The God of Animals: A Novel

The Significant Seven Spotlight Title, March 2007 : Aryn Kyle's haunting coming-of-age novel is the kind of book that you want to share with everyone you know. Twelve-year-old Alice Winston is growing up fast on her father's run-down horse ranch--coping with the death of a classmate and the absence of her older sister (who ran off with a rodeo cowboy), trying to understand her depressed and bedridden mother, and attempting to earn the love and admiration of her reticent, weary father. Lyrical, powerful, and unforgettable, The God of Animals is our must-read, must-own, must-share book for March. --Daphne Durham Amazon.com With the sure hand of a seasoned writer, Aryn Kyle has crafted a brilliant debut with her novel, The God of Animals . Alice Winston, living on the family horse ranch, a marginal enterprise in Desert Valley, Colorado, is a 12-year-old girl with more than she can handle and no one to help her cope. Polly, a classmate of hers, drowned in the nearby canal and was carried out by Alice's father, Joe, a member of the volunteer posse. Her older sister, 16-year-old Nona, eloped with a rodeo cowboy. Her mother never leaves her bedroom, a case of clinical depression. "My mother had spent nearly my whole life in her bedroom... Nona said that one day, while I was still a baby, our mother had handed me to her, said she was tired, and gone upstairs to rest. She never came back down." Joe has little time for Alice, other than counting on her to muck out the stalls and be polite to the paying customers. He doesn't even notice that she has outgrown her clothes. What Kyle does with this scenario is never predictable or clichéd. She writes beautifully of landscapes, interior and exterior, ravaged by extremes: the hottest summer in years, followed by a deluge; a lonely, isolated girl reaching out to a teacher, Mr. Delmar, equally alienated. Alice starts telling lies, weaving bits and pieces of other people's lives into the tales she tells the teacher. What we eventually find out about her family is more poignant and tragic than anything she can make up. Horse lore is a large part of what explains each of the people in the novel: separating mares from their foals, the way a stud is treated, breaking a horse, ordinary everyday contact. This bond is explored in depth and each person: Alice, Nona, Joe, Joe's father, Alice's mother, is affected by this closeness in a different, unique way, revelatory of each individual's character. Much more than a coming-of-age tale, Kyle told a story of compromises and dreams that will never come true. --Valerie Ryan 10 Second Interview: A Few Words with Aryn Kyle Q: In 2004, your short story "Foaling Season," the first chapter of The God of Animals , won a National Magazine Award for Fiction for The Atlantic Monthly . Did you have the idea for your book at the time you wrote the short story, or did the novel develop over time? A: Three years passed between the time that I finished the short story and the time I returned to expand it into a novel. I was always interested in the characters and in the town which the story takes place, but after the story was published, I assumed I was done with them. In the aftermath of graduate school and a failed attempt at another novel, I found myself living back in my hometown of Grand Junction, Colorado, the town that Desert Valley is loosely based upon. More and more, I caught myself thinking about Alice again. I was interested in how the town had changed over the years, in the way that a tide of money and commercial culture was displacing the old families and the old ways. But mostly, I was interested in Alice's family, and in Alice's struggle to make a place for herself in a world that seems to have no place for her. The short story ended before she could really make any headway. I became curious as to where she might go and who she might become if the events of the story continued into the wider space of a novel. The story of The God of Animals starts with Chapter One, but I've always felt that the novel really starts with the second chapter. Q: How much of your adolescence and personal experience are incorporated into your novel? Like Alice, did you ride horses growing up in Colorado? A: Lots? None? This is a tricky question to answer. As far as lifestyle and experience, my own adolescence could not have been more different from Alice's. I didn't grow up on a ranch; didn't have a sister; my mother got out of bed and went to work every day. But adolescence is adolescence. Like Alice, I certainly know about loneliness, about longing, about regret, and about the confusion of trying to live in the world without really understanding it. Though, if I were going to be perfectly honest, I would have to admit that these are all things I found myself working through in my twenties, rather than in my teens. I did take riding lessons when I was about Alice's age, and I competed in a few local horse shows. It was such a different world from the one I'd grown up in, and though I gave it up when I started high school, I guess it made a pretty big impression on me. Q: How did you think of the title? A: The title didn't come to me until I'd finished the book. I was starting to panic a bit, figuring that