Wild Life: A Novel by Molly Gloss (review)

5 0 8 WAL 3 7 . 4 WINTER 2 0 0 3 As Lluvia, whose name means rain, begins to learn the pulses of the transmitter and their correlating words, technology puts her on track to a spiritual world so important to Jubilo and his grandmother. She becomes the conduit for not only the rejuvenated love between her mother and father, but also for the reunion of spirituality and technology, past and future. Wild Life: A Novel. By Molly Gloss. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. 255 pages, $13.00. Reviewed by Jennifer Love Lane Community College, Eugene, Oregon Like many who write of landscape and place, and like some of the charac­ ters in her own fiction, Charlotte Bridger Drummond takes to the woods. The narrator and protagonist of Molly Gloss’s novel Wild Life, Charlotte is a feminist and author living in southwestern Washington during the first decade of the twentieth century. A single mother of young children, Charlotte is a self-sup­ porting writer and self-conscious free-thinker, who prefers her writing of adven­ ture stories to the tedium ofparenting. She inhabits undomesticated spaces both mentally and, in the course of the novel, physically, when she enters the moun­ tain forests in order to search for a lost child. Written as a journal, Wild Life takes us from Charlotte’s home with her housekeeper and five sons in the small frontier town of Skamokawa, near the mouth of the Columbia River, to the wilder woods of the western Cascades. Her journal is both an account of her daily experiences, and a reflection on her life as an author who makes her living—and supports her large household—fromher writing. Although Charlotte's published work is radical for a woman of her day—she sells adventure stories with “scientifically inclined” protagonists and stories about women who can “ride and shoot”—she is acutely aware of the sex­ ist expectations for early twentieth-century female novelists (104). In an essay within her journal, Charlotte complains that women are expected to “write only about . . . the domestic issues of love and nurturing . . . ; in womens newels, heroines should always be good and generous, and when they are unjustly overpowered or attacked, they must seek a male champion" (103, original italics). To some extent, as a writer of popular fiction, Charlotte is forced to meet these expectations. “I am, ofcourse, driven by the marketplace” (105). Yet in the course of Wild Life, Charlotte temporarily evades these constraints, along with the often burdensome task of caring for her children. When the granddaughter of her housekeeper goes missing, Charlotte joins a party of loggers in search of the girl. The child may have been raped or killed, but Charlotte—as honest in her self-appraisal as she is critical ofpatriarchal society—admits to being inspired by the idea of having a wilderness adventure. With her trousers and tough constitution, Charlotte is prepared for a trek through the wet northwestern woods in the spring and early summer. But she BO O K R EVIEW S 5 0 9 falls behind the search party, slowly weakening until she meets a group of crea­ tures who, it seems, “had once been human, or had once been animals” (197). These huge, Sasquatch-like beings— resembling the “wild woods-beasts” of one of Charlotte’s own fictions— accept Charlotte into their world (134). She learns their means of communication, methods of foraging for food, and ability to sprint from danger: the constant threat of humans nearby. Centering on Charlotte’s avid inner life, Wild Life is ambitious in scope and finely detailed, interwoven with omniscient character studies, fragments of Charlotte’s unpublished writing, and brief, actual historical documents from around the beginning of the twentieth century. Place names are geographically accurate, and visual representations of the topography from the mouth of the Columbia River to the Douglas fir forests, gravelly canyons, and volcanic moun­ tains of southern Washington are familiar to readers who have spent time in the U.S. Northwest. Like Gloss’s acclaimed 1989 novel The Jump-Off Creek, Wild Life draws on the author’s (north)westem history and invokes a sense of rural landscapes and women...