Study of cold-blooded creatures
By Lydia Millet |
January 6, 2013, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
DIANA Wagman's fourth novel, "The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets," is about a Los Angeles divorcee kidnapped by a deranged iguana owner, and it's Wagman's best to date - a quick, engaging story, half thriller and half wry domestic drama. Winnie's ex-husband is a celebrity game-show host who wants to be a "serious" actor, with a yoga-teaching trophy wife and a longing for his surfing days. Their teenage daughter keeps busy resenting her mother and fabricating outrageous abuse stories for an older, online boyfriend she's never met. Winnie herself, meanwhile, is stalled out in the center of a featureless plain of middle-aged torpor, with few desires or ambitions.
Enter Oren - reptile enthusiast and online "boyfriend" of the teenage daughter - who decides it's his mission to punish Winnie for her maternal crimes, while scoring enough money to buy a smuggled mate for his freakishly large, sexually frustrated green iguana, Cookie, who lives a sordid life of captivity in Oren's superheated kitchen.
On both counts poor Oren is doomed to disappointment, since Winnie has US$600 in her checking account and isn't, he eventually finds, at all an abusive parent. As the novel's fractured day winds on, Winnie has to fight for her life against multiple males, both human and nonhuman: Suffice it to say that the eight-foot Cookie, though herbivorous, has fairly pointed instincts.
"The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets," like Wagman's earlier novels "Bump" and "Spontaneous," is told from the intersecting perspectives of a group of characters moving through a Los Angeles day as their worlds converge. These books have the conversational rhythm and somewhat self-conscious quirks of certain slice-of-life Hollywood films; but it's their glimmers of darkness that are their strongest suit.
Indeed, Wagman's murderous villains - with their preening vanity, their rudimentary yearnings for sex with beautiful girls and their fantasies of domination - exert a deeper pull than some of her heroines. These men mean to mean well, but suffer from a lack of impulse control that results in the violent death of women.
By contrast, Wagman's female protagonists to lack a sense of purpose beyond the marital and domestic spheres. They're amiable, straightforward and perceptive, but typically deeply lost. Men and women are both effectively indicted, though women generally with a fonder touch; Wagman's women are mostly aware of their purposelessness, while her men are full of egomaniacal purpose but blithely unaware that their egomania will end in femicide.
In "Care and Feeding," it's also the men - from pet collectors to endangered species smugglers - who subjugate wild animals to their selfish and perverse wishes, making their captive animals, along with their captive women, into either victims or monsters.
Enter Oren - reptile enthusiast and online "boyfriend" of the teenage daughter - who decides it's his mission to punish Winnie for her maternal crimes, while scoring enough money to buy a smuggled mate for his freakishly large, sexually frustrated green iguana, Cookie, who lives a sordid life of captivity in Oren's superheated kitchen.
On both counts poor Oren is doomed to disappointment, since Winnie has US$600 in her checking account and isn't, he eventually finds, at all an abusive parent. As the novel's fractured day winds on, Winnie has to fight for her life against multiple males, both human and nonhuman: Suffice it to say that the eight-foot Cookie, though herbivorous, has fairly pointed instincts.
"The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets," like Wagman's earlier novels "Bump" and "Spontaneous," is told from the intersecting perspectives of a group of characters moving through a Los Angeles day as their worlds converge. These books have the conversational rhythm and somewhat self-conscious quirks of certain slice-of-life Hollywood films; but it's their glimmers of darkness that are their strongest suit.
Indeed, Wagman's murderous villains - with their preening vanity, their rudimentary yearnings for sex with beautiful girls and their fantasies of domination - exert a deeper pull than some of her heroines. These men mean to mean well, but suffer from a lack of impulse control that results in the violent death of women.
By contrast, Wagman's female protagonists to lack a sense of purpose beyond the marital and domestic spheres. They're amiable, straightforward and perceptive, but typically deeply lost. Men and women are both effectively indicted, though women generally with a fonder touch; Wagman's women are mostly aware of their purposelessness, while her men are full of egomaniacal purpose but blithely unaware that their egomania will end in femicide.
In "Care and Feeding," it's also the men - from pet collectors to endangered species smugglers - who subjugate wild animals to their selfish and perverse wishes, making their captive animals, along with their captive women, into either victims or monsters.
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