Animal focuses on Joan who decides to move to Los Angeles in order to find a woman who can help her put together the last missing pieces in the intricate puzzle that is her life. By moving to another city, she’s also running away from her past failed relationships—most of them with married men—which only taught her that she’s dispensable and that most men are pretty much awful. After witnessing Vic, her boss-turned-lover committing suicide right in front of her while she was on a date with another man, she feels completely lost and in desperate need of a change of scenery. This event also motivates her to dig deeper into her past as she wants to have a much clearer image of what made her end up on the wrong trajectory.
She is an unlikeable female character and even early on, the narrative seems to suggest that her behaviour and her past mistakes are caused by traumatic past events. This obsessive pursuit of hers that entails finding and pinpointing the exact incident in her past that made her the way she is becomes quite evident from the very beginning because she reminisces on every interaction she had with men, beginning with her father. Her journey of finding herself and putting the missing pieces together is further complicated by Eleanor, Vic’s daughter, who’s determined to get revenge for her father’s dead, and Lenny, her neighbour who only seems to exacerbate her hatred for men. While I was very intrigued at first and really interested in finding out what happened to her, things were unfolding so slowly that I eventually became quite detached halfway through.
The plot didn’t seem to go anywhere for more than half of the book even though there are numerous shocking and violent events—some of which seem to have the sole purpose of highlighting the brutal world in which Joan lives since there aren’t actual discussions on them or what they mean to Joan. A big part of the story is dedicated to Joan’s obsession with Alice, a woman that we don’t really know much about aside from the fact that she’s younger and very attractive. Even though they are complete strangers, Joan trusts Alice from the very start with her turmoil—something that seems quite atypical for her as she doesn’t really open up to others. She entrusts Alice with details about her affair with Vic, with the story of the only time she actually felt something for a man, and how each time it all ended up badly for her. These confessions make them grow closer, but like every other connection of Joan, it’s more complicated than a meeting of like-minded women. The book promises an explosive woman who is ready to take back everything that has been stolen from her, right every wrong, and not let another man get away with using and abusing her ever again. But the execution fell short especially because of the drawn-out mystery around Joan’s past, but also because her rage never seems quite palpable. It seems very dormant even when she exerts this revenge in a scene that is definitely the highpoint of the book.
The book’s strengths are the representation of abuse and the discussion regarding how normalised it tends to be in our society along with the masterful craft of complicated female characters. However, this is by no means superior to Taddeo’s Three Women where she tackled similar themes and did it much more naturally than here. In Animal, the approach feels way clumsier and more inauthentic, and that’s probably because while Three Women had a confessional feeling around it that could help you empathise with the characters very easily, this one lost it due to the drawn-out mystery.
Taddeo’s Animal is an intriguing, at times bizarre, story about female rage, violence, and revenge. While it failed to hit the mark, for me at least, the writing was really beautiful and haunting which definitely attest to Taddeo’s talent and potential.
Animal is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of June 8th 2021.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
Honestly, sometimes I think it’s the only recourse. Killing men in times like these.
Joan has spent a lifetime enduring the cruel acts of men. But when one of them commits a shocking act of violence in front of her, she flees New York City in search of Alice, the only person alive who can help her make sense of her past. In the sweltering hills above Los Angeles, Joan unravels the horrific event she witnessed as a child—that has haunted her every waking moment—while forging the power to finally strike back.
Here is the electrifying debut novel from Lisa Taddeo, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Three Women, which was named to more than thirty best-of-the-year lists and hailed as “a dazzling achievement” (Los Angeles Times) and “a heartbreaking, gripping, astonishing masterpiece” (Esquire). Animal is a depiction of female rage at its rawest, and a visceral exploration of the fallout from a male-dominated society. With writing that scorches and mesmerizes, Taddeo illustrates one woman’s exhilarating transformation from prey into predator.
