War flashbacks evoke nature’s truth
Print Edition
If there were a prize for ornery old men, the ornithologist Jim Kennoway in Alice Greenway’s novel “The Bird Skinner” would trounce every recluse in New England. Refusing help from his remarkably well-adjusted son and incredibly patient neighbors, he’s drinking and smoking himself to death on an island in Maine. Trudging along in this Lear-like existence, he’s taken by surprise by the ebullient Cadillac, a remarkable young woman from the Solomon Islands who comes to stay with him before studying medicine at Yale. (Thirty years prior, stationed in the Solomons during the Second World War, Jim befriended Cadillac’s father, with whom he has since lost all contact.) If this premise sounds familiar — striking young woman brings hope to forsaken old man — the style with which Greenway weaves her tale of memory and loss is bracing in its restraint.
Of course, too much restraint can inhibit engagement; just ask Hemingway’s readers. Indeed, Hemingway’s ghost hovers over Greenway’s novel — in the beginning, especially, when a number of passages end with staccato sentences about Jim’s drinking or smoking, and there’s an abrupt, grouchy rhythm that frustrates. But soon enough, Greenway allows a glimpse of what she’s up to. Cadillac brings the old man a fish as an offering, and he’s impressed. “Jesus Christ, she speared it!” he thinks, seeing the “bloodied hole” behind the gill. This introduces Jim’s first wartime flashback.
Jim’s leg has been recently amputated, he has no interest in company, his life is physically constricted — but his memories guide us through the South Pacific in addition to seaside communities in Maine, Connecticut and even Manhattan, where ornithologists from the American Museum of Natural History meet at Dominican restaurants, discussing Zimbabwe and Laos in Spanish and French over plates of huevos rancheros. We learn not only about expeditions to far-flung locales, but also about the office politics of the museum, where Michael — a younger, resentful co-worker — has been asked to write a profile of Jim. This profile (“an obituary of a man not yet dead”) opens Jim’s story further, providing details about the death of his beautiful wife, the wealthy upbringing he disdained and, ultimately, the role he played in the war.
Patience is required as Greenway layers ornithological detail with flashbacks that expand, revealing Jim as a man whose skills as a bird skinner are more than a metaphor. The book’s title becomes increasingly meaningful, and a central question becomes urgent: How were these bird-skinning skills corrupted in wartime? Can this corruption be viewed any differently in the context of Cadillac’s culture? What, Greenway asks, does it mean to be primitive?
Jim’s memories of his wife give the novel its erratic heartbeat; thankfully, she escapes the fate of a romanticized dead wife and comes across as fully human. Violence has its part in Greenway’s evocation of young love, and so does great tenderness. Their relationship is as fresh as it is heartbreaking.
With an attention to detail that’s both poetic and precise — “Snow heaped up in the backs of pickup trucks, plowed over to both sides of the road like a parting of white hair” — Greenway evokes so much more than the weather and mood of her locales. In literature, the natural world frequently exists behind a gauzy scrim. But “The Bird Skinner” knows we are animals, all of us. The natural world is everywhere, and despite its beauty, it’s rarely pretty.
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