Animal by Lisa Taddeo Review

This was everything I was expecting and hoping for. I read Three Women earlier this year, and knew immediately that Taddeo would continue to shock me, make me contemplate, sit in uncomfortable feelings. Her writing is unflinching, non-judging. She truly gives her narrators space to truly show who they are, baring themselves for the world to see, whether they like it or not. I knew I had to read Animal, which is fiction while Three Women was a narrative nonfiction book. 

This gives everything that My Year of Rest and Relaxation thinks it gives. The narrator is what I imagine to be the final boss of female anguish, rage, pain. This novel even argues that female rage at its core is nothing more than pain gone unnoticed, frustration gone ignored, trauma gone sour. I wanted to read about female rage, and was presented with that and so much more.

This novel’s plot is nonlinear, it jumps from memory to present and vice versa, from stating events to deep reflections, playing with these different mediums and flipping between them with ease. Much like how it feels to reflect on past experiences and traumas, it meanders, slows, dumps, then circles back, the onion peels away, layer by layer. The reader is on the edge of the seat, sitting with countless questions as the narrator takes her time to process how she got to where she is, why she is like this, when it all happened, who she’s talking to, and where she is going. This was a feat of literary fiction, this is everything I seek in a literary fiction novel, and it truly gave me hope in contemporary literary fiction after too many lackluster experiences. 

Ultimately, what I loved most was the tone as I’ve discussed before, and timing of revealing certain details. Taddeo manages to tiptoe the line between too forthcoming and too secretive, dragging it out, and revealing everything too soon. And the narrator is something else. She has gone through unspeakable experiences, she sees the world differently because of this and Taddeo is plain with how her narrator presents it. She presents it as this is who she is. This is what has become of her. It is plain as day by the end of it, that it could have been anyone, even you.