PITY THE BEAST

The author of the story collection Reptile House (2015) explores human vengeance and deep time in her first novel.

“Once, here, on this high plain, there were only Horse, Bear, Rhino. No words to put to things, no call to put them. But today? Ginny and Dan in the barn, and words like this: ‘You fucked me over. You fuckin’ fucked me over.’ " Ginny and Dan are trying to help a mare give birth to a foal that’s too big for her while they argue about the fact that Ginny has been unfaithful to Dan. The opening passage begins with an observation that encompasses the vast sweep of life on this planet and then zooms in on a contemporary scene that’s obscene, filthy, and brutal. This is a pretty good preview of what’s to come. Ginny and Dan will take increasingly elaborate measures to help their horse survive giving birth. Their community assembles to help them. The gathering turns into a party, and any sense that this is mutual aid—rather than the desire to treat suffering as entertainment—quickly dissipates. Rescuing a mare in distress is simply the excuse that brings together people eager to punish a woman who has transgressed. While it would be a mistake to call this novel a Western, it most definitely engages with ideas about the American West. McLean is innovative in reminding us that humans and other animals inhabit a landscape that other animals occupied first. The meanings we impose are, from the vantage point of life on Earth, neither inevitable nor universal. She is, however, hardly new in interrogating cowboy mythology, and it’s hard to not see some of her choices as redundant. It’s clear, for example, that her use of the word Indian conveys a perspective and that her characters’ conversations about Indigenous people tell us something about them. But there’s a point at which an omniscient narrator that’s casually racist becomes a slap in the face. And readers will have to decide for themselves if they want to know what comes next in a novel that spends its first 65 pages recounting the ugly details of a single night that ends with a woman being gang-raped and thrown into a pit filled with lime on top of a stillborn foal.

Ambitious, inventive, and aggressively repellent.