Revisiting Neffy

A review of The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller, an advance reader’s copy received from Tin House, on sale June 6, 2023.

A review of The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller, an advance reader’s copy received from Tin House, on sale June 6, 2023.

There is a lot to enjoy in this book. The distillation of pandemic worldbuilding into an accelerated setting makes for an easy orientation into the chaotic start of the present-tense story while also providing an action-packed and painful confusion of the main character’s, Neffy’s, first days in the clinic. Reason and order can be imposed on memories and sensory experiences we witness in a well-written half-haze of viral twilight. It is a wonderful shock of fresh but recirculated air to come out of that state a week later with Neffy, and to wake, as it were, to an utterly changed world. Think of the worse reports of hospital scenes you read or witnessed in 2020 and combine with your own catastrophizing, and you have a sense now of not feeling so alone with the author thinking that same way.

Was My Octopus Teacher supposed to be required viewing before starting this book? I still haven’t seen it. Would I find that unfolding back story more compelling and resonant with the present tense events of Neffy in the clinic? Was it on me to search for the linkages and connections between her family memories and the less ideal relationships and interpersonal crew-in-isolation dynamics of her fellow trial volunteers? I kind of became addicted to Neffy’s returns to the past; they were more interesting than the plodding day-to-day yet also life-or-death drama of the clinic. It made sense that they took up more and more of the pages in the middle, but they conversely dragged out those chapters/days. It’s where I struggled most, got angry and confused, and started flipping ahead to look at pages numbers left to go. I am glad I stuck with it, to see the conclusions of really two or three separate threads of the stories independently climax.

But the extended form of diary entry took its toll, and with the close first-person present perspective, this often read as a series of things that happened. There were jumps back and forth in time, between the clinic and Neffy’s memories, and I saw all of it happen through her eyes, but got in decreasing degrees a sense of how she felt about what she saw and less so what it meant to her. A chronology of action, entries in a history textbook, almost. In that way, some of the details returning later in the book appeared as surprising elements to solve the loosely constructed puzzles of early days events, and I had forgotten them, lost in the piles of other details that didn’t stand out from one another. Not to say I want clues handed to me as a reader; I just wonder about other ways that one could drown you in the world of information while vicariously experiencing brain fog and yet feel like Neffy’s insights and clarity feel genuine.

Overall, I found this an exciting and challenging book of long-form pandemic fiction. I was very interested to read it as my first experience of its type that was after our own pandemic (instead of a prescient read like Station Eleven, e.g.). As an aspiring writer of pandemic fiction myself, I took lots of lessons from this author’s work. She did so well at creating that lockdown experience of unmoored uncertainty, those escapist dives into memories and dreams to avoid the throbbing dullness of isolation, and a conversant and appreciative level of science that honors that kind of informed perspective on solving a world of problems in front of each of us.


Spoilers below, in contemporaneous notes:

Day Z-2 to Day Z-1

Epistles from Neffy to H, which we learn in the first chapter are written in a notebook during Neffy’s clinical trial for a vaccine to the Dropsy pandemic virus, the UK and elsewhere under lockdown.

Told in the first-person present, each chapter so far a day of the trial, “Day Zero Minus Two,” “Day Zero Minus One,” etc. The trial itself is expected to last three weeks, Neffy one of twelve volunteers to the company Vaccine BioPharm running the trial, here in London. Neffy received a slow-drip IV of the vaccine on Day Z-1.

She sees the Thai nurse Boo three times a day for checkups, likewise the middle-age attendant Mike for meals delivered. She is not allowed to leave the room the whole time, and in that confined isolation the author is painting a full world of conflicts with Mum and boyfriend/stepbrother Justin over texts, the unnamed unseen laughing Irish woman volunteer in the adjacent room, and the immediate window-posted well-wishing rapport with the night-shift nurse “Sophia” across the alley.

Neffy is quickly perceptive of interpersonal nonverbal cues, from Boo, for example. But she is technologically inept (in the way that Apple products make us all a bit that way when faced with unintuitive interactions with technology). The telly was clapped on, Neffy unaware of the connection, and blasts incessant bad pandemic news to make her doubt and fear her choice, nor able to make it stop. Boo showed her how the window blinds respond to voice command, but in the standardless world of medical tech, that same interface doesn’t apply to the telly.

Day Z to Day ?

I love the escalations, the acceleration. Neffy gets the full virus on Day Zero—two drops per nostril, plugged to prevent sneezing for a half hour—and it moves fast. Half-asleep for the next few chapters, waking and dream lives intermixing, Boo now and then an octopus caring for her, bedsheets and pills. But Justin was on a plane to Denmark, and it gets grounded in Sweden, with the last message a video from the plane of infected and dead passengers, fighting with flight crew, looking out the window at armed police keeping them in. When she comes up for a more lucid breath of air, the telly works, news has given way to sitcom reruns that later fade to station ID screens. The meals stop arriving; Boo isn’t around checking her vital signs. The corridor and the Irish woman next door are quiet, but her door is still locked. Sophia is still alive, “still hear” her latest message.

