![]() I would rather read about arguments than agreeability I like it when characters struggle with one another on the page. The thoughts of this narrator moved and intrigued me without fail still, I would rather read about disaster than discomfort. Many people love it.Īs a reader, I happen not to particularly prize accuracy in and of itself. I don’t mean to suggest anything at all about the author and the inspiration for the book, only that the focus on the quotidian feels exceptionally lifelike to me. Not realism - this could happen - but accuracy - it probably did happen. We live in a golden age of accurate fiction. There are anecdotes here that illustrate life but have no effect on events. ![]() “Brood” is the sort of book that is inevitably called quiet. The voice is lovely, with a compelling comic decorousness given to factual lectures - for instance, “A chicken’s perception of cold does not likely resemble ours in any way, is instead the sensation of skin stretching and lifting as the feathers rise.” We know little actual information about the narrator - who she was before the events of the book, beyond the miscarriage - but she is alive: You can feel the beating of her heart and apprehend her soul, even if you can’t call her by name. Instead, “Brood” is concerned with voice and observation: It meets the reader on the page, without invitation in. The back and forth feels part of the ruminant nature of the book (if I may mix animal metaphors), in which time stops and starts again, and you may be certain about yesterday even if you’re not sure what today is. Some of the book’s episodes are written in present tense and some in past, but I could not always divine why one section would start “Yesterday” and occur in the past while another speaks of “today” and occurs in the present. Indeed, the book also isn’t interested in Time, the tacit topic of many, if not most novels. The book’s events concern chickens and cleaning, as well as waiting for a letter from a university that may or not offer Percy a job, and are presented in meditations and episodes out of chronological order, though it’s hard to parse what the chronology is. “Brood” isn’t much interested in plot or character - Percy, the narrator’s husband, mostly seems as though he’s in another room, even when he isn’t he has the vivid absence of a picturesquely named offscreen sitcom spouse. ![]() Her eye for physical detail is surprising, gimlet: two brown eggs “one fair like milk tea, the other dark and a bit orange” the way children move and pout and swoon around animals an egg-bound hen “with a great wag in her posterior.” It’s a pleasure to see what Polzin sees. “I never feel smaller than when I am filled with doubt,” the narrator says, after the death of her favorite chicken, “such a small, small feeling, it’s a marvel it can fill anything at all.” She writes beautifully about everything: the sound of melting snow at the end of a Minnesota winter a forgotten container of orange sherbet frosted over private emotion. ![]() Polzin writes beautifully about chickens she is lovingly cleareyed about their “idiocy” and their dearness. The reader turns the title over and over, to see all the meanings it accrues. “Brood” is a perfectly titled book, a word that can be thing or an action, can refer to people or single chickens or multiple chickens or children. Chickens, foremost cleaning houses for a real estate broker friend, which she does for a living her neighborhood her late-in-life pregnancy and miscarriage motherhood. Over the course of the book she tends to and worries over her chickens - Gam Gam, Miss Hennepin County, Gloria and Darkness - who nest in a repurposed dollhouse in their backyard coop. My decision is not the fault of “Brood,” by Jackie Polzin, a wonderfully written first novel, full of nuance and humor and strangeness, whose unnamed narrator lives in the Camden neighborhood of Minneapolis and is married to an economist. ![]()
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