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Chosen as a Notable Book of 2002 by The New York Times Book Review “Harrison has created some of the most wildly diverse narrative worlds in contemporary fiction. . . . [she] employs simple, intensely focused prose, with some chapters consisting of a single, exquisite paragraph in the middle of a too large page, surrounded, like Bigelow, by profound emptiness, The language of The Seal Wife is, like the landscape itself, stripped down and barren…. In The Seal Wife the nature of obsession is not limited to the self-indulgence of romantic love. It is obsession that feeds explorers who dare to go beyond safely charted territories, as Harrison has done once again.” San Francisco Chronicle “Harrison is adept at transporting readers to strange new landscapes often called the dark recesses of the human mind…. Harrison is a poetic writer and an imaginative storyteller who grounds her work in well-researched details of different times and places…. Bigelow’s peaceful interludes with the seal wife are memorable, as is the apparent message that man should remain linked to nature even as civilization approaches.” USA Today “Harrison will amaze readers with the ostensibly effortless manner in which she describes both the bleak terrain of Alaska and the alien terrain of Bigelow’s own compulsive thoughts. At the root of this story is the interplay between seclusion and desire. Harrison forceful develops this primal conflict.” Library Journal
“Superb, perfect, one might even say—soaring.” —The Seattle Times “Lyrical passages...reads like profound poetry...the most enterprising and successful portrait of a man in heat by a female writer since Joyce Carol Oates’ tumultuously orgasmic What I Lived For.” —Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune “Intricately wrought...Harrison imbues her solitary silence with a stately air of self-possession.” —Maria Russo, The New York Times Book Review “This...mesmerizing tale is dizzying in intensity; its startling story twists are borne along by prose as austere and powerful as Alaska’s icescape. The novel’s undertow of anguish will resonate with anyone who has tried to make sense of desire....Chilled to perfection.” —People “Mesmerizing...harrowing in its emotional intensity, haunting in its evocation of a distant time and place.” Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Booklist Chimerical and probing, Harrison creates utterly different realms in each of her acute, highly stylized novels, yet all chart the course of obsessive desire. More concentrated and dreamier than its predecessors, including The Binding Chair (2000), her fifth novel takes place in 1915. Bigelow, a handsome and intrepid 26-year-old meteorologist, moves to Anchorage, Alaska, to establish a weather station. Suffering from the cold, extremes of dark and light, and cultural deprivation, he fusses diligently with his instruments, maps, and logbooks, and builds an enormous kite, which he hopes will help him prove a theory about polar air. Uncomfortable with the hardscrabble town's macho men, he falls hard for a mysterious Aleut woman who never speaks or shows any emotion, even during sex. Then she disappears. Devastated, desperately lonely, and sexually starved, Bigelow gets entangled in a bizarre situation with yet another silent woman. Harrison writes with a curiously voluptuous efficiency as she gives rein to her endearingly hapless hero's feverish mind, and explores the brutal dynamics of a frontier town where the ambitions of outsiders collide with indigenous wisdom. Painterly in its pearlescent evocation of the Alaskan landscape, steeped in myth and the magic of science, this is a delectably moody, erotic, and provocative cross-cultural love story. -Donna Seaman
Sexual
Obsession in Frontier Alaska In her much talked about 1997 memoir, ''The Kiss,'' Kathryn Harrison chronicled the horrors of incest she was subjected to as a young woman; and given that past, it's not surprising that her imagination should incline toward the lurid and the extreme. Still, her earlier novels have tended to be marred by melodramatic excesses, redeemed only by her psychological insight and her instinctive storytelling talents: ''Exposure'' voyeuristically dwelled on the pornographic photographs a man took of his daughter; ''The Binding Chair'' focused in graphic detail on the grisly Chinese practice of foot binding. With ''The Seal Wife,'' her mesmerizing new novel, however, Ms. Harrison renounces this sort of sensationalistic material and the needlessly complicated plots she has employed in the past to tell a simple story of love and obsession, a story that is harrowing in its emotional intensity, haunting in its evocation of a distant time and place. Set during World War I in Anchorage, which was then a frontier town, ''The Seal Wife'' recounts the tale of a young man named Bigelow who has been sent there by the government to establish a weather observatory. It is an isolated posting in a town subject to paralyzing cold and ice and sudden, unexpected thaws; a town where people learn to make do without newspapers and hot baths; a town where the incessant howling of the dog-sled teams makes Bigelow think of ''the death of civilization,'' ''the death of reason.'' Bigelow's job -- mapping air currents and taking precipitation and barometric readings -- sometimes strikes him as absurd. ''He isn't drawing mountains or rivers or canyons, all those features of the earth that have existed for eons,'' Ms. Harrison writes, ''and