A Review of Laura van den Berg’s “I Hold a Wolf by the Ears”
Dour and Depressing
The 11 short stories that make up Laura van den Berg’s I Hold a Wolf by the Ears sometimes verge on the fantastic (in the magical realist sense — one story features a young boy who climbs a tree and just disappears) and sometimes are fantastic (in the sense that they are of very good quality). This is a book that has come with a lot of hype, as the trade paperback’s back cover attests: it was one of Time’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020 and was named a best book of 2020 by NPR, Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, the New York Public Library, and more. The collection was also long-listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. So, clearly, this is a work that has garnered some acclaim from very important quarters. So does my opinion count? Well, if it does, I’d say that I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is finely written and eerily evocative of fabulists such as Kelly Link and Steven Millhauser (the titular short story in this collection even references one of Millhauser’s works in that a character goes around and slaps strangers’ faces in public). Is it perfect? No. But it is good? It can be.
My favourite story in this collection is the penultimate one: “Your Second Wife.” It’s about a woman who has made a career in the gig economy by impersonating recently deceased wives for grieving husbands so they can have one final date, and the story is about the dangers and disconnectedness that working one-off jobs can have on both the individual’s psyche and the society at large. It’s a tale, essentially, about people not giving a you-know-what. And while I found the story to be mediocre, “Last Night” has one killer opening: “I want to tell you about the night I got hit by a train and died. The thing is — it never happened.” Unfortunately, the rest of the story isn’t quite memorable, even though the story is about mental illness (which is right in my wheelhouse as the co-facilitator of a mental health peer support group). It just didn’t grab me and jostled about temporally a bit too much. In fact, “Last Night,” which opens the collection, and the follow-up “Slumberland,” where a woman is interrupted in sleep by her female neighbour’s nightly wailing (which turns out to be her job: she gets upset for fetishists who call her as a means of making a living), are the weakest of the bunch. It may just be that you must really warm up to van den Berg’s writing style. But once you do, the rest of the collection can be a bit of a treat.
This is a story collection about the realities women face in the present day (not counting for COVID-19, of course — many of these pieces reference things that happened in the Trump era). As such, the male voice or point-of-view is rarely heard from, and, most often, when it is, it is threatening. In the past, I’ve been annoyed at women writers who treat men as the problem and not part of the solution, but there is something about this author’s style of writing that made me feel more at ease with it. It could be that van den Berg has a wickedly dry sense of humour at times, which makes it too hard to be exasperated by these tales. Still, make no bones about it: I Hold a Wolf by the Ears can be a dour and depressing read. This is not a book that should be consumed by those who are looking for an escape with their fiction. Many of these female characters are facing real problems — such as death, rape, domestic violence, and other threats — so this is not a collection that treads lightly.
If there are any glaring faults with this book, they might be two-fold. One, a lot of the stories just end, with nothing to wrap things up. “Volcano House” is one of these stories — we never find out if a character who has been shot and hospitalized will be pulled off life-support. Two, sometimes it can be hard to figure out what the point of some of these tales is. Again, “Volcano House” is the main offender — it lapses back and forth between a visit the main character and her sister takes to Iceland, and scenes from a hospital bedside. I couldn’t parse too much what the point of this was about, other than the possibility that the story is about a longing to make recently past things relived so they can be done right the second time. But I’m not sure. Despite this flaw or criticism, I did find that the journey and not the destination was enjoyable enough. You can read these stories and be transported into the lives of others, miserable as some of them might be, and be devoured by them.
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, then, was a middling success for me. I did enjoy this book but found myself wishing that some of these pieces were blown out into full-fledged novels. There are the glimmerings of some great stories ready to break out here, and it is very clear and apparent that Laura van den Berg is a talented and fearless writer. I might search out more of her work — I understand that she has already published a novel or two — and think that if you’re looking for writing that both challenges and sometimes dazzles, you should look here. There is some good stuff to be found within the pages of this volume, and even the dross stories can have their moments. To that end, while I’m not sure if I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is worthy of all the post-release hype it generated, it is a very fine collection indeed and worthy of checking out if you’re curious about this author and the style of stories she writes. Here’s hoping that there’s more of this from where it came from.
Laura van den Berg’s I Hold a Wolf by the Ears was published by Picador on July 27, 2021.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
