Jade Wallace

Corinna chong, The Whole Animal.

Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023. $19.95.

The publication of Corinna Chong’s debut short story collection, The Whole Animal (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023), marks ten years since the publication of her debut novel, Belinda’s Rings (NeWest Press, 2013) and, judging by the quality of writing in her latest book, it seems her time has been well spent. With all the careful attentiveness of a zookeeper, or a tutelary deity, Chong has nurtured each story in this collection until it stands as a gleaming example of its own particular species.
As one would expect from the title, some of the pieces in The Whole Animal are explicitly concerned with animals of various types and how humans relate to them. In the titular story, as the protagonist Ruby struggles with her husband Ward’s newfound enthusiasm for veganism, she is haunted by—among other things—the memory of how her and Ward found their car suddenly surrounded by a sublime herd of bison with “Water dripp[ing] from their faces like tears” (18) when they got stuck in a terrible summer storm in Badlands National Park. In stark contrast are the Siberian husky-poodle crosses whose “manufactured” existence sparks controversy at a casual evening soiree in “Siberpoo.” Still again there is a tragically fated guinea pig named Sheila from “the snare. the arm. the guinea pig. the bottle. the bus. the night.” whose brief presence in the story both reveals and catalyzes the mundanely sinister inclinations of the teenaged narrator and her stepfather after they are abandoned by the narrator’s mother.
But I think what The Whole Animal is really concerned with, at its heart, is the human animal. In Chong’s collection, people are positively creaturely. One might note the unruliness of human bodies in “Porcelain Legs,” in which the preteen protagonist Queenie becomes preoccupied with an especially long hair on her mother’s eyelid: “The feel of it reminded her of the dog hairs she always had to pick off her sweater” (Chong, 109). Or there is the carefully sculpted but still untamed body of “Butter Buns” protagonist Gavin’s mother after she dedicates herself to weightlifting: “Her muscles tightened and undulated like animals moving beneath the skin” (Chong, 51). The continual tension between the wildness of the human body and the effort to domesticate it comes to a head for Gavin’s mother when she chooses to have an abortion after becoming unexpectedly pregnant while in the middle of separating from Gavin’s father. She explains, “I’m glad I did it, but making a decision like that still hurts” (Chong, 55).
On a deeper level, The Whole Animal seems, most of all, to be interested in probing the instincts and impulses that motivate individuals’ actions, especially when those motives are inscrutable to the people around them, and sometimes even to the individuals themselves. In “Thieves,” unidentified burglars repeatedly enter the child-narrator’s family home, but take little or nothing with them, leaving the narrator wondering if the perpetrator might have been a member of her own family. This mystery is paralleled by a recounting of how blue tits learned to steal cream from bottles left in milk chutes, though scientists were apparently never able to discover how they learned to do this, leading some to posit that the birds possessed a kind of collective consciousness that allowed them to transmit information as if telepathically. That the interior lives of the humans in “Thieves” are as hard to discern as those of the animals makes a striking, but implicit, suggestion about the profound unknowability of the human mind.
Similarly, in the difficult story, “Zora, in the Whirl,” the seventeen-year-old narrator must reckon with the enigma that is other people. Throughout the story, she recalls various scenes from a shortlived childhood friendship with the eponymous Zora, as she attempts to come to terms with her family’s recent accusations that her former friend Zora was “not right” and “a compulsive liar” (Chong, 35). This disclosure is further complicated by another revelation: that Zora may have been a victim of child abuse. But the truth of the matter is caught like an animal in a trap. If one takes the narrator’s family at their word, Zora might as well have been lying about the abuse as she allegedly lied about everything else. And yet, the narrator senses a “callousness” in her mother’s description of Zora, and comments to herself, cryptically “We’ve learned not to talk about problems with fathers. […] We know better than to ask questions” (Chong, 36), suggesting that it might be her own family members who are inclined to deception, and that their retconning is perhaps just a mechanism to alleviate their guilt for failing to intervene and help Zora.
The complexities at work in “Zora, in the Whirl,” are emblematic of Chong’s approach as a whole in this collection. I see elements of metatextuality in the following exchange between the photographer-narrator of “Fixer” and a young poet named Mariko during an arts residency:

“Hm,” Mariko said, looking off across the
room. “I like uncertainty.”
“Oh really?” I said.
“Yeah, Like in writing, if I knew where
I was going all the time, I think all the
energy would be taken out of it, you know?”
(Chong, 69).

Like Mariko, Chong herself seems to relish uncertainty. All of the stories in The Whole Animal luxuriate in ambivalence and are sustained by propulsive ambiguity. “Fixer” itself serves as an apt example; the story, which traces the narrator’s preoccupation with Mariko, opens with the loaded, seemingly romantic statement: “I knew I liked her better than she liked me” (Chong, 65). Thereafter, the narrative follows the narrator’s misadventures in getting to know Mariko better, including several instances of stilted flirtation that culminate in an awkward but sympathetic scene in which the narrator accidentally touches Mariko and feels “like I’d just opened a soda can inside my body” (Chong, 75). This is quickly followed by the narrator downplaying the significance of the interaction in her own mind, explaining “I didn’t think I was sexually attracted to her. I was just trying something” (Chong, 75), an understandable but ultimately unconvincing justification. The last time the narrator sees Mariko, she is “letting herself balance on the two back legs of her chair for a moment, then catching herself again with the tips of her toes. The sound was like a tiny bird trying to get in” (Chong, 76).
This image, like much of the closing imagery in these stories, is loaded with implication. The precarity with which Mariko is balanced, the evocative simile of a small bird wanting to get into the room, seem to suggest that Mariko, or the narrator, or both of them, are ultimately unsettled, and that a repressed sense of attraction or connection to one another is struggling to be acknowledged and let in.
Reading Corinna Chong’s stories is very much like trying to interpret the often silent language of animals. One must be attuned to subtlety, curious about the cryptic, and sensitive to proximity in order to appreciate all that’s in play. For those who are, The Whole Animal offers fictions that pulse with the significance of memory, and that are as meaningful as any real-world interactions we might be so lucky as to have with the animals around us, human or otherwise.

Jade wallace

Jade Wallace (they/them) is the book reviews editor for CAROUSEL and the cofounder of MA|DE, a collaborative writing entity. Wallace’s debut poetry collection, Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There, is available now from Guernica Editions. jadewallace.ca.