neither is he mapping countries or cities or even streets, the work of centuries. No, Bigelow records ephemera: clouds; a fall of rain or of snow; hailstones that, after their furious clatter, melt silently into the ground. Like recounting a sigh.'' There are few women in Anchorage, and Bigelow suffers from both unrequited lust and terrible loneliness, until he meets an enigmatic woman known only as the Aleut. She never speaks to Bigelow, never shows him a shred of emotion, but he becomes obsessed with her and vows to crack the carapace of her reserve. The two begin a highly ritualized affair: several evenings a week, Bigelow arrives at the woman's door bearing a duck or rabbit he has shot; she prepares the food for dinner, and after their repast the couple go to bed. He tells her about his work and his dream of building a giant kite that will take atmospheric readings miles above the earth, but she never says a word. After they have sex, she takes a bath, while he prepares to leave. One day the Aleut refuses to let Bigelow into her house, and several days later she vanishes without a trace. Her disappearance throws Bigelow into an acute depression. He searches for her in vain. He succumbs to nightmares and brooding daydreams, wondering whether he has offended her, whether she was perhaps pregnant with his child, whether she has found another man. He tries to lose himself in his work: building the giant kite that will prove his scientific theories about the circulation of air and make his name. It is a dream made up in equal parts of hubris and common sense, and it will lead to an experiment that will endanger Bigelow's life. Months and seasons pass, and eventually another woman -- Miriam Getz, the daughter of the general store's owner -- catches Bigelow's eye. Bigelow is told by her bullying and larcenous father that he must marry her, but he realizes that even in her company he thinks only of the Aleut, who has magically reappeared in town. Ms. Harrison narrates these events with uncommon grace, limning the frozen landscape of early-20th-century Alaska with the same easy authority she brings to the delineation of Bigelow's turbulent state of mind. She demonstrates, with more assurance than she did in ''The Binding Chair,'' that she is capable of writing historical fiction that possesses all the immediacy and harsh poetry of reportage. And she once again demonstrates her ability to evoke the sensual qualities of everyday life, while using language that is considerably sparer than she has used before but equally hypnotic. Like her earlier
novels, ''The Seal Wife'' takes on the subject of passion and its
capacity to warp or derail a life. But in this volume Ms. Harrison
not only makes us understand the destructive consequences of sexual
obsession, but also makes us appreciate its power to shape an individual's
sense of self, its ability to inspire and perhaps even to redeem
the past. --------------------------------------
A surprising novel of science and desire in Alaska By Alan Cheuse. Alan Cheuse is a book commentator for NPR's "All Things Considered," a writing teacher at George Mason University and the author, most recently, of the short-story collection "Lost and Old Rivers." A cold setting. Anchorage and its environs in 1915. And this fine new novel's main character, a pioneering, 26-year-old meteorologist, a visionary innocent from the Midwest named Bigelow, arrives in this frontier town made of flimsy wood and slathered in mud and snow with a few small instruments and a grand plan (but no heavy coat or lined boots). His mission? To take the air temperature and trace the winds. "Bigelow," Kathryn Harrison tells us, "records ephemera: clouds; a fall of rain or of snow; hailstones that, after their furious clatter, melt silently into the ground. Like recounting a sigh. . . . He is recording a narrative that unfolds invisibly to most people, events that, even if noted, are soon forgotten." His own story, unlike yesterday's or last year's weather, may linger in your mind. Harrison is a generous, if not a fulsome, narrator, and she more than sketches in the details of Bigelow's appearance and his manner ("handsome . . . with a broad face, pale blue eyes almost too widely set, a straight nose, and a wide mouth that balances the eyes. . . . His big forehead appears even bigger because of his fair eyebrows, his slightly elevated hairline."). She quickly convinces us that she knows his heart and mind--and more. Bigelow is an innovative and enterprising scientist. And to keep up with his attempts to construct a large weather kite that will carry sensitive instruments higher than they have ever flown before, the novelist has had to digest a lot of technical material about meteorology and the practical applications thereof. This she has done with a wide reach and a delicate hand, as when, for example, she reveals Bigelow's thinking about ice: "The basic pattern of ice is hexagonal, a union of six tetrahedra, but the formation of crystals varies with temperature. From zero to negative three degrees centigrade, it is the habit of ice to form thin hexagonal plates. With the subtraction of one or two degrees, needles result. Take away three and get hollow prismatic columns." Elementary to a scientist, mysterious to a lay reader. But when you consider that Bigelow runs through these thoughts in order to prevent himself from ejaculating while making love to a mysterious Inuit woman, the seal wife of the title, the passage is seen as an ingenious bit of craft. In fact, Harrison