Focusing all the attention on the twist threatens to obscure Fowler's other more considerable talents. Some might say I'm spoiling the twist, but given what plays out (as Rosemary pieces together the real story behind Fern's removal from her family, Lowell's estrangement, and the unwitting role Rosemary herself played in events), a novel that is both one giant moral compass and a harrowing depiction of a family's implosion, the prose of which zings on the pages – a grandmother, for example, for whom "conspiracy is folded into her DNA like egg whites into angel food cakes" – deserves to be acclaimed for the right reasons. The latter describes my experience of reading Karen Joy Fowler’s most recent novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (A Marian Wood Book/Putnam, 2013), published earlier this year to widespread critical acclaim. You should read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves only if you're willing to be upset and probably permanently haunted Fern disappears when Rosemary is 5, and we don't learn what happened to her until the end of the novel. We don’t so much finish these books as emerge from them, blinking our eyes and knowing we’re changed.
They conducted experiments around the breakfast table, made freak shows of their own families, and all to answer questions nice people wouldn't even think to ask." Think Project Nim and you get the idea. Fowler's novel is superb, but I've already warned a couple of sensitive animal lovers I know away from it. "Psychologists," she tells us, "didn't leave their work at the office.
You have to wait until page 77 for the explanation for their disappearance, but it's not too hard to work it out for yourself – Rosemary grew up in the 1970s, and her father was a psychology professor at Indiana University. Both, however, have long since vanished from her and their parents' lives. R osemary Cooke, a quiet college student, grew up with her sister Fern and her older brother Lowell.
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