Benjamin Percy The Wilding

$Call of the wild A Contrary review by Frances Badgett  The Wilding Benjamin Percy Graywolf Press 2010 Buy this book...> “The Cascades forever keep Justin oriented. All his life, if lost, hiking through the woods or driving along some strip of county two-lane, he needs only to spot the familiar crowned point of North Sister or the flat-topped Mount Bachelor. They breathe over him. They help him find his way. Now he adjusts the side mirror and in it observes the mountains growing smaller behind him. He places his hand on the reflection.” It would be easy to dismiss Ben Percy’s The Wilding as simply a novel about powerful developers destroying Echo Canyon in the Cascade Mountains for a golf course. But Percy personalizes this story so well, the golf course battle seems almost secondary. Percy’s characters, particularly his protagonist, Justin, are each grappling with a sense of “wildness” within themselves. Justin is a quiet, bookish high school English teacher who feels both a deep connection to and removal from the experience of the wilderness. This removal haunts him quite literally, in the form of nightmares about grizzly bears. His father, Paul, and his wife, Karen, serve as constant reminders for Justin of his lack of potency, strength, and self-sufficiency. As Percy describes him, “Justin is a man with neat hair, parted clean on the right side, cut tight above the ears and along the neck. He brings a hand to it now, tidying it, part of him thinking that as long as every hair stays in its place, everything will be fine.” Justin’s meticulous, retiring personality clashes sharply with his father Paul: “He smells like motor oil. His huge hands seem capable of tearing phone books in half and uprooting trees with a tug. His fingernails always carry dirt and bruises beneath them. He often keeps a sandwich in his pocket and withdraws it intermittently for a bite. His idea of a good time is to go price pistols at Bi-Mart.” Justin’s conflict with Paul becomes a central motif in the novel, culminating in an adventurous camping trip to Echo Canyon, where the two men will face their own imbalances: Paul’s overly macho sensibility and Justin’s dainty ambivalence. The most compelling character in the novel, Brian, is a kind of secondary player to Paul and Justin. A Gulf War vet and locksmith, Brian’s fascination both with his own bear suit and with Karen leads him down some rather tricky paths. Brian literally becomes wild, absorbing the night, the wilderness, and his bear costume as part of his lifestyle. Brian works so beautifully in the story as the eyes of the wilderness, as the representation of both a psychological and literal ecotone—an area where wilderness and human mingle. Percy’s writing takes on a lyrical quality with Brian, and it’s through Brian that the novel gains real poignancy. Percy approaches this novel as an allegory of man’s relationship with nature. Regrettably, he clings so tightly to this allegory, his characters (with the exception of Brian) end up as types, and the dynamics among them become stereotypical. Justin describes an exchange between his son Graham and Paul on the camping trip: "To hear them talking about guns, laughing sadistically—acting like men are supposed to act—positions Graham in a new light, making him seem more mature than he ever has before, a little man." It would be easy to dismiss this simplistic description as a matter of Justin's perspective. But Percy doesn't complicate this observation at all. Justin's big epiphany in the novel is that his father’s distance and “manliness” were a result of a hard day’s work, unlike his own teaching career, which leaves Justin “vacant, headachy, uncertain, and uncaring of what he has accomplished.” It’s here that we realize that Paul’s machismo is not just to be understood, but admired. And not just by Justin, but also by the reader. Paul’s “manliness” cracks only once, very slightly, as they listen to owls in the surrounding woods. “If I could sing a song like that... A song about the way I feel. Well, it would be quite a song.” Other than that small break in type, the characters stick to their roles: Karen, the withholding wife who over exercises and belittles Justin for not being manly enough; Bobby, the gregarious, womanizing developer with a bleached white smile; and Tom Bear Claws, who stages his native wisdom speeches for the cameras even as he has sold out to developers. All of this gives the novel a flat, cartoonish quality that cheapens the bigger story Percy wants to tell. Another fracture in the novel is in Percy’s desire to write The Wilding as an adventure story. Some scenes, suffused with drama, knock the book off-balance. For example, Justin and Karen are eating dinner, the dialogue is tight and tense. And down the chimney flies an owl, disrupting their evening, the scene, and in many ways, drawing away from the most interesting elements in the scene. The owl singes its feathers in the fireplace and flies out the open front door. Later in the novel, Karen and Bobby are in the living room, and the owl has a repeat performance, ruining their evening. Percy’s intent with these moments is to illustrate the ways in which nature can’t be controlled—the way it intrudes upon those who are surrounded by it. But these moments jar the reader out of the scenes and seem more like trickery than a natural part of the weave of the characters’ lives. Despite these weaknesses, many strengths rescue The Wilding. Many of Percy’s passages are beautifully written, contemplative, and poignant. When he steps outside the adventure story and slows down the narrative, the book deepens and expands. My favorite of the passages is a moment of tenderness between Justin and Karen when she was pregnant with Graham: “He was not a religious man, but in the dark, with the baby moving and the warm buzz of sex playing through his veins, he could believe in anything, so he offered up a prayer for his son. He prayed that nothing would ever harm him, that the boy would grow into a happy, healthy man. He hopes the prayer somehow imprinted itself into his bones and blood, like something Karen consumed, its nutrients broken down and filtered through a cord into Graham, helping him along, even now.” Despite its flaws and imbalances, The Wilding has much to recommend it. If Percy’s goal is to illustrate the complicated and often fraught relationship we all have with the wilderness and internal “wildness” and to do so against the breathtaking backdrop of the Cascades, then The Wilding is an achievement. Frances Badgett is the fiction editor of Contrary. Index of Reviews...>$ shapeimage_1_link_0

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AUTUMN 2010 COVER THREE PROSE POEMS
CLAUDIA SEREA
THREE PROSE POEMS KRISTINE ONG MUSLIM THE THING ABOUT DEPARTURES TASHA COTTER DAYDREAMING IN MY
LOVER’S ARMS AFTERWARD DAMON McLAUGHLIN THE POOL DAVID MOHAN
FINGERS MICHELLE MILLER INSECT EFFECT ANNIE BELLET RECENT AWARD WINNERS REBECCA LEHMANN SHERMAN ALEXIE MEREDITH MARTINEZ REVIEWS BENJAMIN PERCY TOVE JANSSON C.K. WILLIAMS KARA CANDITO BOB COWSER JR. KATIE DONOVAN SUSANNA DANIEL