presents Bigelow's lustful desires--his inner weather, if you will--with as much precision, if not more, as she employs in describing his vocation and the setting: "He undoes the button at her throat, then the top button of his own shirt, then back to hers, one and one and one, until she gets sick of the game . . . and begins to undo the buttons herself. Down to her waist and then on past her lap . . . and with each one she releases he feels himself growing that much harder, an erection that seems to claim all the blood in his body." Because of passages such as this, the eroticism in the book often seems more natural than the science, as one might expect from the author of the infamous incest memoir "The Kiss." But Harrison does show off a wonderful ability to turn her research into striking, lyrical passages, so that the accounting, say, of the cost of Bigelow's enormous weather kite ("Twenty-eight spars. 232 square feet of muslin. Five miles of piano wire at $.02 a yard. $.02 X 5 X 1760 = $176.00 = two paychecks = two months = 1440 hours' worth of piano wire. Barometer, thermometer, and dry cell battery. A hundred nights of sanding. . . .") reads like found poetry, and Bigelow's struggle to record, if not master, the outer elements meshes with his quest to find a woman to match his own capacity to love. From the first,
Bigelow boils while Alaska freezes over as that silent Inuit woman
leads him into a state of equatorial lust. When for a time the woman
disappears, the weather expert lurches into a difficult and unsatisfying
friendship/affair with the mute daughter of an Anchorage shopkeeper.
The end of his story, unlike the passage of the weather and the
turning of the seasons, is unpredictable, though inevitable. And
the book itself turns out to be a rather wonderful surprise, the
most enterprising and successful portrait of a man in heat by a
female writer since Joyce Carol Oates' tumultuously orgasmic "What
I Lived For." -------------------------------------------------------
Seasons
of Lust This dark tale hovers around the edges of Kathryn Harrison's haunting new novel, The Seal Wife, the story of a man who loses himself to an oceanic female power. In 1915, 26-year-old meteorologist John Bigelow arrives in Anchorage, Alaska, to set up a weather observatory. Armed with his instruments and an education that taught him to name clouds and read columns of mercury, Bigelow believes he will be able to decipher the signs of this strange land. But soon he becomes disoriented by the absence and sudden reappearance of sunlight, the astonishing cold, and the native people's speaking Chinook. Alaska's a place Bigelow never could have anticipated, and he becomes so consumed by loneliness he can't think straight. His maps become smudged; his weather readings are unreliable. Enter "the Aleut woman." She never speaks to Bigelow, but has sex with him in her cold house, unbuttoning her dress and lying down for him night after night, without ever telling him her name. Her aloofness vexes Bigelow. He brings her soap and magazines, hoping for a reaction. But the only gifts she accepts wholeheartedly are the rabbits and birds he shoots and brings to her table. She skins and cooks them, leaving a bowl of blood on the counter. In The Seal Wife a minor bloodbath precedes sex: The skinning of animals constitutes a kind of foreplay. Readers familiar with her work will recognize this as vintage Harrison: No other writer has so mastered the troubling erotic vignette, the multi-layered sex scene that leaves the reader wondering what just happened. In Harrison's world, sex is a force that can stop time and reverse gravity?pleasure is almost beside the point. In Harrison's beautifully written and infamous memoir of incest, The Kiss, she compares her father's kiss to a "scorpion's sting." For Bigelow, the lust he feels for the Aleut woman is a form of drowning, and sometimes she seems like a creature of the sea, swimming out of his grasp: "Bigelow keeps his eyes closed until she cries out. He wants to watch her as she comes, the way she seems for a moment to swim beneath him, her legs kicking in some rhythm he can almost understand. But she's too quick; it's over before he has a chance to see." Not much happens on the surface of The Seal Wife: Bigelow builds a kite that will expand his knowledge of the heavens; the Aleut woman leaves mysteriously for a while; Bigelow becomes manic in the summer's perpetual light. As a novel of obsession, The Seal Wife is necessarily uneventful?perhaps nothing is so monotonous as obsession. Yet the longer one spends with this remarkable book, and the closer one looks at its finely wrought sentences, the deeper it gets. There's so
much to dwell on here: the way the kite comes to represent the soul,
trying to break out of the flesh, the way the Aleut woman seems
real and solid but also transparently mythic?one morning she even
pulls on a pair of boots made from seal's flippers. As Harrison
evokes the Native American tale of the seal wife, she simultaneously
describes the vanishing of the world that created it. Bigelow is
only one of many white men who have come to Alaska hoping to subdue
it and quantify its mysteries. As the story continues, industry
transforms the town. The villagers celebrate Bigelow's presence
because he can warn them about storms before they arrive. But every
time Bigelow thinks he has mapped out the answers, he envisions
the Aleut woman swimming beneath him. Silent and remote, she's the
void where all his calculations disintegrate.
