A Field Guide to the North American Family
Garth Risk Hallberg'due south A Field Guide to the N American Family is a novella about two neighboring Long Isle families, the Hungates and the Harrisons, and the means their paths intersect and diverge. But it's as well a written report in the juxtaposition of photographs and words, a riff on nature guides and cultural anthropology, and, fundamentally, a book that brings the reader'south imagination to the front. We are charged with the responsibleness of creating meaning from this piece of work. How we do that is upward to us.
The consequence is a book that is intellectually stimulating, simply just intermittently effective as narrative. Field Guide is formatted similar a nature guide: each page focuses on a specific subject, featuring text, a picture, and cross-references to other subjects of possible interest. The subjects tend to be broad: "Chemical science," "Gravity," "Boyhood," "Maternal Instinct," "Pregnant, Search For." A page at the beginning of the book instructs readers on the many paths through the text, and a defining feature of this work is its not-linearity: it has been designed to be read in almost whatsoever order. Readers can proceed from starting time to end, they tin can hop through the entries by following the cross-references, or they can follow a logic of their ain devising.
The entries tell the Hungates' and the Harrisons' stories from a variety of perspectives and in numerous different voices. The two families are not particularly close, though they interact ofttimes, and come together for neighborly activities similar barbecuing. Jack and Elizabeth Hungate have a son, Gabe, a rebellious teenager, and a much younger daughter, Jackie, who is often lost in her own world. Frank and Marne Harrison accept a daughter, Lacey, who is around Gabe'south age, and a son, Thomas, who is a few years younger and is prone to exaggerating the truth, and so much and then that he is nicknamed "Lying Thomas." Gabe'south rebelliousness develops into experiments with the expressive powers of graffiti, but he's reckless, and his actions take consequences that draw in the residuum of the characters, especially Lacey, who becomes infatuated with him. The elliptical structure of the writing makes the story difficult to summarize beyond this sketchy layout, and anyhow it feels beside the signal: each vignette stands on its own, linked to the others through oblique references. Some dive into specific moments of the characters' lives, describing their internal states in scintillating detail. Others pull dorsum, take a sociological perspective. Some are in first person, some in second, some in tertiary. Under ane entry, there is a listing of questions; under another, a fairytale in a kid'south handwriting. In one memorable example, under the heading "Habits, Proficient," the showtime paragraph of text has been blotted out with a heavy black pen, leaving only the line "There is no such affair every bit a skillful habit."
Loneliness and sadness make frequent appearances, and though the writing can also be funny and hopeful, the dominant way is existential angst. "Chemistry" is a list of diverse substances, licit and illicit, that might be consumed by members of a family; underneath the litany of chemicals lies a narrative of pain and the ways people cope with information technology. "Cede," ane of the most moving moments in the book, describes Jack discovering a cadger equally long as an arm living in his garden. He believes it'south an escaped pet and lets it be. But every bit winter approaches, he calls animate being control, thinking the lizard won't survive the cold. A woman comes to take the lizard away, and when she departs, he breaks downwards into tears without quite knowing why. "Adolescence," the first entry, describes Gabe breaking into a train yard, his backpack full of spray pigment, mischief in his heart. Though not all readers will start there, it's a clever entry bespeak to the novella, its imagery and emotions a rubric for the rest of the story.
In aggregate, the vignettes grade a cubistic portrait of the two families: multiple angles, splashes of color, empty spaces. There's no single protagonist, which is both a force and a weakness. Characters come to brilliant life in a few words, simply in that location'south not enough narrative momentum to sweep the reader upward in the story. The book compels the reader to fit the pieces together, not unlike doing a jigsaw puzzle. You lot go the please of finding the right slice, and the frustration of missing it.
Though Field Guide can be maddeningly elliptical, the linguistic communication is often beautiful. 1 of Hallberg's strengths is the manner he layers intricate imagery into his sentences, giving them a texture that is a joy to read. Consider the final sentence of "Adolescence": "Information technology's the sky over the urban center sprayed violet, like the inside of 1'due south heart—cloudy, brooding, still aglow subsequently distant explosions." Through the spray paint cans Gabe is carrying in his backpack, the exterior world is mapped onto his interior boyhood, its joys and pains.
The photographs vary in how straight they relate to the text. Many of them feel haunted by absence, sorrowful, alienated, and their juxtaposition with the text creates spaces for the reader to wander around. The photo under "Chemistry" is more texture than anything else; in its fuzziness, its uncertainty, it suggests the blurring of the senses that substances often crusade. The photograph accompanying "Adolescence" is of a teenage boy in a black sleeveless shirt, his head titled back, his eyes to the sky, his hands belongings taut wires that become upward and out of the frame. It plays off the text perfectly, capturing a feeling of tension and possibility. Underneath the pictures, humorous lines continue the field guide conceit by invoking the language of nature documentaries: "Though often identified with Liberty, the wild Adolescence more closely resembles a Search for Significant."
Originally published in 2007, Field Guide is beingness republished after the success of Hallberg's 900-folio novel City on Burn down. The two works share many similarities: non-linear storytelling, multiple perspectives and modes of writing, the integration of graphical and pictorial elements, the mimetic representation of text as it would announced in the world (especially in handwriting). In City on Fire, the disparate elements, united under a grand narrative, become coherent. They all feed into, and aid to create, the novel'south vast telescopic, its want to represent the many forms the globe can take. The compression of Field Guide ways the pieces stay jagged and scattered—they tell a story, only their coherence tin can seem forced. The implication of the format is that the specific characters and stories are representatives of species, and their needs and wants, their habits and nesting places, their success and failures are therefore universally relatable. Only isn't that already the hidden hope of all fiction?
No writer truly controls how a reader reads their work. Hallberg'southward novella explicitly endorses wayward reading in its structure, in its not-linearity, in its use of photos in juxtaposition with the text. The reader makes an essential contribution. A Field Guide to the North American Family is a refreshing accept on narrative, and if the volume sacrifices momentum, what it gains is just as of import: an explicit endorsement of the liberty to create significant.
John Flynn-York is an MFA candidate in the UC Riverside–Palm Desert low residency artistic writing programme. He writes fiction, poetry, and essays.
Source: https://www.fictionadvocate.com/2017/10/25/a-field-guide-to-the-north-american-family-by-garth-risk-hallberg/
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