I’m holding out any anxiety about my own pandemic writing, and instead taking it as excitement and inspiration for my own stories. Within a week, it seems (the next chapter title is “Day 7”), everything has collapsed. Very late March 2020 of the author to depict. Deer are already spotted down in the alley of this hospital building in metro London. I’m also falling in love with the epistolary story, the letters to H, talking about Neffy’s experience in the past working with Octopi. The latest ending entry talks about what their intelligence does in the face of prolonged captivity and boredom, the ways they try to escape, to kill themselves. Love it.

The author uses beautiful descriptive vague language to carry us in the fevered reeling mind, letting it not make sense, her confidence in the reader to enjoy that ride showing well. She is also painting so well the changing pandemic world from the limits of Neffy’s point of view. The convenience of the trial staff unable to discuss anything else happening outside her room, except for the phrase “unforeseen event,” means that any phone or telly information received is through Neffy’s worried interpretation of what might be happening. The choice to receive or not an answer of what’s happening outside her room based on how the door responds to her turn of the handle is simple and small but telling and big.

Day 7 to Day 8

Now that Neffy is awake and recovered and interacting with the other volunteers that have “chosen” to stay in the clinic after the staff left when the world ended, the format of one chapter per day has become trying. There’s now so much for her to do, to learn, to talk about. The chapters are suddenly interminable, the pace slows with the narrative opening up to these other characters. It is both a feeling for trudging nowhere yet also kinda immersive with the actual lockdown experience of days stretching out and desperately filling up all the hours and every corner of the room. The mind in shock, the body recovering, Neffy playing catch-up with the dynamics and events her fellow castaways—all unvaccinated after the trial was abandoned—witnessed in their horrified waking of the past week, wondering if Neffy would make it.

Two days of her adjusting to the larger reality of what’s happened outside, while getting her social bearings with the dynamics and motivations of the other four volunteers, and trying to think of whether she’ll stay or go, Clash-style. Yes, the world got bigger eithin its confines, but at some points the backstories proceeded ploddingly. Here and there another and another scene of Neffy sitting with and almost holding space for one other volunteer while they poured out expository accounts of the specific vantage point their window afforded to the chaos on the streets below, or their characterization indicated via group gossip. Neffy herself is very aware in these moments, nearly fourth wall-breaking, of her need to assess the group for possible alliances and hidden motivations, like cuts to talking head revelations in a group survival competition reality show.

It almost sorta kinda takes me out of the story, all this social analysis that Neffy internally engages with. Was Yahiko just flirting with me? Are Leon and Rachel coupled up already? It’s jarring pettiness to me, when and how those thoughts cut back and forth with flight-or-fight panic over leaving for Dorset when Justin may not even be there, alive or dead. If there’s a pointless sex scene in this book, as shorthand for fleeting physical love in the time of Dropsy and memory loss, I will be so annoyed, but less and less surprised, given how the group dynamics are being set up, balanced on the nose.

For a bunch of naive or sarcastic twenty-somethings, am I supposed to believe they also quickly in the chaos started rationing and boiling water while keeping the lights off and blinds untouched? Are these the happenstance blips of good instinct among this group, or are they somehow all extremely competent and rational in a crisis situation? What I read was a lot of witness to, but never participation in, societal breakdown. They experienced trauma of abandonment and stay in for fear of the horrific acts and symptoms seen outside, but have in just a week’s time of losing nearly everything, some group rapport and daily habits that seem a tad farfetched.

Also in the time scale, unless my memory is deceiving me, the return to normal narrative to set in so soon with them, was that the case for us as well? Two of the group members missing and longing for the return of Instagram specifically and cloud Internet in general. One member in particular, Piper, clinging to their rescue at the end of the clinical trial period, on Day 21. The fourth other volunteer, Yahiko, hoarding all supplies in his room, like the panic shoppers and looters of early pandemic.

Because the day-length chapters are getting longer, the Neffy-to-H epistles are showing up at scene breaks with in the chapter now, a further extension of their length. They tease out some event in previous work that Neffy did with octopus research. Such letters aren’t always required to serve a metaphorical juxtaposition to the surrounding A Story events, but they felt like a good container for visiting the past. Now, with Leon’s hidden Revisitor technology (a fully immersive somatic memory reality system), there are two methods at play in the chapters for Neffy to go to the past and bring the readers with her. The reader fractures away from the main narrative a bit further, yet I understand its intention. When the present is empty and the future bleak, going into the past is a balm on the soul. Neffy maybe hasn’t had enough time to feel the grief of losing taste and smell, so it doesn’t strike so heavy that she can Revisit her father’s hotel in Greece and smell the sea and the kitchen. But the others were doing it as well, earlier at the breakfast table reminiscing on childhood birthdays. The past is an element of both escape and of conflict for Neffy, yet is only loosely anchored to present-day events and pressing needs.

