Animal by Lisa Taddeo
Joan, the protagonist, carries the auspices of her name with a fraught grace. She doesn’t hear voices, but by the end of the book, her divine mission becomes clear: retribution. The resemblance to another holy Joan, circa Play It As It Lays Didion, is so evident to me: escaping tragedy in New York only to experience a sun-dappled, Los Angeles descent into madness when the accumulation of grief is just too much to bear. But the Joan of Animal is pulpier and more vulgar than Didion would ever be: in the very first paragraph, a married former lover kills himself in front of her, and the body count only compounds from there.
Joan is intense as the embodiment of the psychological and physical trauma inflicted by men onto women, which has catalyzed into her surging, ever-present anger. She trusts no one; she doesn’t expect to. Every interaction with another person is a microcosm of the great power imbalance that no woman signs up for, but must become an expert in.
One of my greatest furies was the way men treated me like I would not merely endure their filth but endorse it.
…Men will use you unless you use them first […] sometimes men must be punished because women are important pain from the moment they are born until the moment they die.
I believe all men have a rapist within them, just dying to get out.
The amount of trauma that Joan has experienced is perverse in a way that might be ridiculous if not for its plausibility —the unsurprising thing about the way Joan’s story plays out is not the extent of the abuses she’s suffered but that she has decided to do something about it. We are seduced into believing in her mission through her unassailable style and oscillating self-possession, a jaguar on the prowl for the answers to her life’s greatest failures. A rote dedication to beauty and pleasure is one of the only things she can confidently possess amidst a lifetime of pain, and it’s enthralling to be alongside her observing the duplicitous men and stunning women that populate the postcard backdrops of Poconos resorts, Montana skies, Wall Street restaurants and the jagged ravines of Laurel Canyon.
Joan scans every landscape for a whiff of the predator, having decided that she is done being prey. She’s out for blood, and anyone who’s ever been a woman knows why.
