Unlikely Animals

An articulate and charismatic poetry professor and rock musician who has always been considered “cool” by his students and his children’s contemporaries, Clive Starling finds himself gradually losing the mental faculties which have defined his sense of self, his dignity and his social standing. Paradoxically, the short-term memory loss which infantilizes him has a redeeming quality: It forces him to live in the moment and allows him to fully experience and appreciate the time that he has left.

Clive’s capacity to live in the present is shared with the children and animals in the novel (the fifth graders, Rasputin, and Moses), with whom he has a special affinity. His increasing alignment with the natural world is reflected in his identification with Harold, a naturalist.

As he grows increasingly forgetful and prone to distraction, Clive’s sole constant focus is his search for Crystal Nash—an addict who everyone else believes to be either dead or hopelessly lost. Clive’s insistence on the value of a single life which is apparently without hope is in some ways a reflection of the continuing value of his own doomed and compromised life—of the hope and life force that endure to the very end.

Ingrid Starling is passionately committed to her home, family, and local community. A specialist in local history, she is rooted and invested in the heritage of Everton. At the beginning of the novel, she has been working extra hard to maintain both her family the Corbin Estate. The opioids crisis has ravaged the local community and she has been left handling the upkeep of the mansion almost single handed since Sid Wish lost his job as groundsman at the park. Having supported her son through his addiction, she had set aside her own feelings to forgive her husband for his affair before finding herself nursing him through a terminal illness.

Ingrid reaches her breaking point when the deer destroying the home into which she has poured so much of her life indirectly catalyzes the death of Ralph Kelsey, owner of the Corbin estate and a kind of unofficial “patriarch” or grandfather figure in her own family (28). When Kelsey’s funeral is interrupted by the delivery of the fox, Ingrid abandons her caring roles and goes to live with Clive’s doctor.

Ingrid’s decision ultimately proves beneficial for the whole family. Her temporary separation from her husband makes her begin to appreciate their day-to-day life together: “Those conversations, those rituals, were the kind of things that make up a life. The things Ingrid was missing now” (187).

Taking over her mother’s caring role enables Emma to share precious time with her father and brother and to reassess the nature of her own healing gift.