As a relatively new cat-owner, I’ve undergone a spiritual fracturing wherein my childhood adoration of canines wasn’t altered, but transposed (curled paper, marked by private hurt and necessity, some give and take for the sanctification of owning a pet again), and while I made moves towards creating ample room for a new species to take up residence in my chest, I couldn’t dodge the guilt-claps of betrayal that run alongside trading previous animal for new. He flies, and occasionally smiles goofy incisors at me from his perch on my knees. Both a comfort and threat to my new way of living: alone, single, participant of a complicated marriage to my work that oftentimes feels like the safest of cages I crept into out of need for belonging to a philosophy. My cat’s slimness reminds me of a sentence set to meter. He’s often naughty, prone to attacking my ankles before work and drawing quiet marks against my shins like some amateur line artist, and I forgive him, hourly, forgive him because I suspect his personality has been entrusted to me for the very particular reason of my childlessness.
In this respect (as well as several others I’ll do my best to reach appropriately towards in this review) Rebecca van Laer has set the bar at excruciating distance from others catering to the wide, loose theme of animal. Books about animals stand the chance of alienating the audience due to the anthropomorphic inability to emote in humanistic terms. While we love fuzzy puppies, spending our one spare Sunday committing an entire afternoon to them feels wasteful, even flippant. But van Laer‘s writing isn’t loose at all. Sewn tightly to sets of instances of emotional discord and the highest form of household congregation, Van Laer’s context matters in relation to feeling, and that’s something I liked so well that I wish I could bold this sentence. Very rarely do I read an intellectual write from the gushy center of the heart, but it’s a wonderful witnessing. A friend once told me that being good at love makes you smart. I admire writers who reanimate its concept. Malleable as it is, a remaking’s always possible. We’re afraid of writing about it because it’s the most written about thing in history.
van Laer is as gifted at storytelling as she is with rendering her red thoughts edible to her audience. CAT’s episodic structuring often illuminates the many dichotomies of love’s mutations that institutionalize a fully-modern existence. CAT’s anxious deliverance glorifies the woman-on-the-precipice principle: neurotic, pet-owning, intellectualizing parenthood to such absorptions they decide on opting out completely, turning their sensitive natures against the crowd’s encouragement. Throwing the shoe in and joining the popular, standardized mission of their sisters: repopulation, feels like an error that the author’s circled in red pen and shown to her partner. They study it, decide together, as any modern couple has the right to do.
“This, I suppose, is what is fun about having a child: getting to witness them becoming who they will be. But you must play a role in shaping them, and everything reflects your rearing. If you insist on seeing them your way, imposing your narrative on them, you make a grave mistake they may never forgive.” (86)
van Laer places existential worry at the forefront of her memoir, and nurses – in full view of the reader – an ability to siphon dense theory into easy, whip-smart narrative. By blithely coaxing her willing audience into an interdisciplinary course on cats, creature-specific, van Laer involves a level of concurrent persuasion that she performs on readers like a magic trick. Suddenly, we’re in class, learning alongside instances of her more elegant and emotive segments of true-to-form memoirist confessionals. An early division in childhood, a young girl’s emotional identity built sweetly on the ligament of family pet mythologizing, the sedately recounted romance of finding, settling down beside, and having cats with a man who, for these purposes, I’ll christen as Soulmate.
“For a year, the rats have been gone. For a year, we have painted the walls so that they are no longer the previous owners’ olive green, but millennial pink and tangerine and bright red. For a year, we have visited the veterinarian at the drop of a hat.” (56)
The reader senses his steadiness through the page, and the brief, phlegmatic dialogue afforded him is profound, serving as steady armor to the author’s rightfully moribund anxieties. van Laer’s devotions to the genre’s anticipated narrative leniencies (time and space, stop and start, asides and expansions) performs well in light of the reader’s main wish: pleasure, with the side-effect of light-learning, set neatly alongside this modern history of matrimony (and the immersive, easy-to-infect depressive points of the small-big decisions we’re forced to make just before reaching our midpoints).
“I am not a philosopher, but after Toby’s death, I am myself an autobiographical animal. And what I must make sense of, most of all, is how my story can go on without Toby. This is what hurts so much: Steven and I have lost not just a narrative thread, but our lives’ shared narrator.” (69)
But I’d like to strongly advocate that CAT, at its adroitly epigrammatic, kitty-cat center, is recognizably an elegant treatise about maternal choice. Love’s main crux is distinctly weary and compacted with the ancient sacrifice that under love’s legislation, we’ll hug daily, and keep whatever karmic legacies we’re blood-programmed for stationed by the door where the shoes lie unevenly. The karma will go out with the trash on those days, and be taken by top of umbrella outside to breathe and narrate our futures, but never, ever will it be freely let into the main interior of home – off the carpet, you! we’ll cry – and in the worst instances, the cat and you will grab it by its throat, make it so weak it willingly settles next to the dust again.
van Laer’s astute historical lacings illustrate her own career trajectory as doctor of literature and profound pet enthusiast. She couples research with the memoir’s surface narrative of young adult bildungsroman, turning tops by making the risky literary transmutation of basing memoir in the soft, wet mouth of the modernized bestiary.
“Abigail Tucker repeatedly suggests that cats have “bewitched” us—that they have, through their cuteness and perhaps the parasite that they carry, Toxoplasma gondii, convinced us to do what we know is illogical: to keep them close, to let them kill. But why would we need to be sick or bewitched to let cats do what we already do ourselves?” (103)
The cat: elusive, cute-until-provoked, congenitally spiritualized / shamed / worshipped / slandered / divinized to lengths that, in some forgotten histories, spell out deep cruelty done to the creatures – the 1800s practice of cat burning, for example, or the Thai tradition of placing cats in cages for the simple, fervent purpose of praying for a rainstorm – van Laer reveals her genius at conscientious detail by enlisting help from history and science with aims towards recounting portions of her life story set against the noble, feline silhouette.
“For cats, who have been accused of loving back too little or not at all, it is a different story. While their love is intermittent, restrained, there is such pleasure in learning to accept its limits, and to revel in the moments when they show it…” (99)
She utilizes her fine training to reach for ingredients of scholarship in leveraging her argument… cats are quite possibly the coolest things on Earth, let’s discuss. She does the work for us by fluently placing beautifully-wrought passages of description delineating the importance of the cat’s heritage and its historical and ecological footprint, and by tracing references through ideological, political, theoretical, and philosophical beginnings.
“Cats roam free all over the world, with an impact that we certainly do not want. In 2013, Nature Communications published a study estimating that, in the United States, cats kill somewhere between one and four billion birds each year, and perhaps five times as many small mammals.’ Its authors, along with many biologists, consider cats an invasive species.” (94)
I imagine my child (a son, no daughter could survive me) sharing common attributes with Blue – wild and hysterical and a composite of confused traits that adjoin awkwardly by elbows instead of hands, and when provoked, weird in the clandestine way only little boys are guided with – what mean to say is that my cat’s pelage is the constant representative of the luxurious, brown curls of my wayward son – ghost, gift, a united front — of me and someone who doesn’t quite exist. The idea of Son shimmers fitfully in the region of my mind that I allocate to lost futures, knowing ahead of time that love for a child (whether flesh or animal or other) assigns us with a debt we’ll repay over a lifetime of troubled interludes. The love-tugs are faint enough that I can ignore it most days.
Her Ghosts 