I’ve learned to be skeptical about stories of friendships between animals and people, as I find that they usually fall into one of two categories. Either they rip your heart out and grind it under the well-worn earth where the animal makes its home, or they turn out to be a feeble excuse for the author to engage in public therapy for their own underlying issues. There are exceptions, of course–Helen Macdonald’s lovely memoir H is for Hawk (review by ElCicco here) comes to mind. But Fox and I has such a beautiful cover, and I like foxes, so I decided to take a chance. I assumed the worst I could expect is that I would dissolve into sobs over the death of a small mammal whose typical lifespan in the wild is a mere 3 to 4 years. I can’t tell you whether the inevitable end occurs in the span of this memoir, because I couldn’t finish it. I struggled for a week and quit after finishing a sorry one third of the book.
Fox and I is the story of a woman living in an isolated cabin, teaching classes part time, and making a connection with a fox. I think that’s the story–in spite of my reading 87 pages, the details are pretty fuzzy. When she “meets” the fox, she almost immediately begins anthropomorphizing, which I’m ok with because she owns up to it. The relationship with the fox wasn’t an issue for me.
My issues are several. I’ve frequently said I like beautiful writing, and author Catherine Raven–a former national park ranger and contributor of natural history essays to several magazines–can craft a well-written sentence. Unfortunately, the string of skillfully worded sentences merge into a jumbled mess that doesn’t build into anything approaching a cohesive story. She jumps from reading The Little Prince to her fox friend, to pondering magpies, to recalling the death of Pope John Paul II, to recounting how her family wasn’t nice to her and her father never wanted children. There are some heavy revelations about the author’s childhood and her inability to relate to people, but they are dropped into the text with such nonchalance that the only response they elicited from me was confusion. Her style is an accidental stream-of-consciousness that makes Virginia Woolf’s writing feel linear.
I also had trouble grasping Raven’s relationship to the animals on her land. She mentions, “Now that I was spending time with Fox, I couldn’t imagine that I would ever be willing to own an animal.” Ok, why? I mentioned that she admits to anthropomorphizing the fox, so what is her reasoning behind not wanting a pet? Because the fox is free? She doesn’t say, so your guess is as good as mine. Additionally, her attitude toward some of the other wild animals she encounters is appalling. I can’t shake the feeling that her mixed reactions to the magpies has to do with their rejection of her as a “friend.” She complains about the voles. She refers to a random fly as an ugly creature with a “filthy little mouth.” Random neighbors don’t fare much better, as when she calls a neighbor and rips him a new one because two dogs (which turn out not to be his) were chasing her fox friend. If she eventually apologized to the neighbor for her mistake, she doesn’t share that information. Are we supposed to find her Momma Bear routine against an innocent neighbor charming? I honestly don’t know. This book baffles me.
It’s clear from the writing that Raven doesn’t relate well to people; she writes as if she is enjoying her own private joke. There might be a lovely story in here about a woman connecting with nature, but I couldn’t sift through it long enough to get there. I hate quitting on a book, especially one that holds a promise of exalting the glories of nature. But now that I’ve committed to quitting Fox & I, I simply feel relieved.
