have seen more of him and his seven-year-old daughter than usual since their move to Central Falls. Thanks to his ex-wife's addiction to painkillers, he has full custody.
Frank offers me the final claw of bread, which I refuse. He says, ''Assumed I'd have to field some eggheads."
Over time, I have learned to smile at his contempt for aca demia. Prue, who shares some of his scorn for the chattering class, despite being one of us herself, shrugs off most of his jabs. I read them as deflected self-reproach, the chagrin of an intellec tual who never made much of his mind.
"Supper?" Frank gestures at a blue sign overhead.
"You just ate," I say, although I could use a proper coffee. We'll be home well after dinner at this rate.
"Didn't hit the spot," he says. He roots around in his pocket, producing a washcloth too late to catch his sneeze. As he mops his nose I merge into the exit lane, provoking a blast from the truck behind us.
Frank scratches his head, his white hair so thick he has to dig to reach the scalp. He says, "You've read it, yes?"
Prue's lecture, he must mean. She hasn't shared the docu ment with me, and I hadn't considered asking her to. Public lec tures are a rote affair at the College, well advertised but sparsely attended. Since my first appointment, I have delivered two for the Philosophy Department. Both attracted a modest turnout, and the second boosted my upcoming tenure case. If it goes over well, Prue's should do the same.
"Wouldn't want to ruin the surprise," I say.
The off-ramp deposits us onto a lunar stretch of banks and car dealerships. The diner, glowing on our left, looks festive by comparison. Across the road, a green air puppet throbs in time with our turn signal.
"You're in for one," Frank mutters. His voice is freighted with what he isn't saying: I love her more. He has probably read multi ple drafts of the speech by now. Despite everything, my heart goes out to him. He has so little else to occupy his days that I can hardly reproach him for caring so fiercely.
"She mentioned she'd gloss the birdsong study," I say.
The experiment, which tested songbirds' ability to discriminate between melodies, was published over the summer in Nature Communications, a distinguished multidisciplinary journal. It is Prue's first contribution to the study of animal "languages," which, after languishing for thirty years, has recently resurfaced as a branch of biolinguistics. Thankfully, her approach bears no likeness to the hijinks that passed for research in the seventies- anthropomorphized chimps, sex with dolphins, and worse-but the phrase itself still doesn't strike her as the oxymoron it is. Most discouraging about the recent scholarship I have skimmed is its interchangeable use of the terms "communication" and "lan guage," a confusion to which Prue succumbs regularly. When I press her, she usually concedes that communication-the ex change of information-is not remotely synonymous with lan guage, that sine qua non of thought: a finite set of elements capable, like the Arabic numerals, of infinite variation.
We park before the diner-all chrome and scabbed leather. Though it is barely six, and a Thursday, the place is close to full.
"So," Frank says, after we order. "Birdsong."
He straightens his knife. The lines between his sharp gray eyes have deepened since June, when I saw him last. His brows, set high on his forehead, give him a look of permanent surprise.
"You're the expert, I hear," I say.
According to Prue, Frank had badgered his local library into subscribing to Nature Communications,and would have invited half the town of Chester to her speech, had she not talked him down.
"What do you know?" he says, tucking his napkin into his collar.
His belligerence usually amuses me, but now I feel a stab of indignation, blunted by weariness. Before meeting Frank, I had allowed myself to imagine him as a surrogate parent, cosmic rec ompense for losing my own. No such luck. Though we have made our peace with one another over the years, each reunion reaffirms that Prue is all we share.
"Well," I concede, "Prue's team began by recording a phrase of birdsong, and then ..."
The waitress descends with my coffee and turkey salad. Frank, a longtime vegetarian, has ordered lentil soup. As she sets his bowl before him he catches her lightly on the wrist, pushing her bracelet aside to reveal a tattooed Arabic phrase.
"Urn ..." She retracts her arm, glancing at me.
"Sorry," Frank says. "Couldn't see it."
"Please excuse him," I offer, mortified, but she is already hur
rying off.
"Frank;" I lean forward. "That was-"
"The body as a page ..." He rolls his fist over one of his packaged saltines. "Never got one myself. Never saw the appeal."
Laughter flares from the booth behind me, followed by in fant babble.
"I interrupted you," Frank says.
Though he is thin, there is a softness about his jaw. His fore head glints. Sweating and weight gain are side effects of Clozaril. As he tears open the cellophane, crumbling his crackers into his soup, I can't help but marvel at the fact that not even an antipsy chotic can neutralize him.
"About the experiment." He glances up at me. "You were saying?"
"Right." It all seems so ludicrous, suddenly-the exchange with the waitress, his soliloquy in the women's restroom, Prue's birds and his obsession with them-that I laugh.
"What?" he says.
"Sorry." I recover. "Exhaustion."
"You're very kind to drive me all this way."
It's nothing, I almost say. Instead I take a bite of turkey.
"You haven't read the study," Frank says, addressing his soup.
"Of course I have," I lie. Prue had summarized it for...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Shipping:
FREE
Within U.S.A.
Shipping:
US$ 5.00
Within U.S.A.
Seller: Orion Tech, Kingwood, TX, U.S.A.
Hardcover. Condition: Good. Seller Inventory # 0525557431-3-26453365
Quantity: 2 available
Seller: SecondSale, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
Condition: Very Good. Item in very good condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00031079867
Quantity: 1 available
Seller: SecondSale, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
Condition: Good. Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00027802435
Quantity: 5 available
Seller: More Than Words, Waltham, MA, U.S.A.
Condition: Good. . Former Library book. All orders guaranteed and ship within 24 hours. Before placing your order for please contact us for confirmation on the book's binding. Check out our other listings to add to your order for discounted shipping. Seller Inventory # BOS-L-03b-01341
Quantity: 2 available
Seller: Irish Booksellers, Portland, ME, U.S.A.
Condition: Good. SHIPS FROM USA. Used books have different signs of use and do not include supplemental materials such as CDs, Dvds, Access Codes, charts or any other extra material. All used books might have various degrees of writing, highliting and wear and tear and possibly be an ex-library with the usual stickers and stamps. Dust Jackets are not guaranteed and when still present, they will have various degrees of tear and damage. All images are Stock Photos, not of the actual item. book. Seller Inventory # 19-0525557431-G
Quantity: 1 available
Seller: Once Upon A Time Books, Siloam Springs, AR, U.S.A.
hardcover. Condition: Acceptable. This is a used book. It may contain highlighting/underlining and/or the book may show heavier signs of wear . It may also be ex-library or without dustjacket. This is a used book. It may contain highlighting/underlining and/or the book may show heavier signs of wear . It may also be ex-library or without dustjacket. Seller Inventory # mon0000692328
Quantity: 1 available
Seller: Wonder Book, Frederick, MD, U.S.A.
Condition: As New. Like New condition. Very Good dust jacket. With remainder mark. A near perfect copy that may have very minor cosmetic defects. Seller Inventory # M06P-00244
Quantity: 1 available
Seller: ThriftBooks-Reno, Reno, NV, U.S.A.
Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.15. Seller Inventory # G0525557431I4N00
Quantity: 2 available
Seller: ThriftBooks-Atlanta, AUSTELL, GA, U.S.A.
Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. Former library book; May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.15. Seller Inventory # G0525557431I4N10
Quantity: 1 available
Seller: ThriftBooks-Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ, U.S.A.
Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Former library book; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.15. Seller Inventory # G0525557431I3N10
Quantity: 1 available