Mostly Dead Things

Kristen Arnett’s debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, is a book about the family dynamics that occur when everybody in the family has a different idea about what appropriate grief looks like. It centers around a family taxidermy shop taken over by the family’s eldest, Jessa, who took over the business after her father took his own life.

In many ways it reminded me of Melissa Faliveno’s Hemlock, about a queer woman who returns to her family’s lake cabin in Northern Wisconsin several years after her mother died there several years earlier. There two characters are both queer, both drink too much and seem to favor beer, and both are haunted by how to remember their flawed but loved deceased parents.

Jessa wants to remember her father as the careful craftsman, dedicated to the accuracy and dignity of the animals that come through his shop, by carrying on the trade. Conflict shows up immediately when her mother’s more artistic approach is a sharp rebuke of tradition and down-to-the-whisker perfection.

Arnett made some interesting choices in the pacing of this book, particularly when it came to how she signaled (or didn’t) jumps between past and present, and how subtly she would mark major plot events. It was a book where the full picture of how all the characters related to each other and what motivated them didn’t quite cohere until very late in the book. Some major questions remained unresolved or open to interpretation even at the end of the book.

There’s a tremendous amount of narrative dedicated to establishing the relationship between Jessa and her lover-turned-Sister in-law Brynn, but I’m still not sure to what end. She walks out of the house and disappears early in the book, never to return. Her disappearance clearly adds emotional weight for Jessa, her brother and his kids, but the amount of exposition makes it seem like she’d be a more significant character for the events of the present day.

Perhaps Arnett is trying to draw a parallel loss to Jessa losing her father by showing her also lose the love of her life. Or maybe Brynn is more of a foil to articulate Jessa’s inflexibility to remember people other than how she experienced them, especially people she put on a pedestal. Maybe it’s a little bit of both. Regardless, I was left wanting a little bit more stakes to understand the dynamics and what sort of resolution Jessa might want.

Despite that, I liked this book. I definitely think about it every time I see a piece of taxidermy hanging on a wall in a bar or displayed in a museum. In contrast to Hemlock, the Florida setting feels much more grounded, complete, and free from generalization. Arnett benefits from actually living in her setting, but she also gave the characters work to do that requires building the setting into the narrative, which in turn compels more specific detail. In this regard, it reminded me of another Florida based book I loved: Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell.

Jessa is at all times surrounded by the taxidermy shop: All the animals past, present, and pending, that have gone under the knife. Arnett goes to the setting to answer the questions: Where and how would someone come upon a dead boar? How would they get it to a shop? Why, to what end, and for what price would anybody purchase one preserved by a taxidermist? At what point, and for what animal, would a taxidermist ever turn down work or have too many specimens of a given animal? Why would they love working on one kind of creature but not another.

Kristen Arnett clearly had a lot of fun with this book, too. She must have learned a lot about taxidermy and how it’s done well, to write it. It’s fun to read, and the central conflict between Jessa and her mother is at once hilarious and compelling — sometimes to the point where I found myself rooting against Jessa just so that she might finally get it. It’s a good read you can find at your local library or bookstore.