1. Kathryn Harrison has been hailed as a master of “spare narrative”. Why might the prose of The Seal Wife be characterized as “spare”? Discuss examples or particular passages that highlight this quality of Harrison’s writing. What effect does this style have on the novel as a whole, or on your ability to imagine the time and place in which it is set? 2. In The Seal Wife, Harrison explores the relationship between physical and emotional suffering. Bigelow is subject to the harsh Alaskan climate, to which he is unaccustomed, as well as to the simultaneous and profound effects of an unexpected obsession. How do these aspects of Bigelow’s inner and outer lives interact? How does Harrison express the theme of suffering–its causes and consequences–through other characters in the novel? 3. What effect does Bigelow’s realization that the Aleut is not unable to speak, but rather unwilling, have on her overall characterization? Does this understanding affect or alter your sense of the dynamics of their relationship? If so, how? 4. Over the course of the novel, speech (and the lack thereof) becomes a prominent thematic thread. The Aleut allows Bigelow into her home and her bed, but never speaks, though he does so “more volubly to her than . . . to anyone else.” At what other points in the book, and through which characters, is the theme of speech explored? What might Harrison be trying to convey through her use of speech as a link in Bigelow’s relationships, especially with women? 5. Despite the noteworthy dearth of women at Bigelow’s Alaskan outpost, he engages in relationships with several throughout the book. Describe the novel’s key female characters, and discuss the nature of Bigelow’s relationship with each. In what ways are these women different? Similar? How does Bigelow change or grow as a result of these relationships? 6. The various types of power dynamics between men and women–Bigelow and the Aleut, Getz and Miriam, and so on–are at the core of The Seal Wife. Describe and discuss some of the important male/female relationships in the book. What conclusions can you draw at novel’s end about Harrison’s ideas regarding sex and power? In many of the relationships through which the theme of sex and power emerges, there is a direct correlation between speech and power. How do the various qualities of gender, sex, speech, and power interact throughout the book? 7. As much attention as is paid to Bigelow’s inner obsession with the Aleut, equal attention is paid to his professional passion for charting the weather, his obsession with “recording a narrative that unfolds invisibly to most people.” How do Bigelow’s passions correspond to each other? In what ways are they parallel, and in what ways might they be directly related? What effects do these consuming obsessions have on Bigelow? How do they affect his ability to relate to others, understand himself, and achieve his goals? 8. When the heavy sun appears, rolling sullenly along the horizon, it reveals landscapes of unutterable splendor, ice glazing every twig, turning gravel to diamonds, garbage to ransoms. . . . But what he described as grandeur in last year’s letters to his mother and sister now strikes him as threatening, the inlet’s water black and violent, heaving under a mantle of splintered ice. In such passages, Harrison uses richly metaphorical language to describe the Alaskan landscape as seen through Bigelow’s eyes. While such descriptions provide a vivid sense of setting, they also provoke questions of physical realism versus emotional perspective. How might Bigelow’s literal vision of his surroundings be a reflection or projection of his inner state at any given moment in the book? Find and discuss a few passages throughout the novel that illuminate this relationship. How does Harrison’s depiction of the landscape change in relation to Bigelow’s emotional evolution? What other “realistic” aspects of Bigelow’s surroundings (other characters, professional pursuits, and so on) provide a mirror for his inner narrative?
10. Bigelow seems to have achieved a sense of balance and resolve by the end of the novel, a composure at the other extreme of the emotional spectrum from the air of obsession that permeates the book. Discuss the arc of Bigelow’s character development. What does his emotional evolution imply about the relationships between his emotional and professional pursuits? How does he use potentially self-destructive feelings and behaviors to achieve creative success and emotional balance? How do you feel about the end of the novel? KEEPING SECRETS from BOOK MAGAZINE
Book: It’s been
five years since you published The Kiss. Do you have to remind people
that you’re a novelist? |
