‘On Animals’ could have benefited from updates, but still a fun read
Susan Orlean — author of “The Orchid Thief,” “Rin, Tin, Tin” and the wonderful “The Library Book” — is a fun writer to read.
Her style is conversational, she includes intriguing facts, and she has an engaging, self-deprecating sense of humor. That said, there are plusses and minuses about her newest book, a collection of essays titled “On Animals.”
The essays themselves — ranging from musings on donkeys, mules, birds, rabbits, dogs, tigers and lions — are informative and unusual and reflect Orlean’s curiosity and her quest for answers to questions that take her all over the world.
She investigates Joan Byron-marasek, the woman who single-handedly raised her section of New Jersey’s population of tigers to more per square inch than almost anywhere in the world. Orlean travels to Afghanistan to study pack mules who carry everything from bullets to blankets, boots, Kevlar helmets and sand for making concrete. She stops in at the World Taxidermy Championships in Springfield, Illinois. She studies pandas in Beijing, China, and donkeys in Fez, Morocco.
And, she travels to Iceland to discover what happened to Keiko, the killer whale who starred in the 1993 film “Free Willy.” This essay illustrates the problem with “On Animals.” Orlean’s essay, “Where’s Willy,” published in 2002 in The New
Yorker, ends with Keiko swimming in open waters off the coast of Iceland. Later, scientists determined by a tag attached to his dorsal fin that Keiko died — probably of pneumonia — in July of 2003, a fact not included in Orlean’s essay.
Such omitted information reminds readers that these essays were written years ago, some of them as early as 1995, and most could do with an updated postscript.
The best parts of “On Animals” are the opening and closing essays, “Animalish” and “Farmville,” in which Orlean recounts how she came to love and acquire the animals in her life. Before she and her husband and son moved to Los Angeles in 2011, the family lived in New
York on a Hudson Valley farm that was also home to chickens, ducks, turkeys, guinea fowls, dogs, cats and cattle.
Orlean writes how she relished watering her chickens and ducks: “No need to use free weights to tone your biceps when you’re carrying ten gallons of water back and forth every day.”
She traded her cantankerous rooster Laura (the sex of baby chicks is difficult to determine) to a neighbor for a Rhode Island Red Rooster her son named Statue of Liberty.
Martha Stewart, also a keeper of chickens, invited Orlean and her hen, Tookie, to appear on her television show. Orlean writes: “The one moment that really unnerved me was when I walked out on the set and realized that there were several dozen chickens there running around or sitting on audience members’ laps. Chickens, as a rule, are as cliquey as high-school girls and quite happy to tear to pieces an unfamiliar bird.” (Tookie did fine.)
In appealing prose, Orlean displays her fascination and love for animals as well as a farmer’s practicality when things go wrong. When she leaves the New York farm, she’s wistful:
“I always dreamed that someday I would have animals all around me, in the house, in the yard, watching me in the garden, dotting the landscape, crowing in the morning, lowing in the moonlight, barking at the wind, and I had had that there.”
Her appreciation of the friendship, strangeness, colors, textures and just plain mystery of animals is infectious and nicely documented.
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