no one would be too interested in publishing a book called Novel, which is what I'd named the file on my computer. So I did the only thing I could think of--I frantically thumbed through the pages of the draft waiting for something to pop out at me. I reread the scene between Alice and Mr. Delmar where they discuss God and spirituality. Something about that scene seemed to encapsulate some of the greater themes of the novel, the uncertainty Alice has about the world, her desire to believe in something larger than herself, her fears regarding isolation and loneliness. Q: Do you have another novel in the works? A: Lately, I've been working mainly on short stories. It's kind of hard for me to spend so much time working on one project, then dive into another. I've needed the time to get Alice's voice out of my head before I commit to another novel. But I do have a second novel underway--I'm superstitious, though, and it seems like bad luck to talk about something while its still in the works. Mostly, my writing starts with the characters, with understanding their flaws and their desires. Plot, for me, seems to come later, after I know what my characters want, and what they're willing to sacrifice to get it. Aryn Kyle's Favorite Coming-of-Age Novels Housekeeping That Night Thumbsucker Ghostworld Atonement See all 10 of Aryn Kyle's favorite coming-of-age novels (with commentary) From Publishers Weekly Horses and lost love propel this confident debut novel about Alice Winston, a 12-year-old loner with family troubles in Desert Valley, Colo. Her mother hasn't left her bed since Alice was a baby; her father struggles to keep their horse ranch solvent; and her beautiful older sister, Nona, has eloped with a rodeo cowboy. Alice resists befriending the rich girl who takes riding lessons from her father, becomes obsessed with a classmate who drowns in a nearby canal and entangles herself with adults whose motives are suspect. Kyle imbues her protagonist with a genuine adolescent voice, but for all its fluidity, her prose lacks punch, and too often, somber descriptions of Colorado's weather and landscape are called upon to underscore themes of human isolation, jealousy and pain ("Tomorrow, the sun would rise and deaden the land beneath its indifference"). The coupling of female adolescence with the stark West produces its share of harsh truths, though Kyle overstates the moral: love hurts, it's a dangerous world and the truth is hard to swallow. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks Magazine Critics raised a few concerns about this debut novel (based on the award-winning short story "Foaling Season"), but Aryn Kyle's talent astounded everyone. She takes a clichéd storyx97a lost girl approaching womanhood in a man's worldx97and develops it in unpredictable, emotionally thrilling ways. The business of raising horses acts as a novel-length metaphor, sometimes too obviously, but Kyle's illuminating details make it fresh. Alice sometimes veers into philosophical musings more fitting for a creative writing grad student, but her voice is still the voice of a character readers will care about deeply. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. From Booklist Sixth-grader Alice Winston is having a tough year. Her older sister dropped out of high school and ran off to marry a rodeo cowboy. Her father's horse ranch is teetering on the edge of solvency. Her depressed mother won't get out of bed. And her shop partner just drowned in a canal. Unprepared for the increasingly adult role she finds herself playing, Alice starts telling lies, and soon finds herself in a complicated relationship with her alienated English teacher. Though the powerful building of portents doesn't fully pay off in the end, this is a very impressive debut. Kyle's prose is graceful and mature, and her themes are subtly stitched into the story. Her portrayal of Desert Valley, Colorado, ravaged first by drought and then by rain, captures the isolation and hardship that can characterize western life and also the encroachment of those--the subdivision people--for whom the weather means nothing. A powerful tale, from a writer with real promise, of a girl coming of age amid a dying way of life. Keir Graff Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "Aryn Kyle's stunning debut is a wry and moving look at a disappearing way of life...powerfully understated, ruefully funny...astonishingly assured." -- Vogue "Nothing compares to a first novel that has "it": that dazzling ability to create a world so real, it is true, and because of it we are changed. This book begs to be shared with everyone looking for a great novel." -- Elizabeth Houghton Barden, Publishers Weekly Aryn Kyle is the author of the bestselling novel The God of Animals and a graduate of the University of Montana writing program. Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares , The Georgia Review , Alaska Quarterly Review , Best New American Voices 2005, Best American Short Stories 2007, and the Atlantic Monthly, for which her story won a National Magazine Award. She is also the recipient of the American Library Association's Alex Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers'Award, and others. She lives in Missoula, Montana. Read more