Day 9

Time marches on. It plods. It pauses to look back for hours but only minutes have actually passed by. Is this a pandemic metaphor on top of a pandemic plot? Day 10 is over 30 pages long, I looked ahead. Interpersonal drama scene. Letter to H. Revisiting session with Baba in Greece. Neffy’s grip on reality deteriorating via exposition of deterioration. I am what I say and think I am, but the real me is 17 and eager to lose her virginity and the future me is along for the ride. Conceptually rich plot device, Leon’s invention is. The tethers to people dear to the characters outside the clinic are withering, but were flimsy at the start. Rachel’s dad in prison we learn of later: did he get out? Reminder to the reader that a chapter or two ago (~50 pages ago) Rachel was asking oblique questions about zoo animals. Ah, yeah, that would’ve been relevant in order to be emotionally resonant earlier, if we weren’t beholden to linear time. In a world of “melty time” (my phrase), the waking hours of this story proceed in painfully chronological order. Reminder: COVID isolation was filled with painfully boring hours upon hours of anxious navel-gazing. And here’s a book that captures that antipode of joie de vivre. How should we take it? Revel and wallow? I can’t put on a bingeing rewatch at the same time; the writing demands too much of me yet I receive too little in return.

See how long that paragraph was. Wishing for line breaks? Me too. Imagine a book of them, interspersed with plot-driving (instead of character-building) dialogue and a haunted past serialized into dissociative scattershot letters written to an empty vessel of a recipient. I think I’m angry at this writing, partly because of how it feels a bit like it’s wasting the inspiration of the public collective experiential source materials we are all too too familiar with. And would it help at this halfway point if I watch My Octopus Teacher finally? I think I’m also pissed off at the truth of its pettiness. When the plane falling out of the sky sensation of doomsday of those initial chapters bottomed out in chapter “Day Seven,” and Neffy woke up not in apocalyptic Oz but in ordinary lockdown, I don’t think I earlier clocked how vast was the gulf between my expectations and this book’s reality. Disappointed, to say the least. Do I continue to be surprised at how incidental and surface-level are the larger-world concerns the characters hold up in presentations to the reader when called upon to stop their petty human dramatics for two seconds and remind each other out loud of the context and its life-and-death stakes.

As an aspiring pandemic writer myself, what lessons can I take from this author’s choices so far? My wish is for things to go materially worse for the characters. I am mad that they aren’t spending more waking time frantic over the unknowns. But it is a fact of lockdown that is not conducive to the movement of plot in a novel, that of the real individual impotence to change, to affect, to impact, upon the exterior of one’s confines. Watch from your phone the burning hateful world. Respond inside yourself and let it all in to eat away at you. Self-flagellation, for the dearth of alternative responses.

Day 10

And later, when I finish the Day 10 chapter and get into Day 11, I find that the previous night’s put-downs and cynicism are gone. They are taken away, like Neffy, by the escapism and mystery and emotions tinged with foreknowledge that are present in her Revisiting experiences. She is older, closer to present-day, and her relationships are more nuanced. The experience of being with Baba in the hospital attempting to be a kidney donor (only to find out she has only one to begin with), then to later be at her Mum and new step-dad Clive’s house, and to quickly and hotly fall in love with new step-brother Justin...is the author aware of the ridiculous bent of people’s porn habits these days? This dinner being only their second time meeting (the first was at the wedding) and in their twenties, I think the taboo is probably forgiven for how flimsy is the barrier to cordoning off such love as incestuous. But the scene itself is confusing. As a Revisited memory, every experience up until now has been in sometimes excruciatingly minute detail. Apparently the narrator gets very vague as they move to the bed, and she blacks out to the readers when the sex begins. I didn’t come to this book looking for erotica, more the speculative world of this version of a pandemic. But, it seems another loose step of divergence by the author in tone and intention-setting for readers of the character and narrative importance of these experiences are, the escapism to sensory near-overload in avoidance of grim present-day reality. Paraphrasing, “we fuck all summer like animals” is a form of summarizing that wears away at the point and purpose of Revisiting. Is this Neffy’s actual memory of that summer, a generalization? Or is the perspective shifting from in-memory to after-Revisit review with Leon? Partly, though, I’m grateful for the jumps, as it wasn’t needed for the story except inasmuch as it is true to the character. We get it, it was hot, we can move on.

In the letters to H this chapter, we learn that H is the name of a white-spotted octopus supposedly from Turkey but actually England who barely makes it alive to the aquarium Neffy works at. And she cares for H. She ends one letter with acknowleding how it is possible to fall in love with an octopus. I’m hanging on that cliff, looking to start the next chapter soon. When Neffy has a clinic entrance encounter with a sick Boo—her nurse from the beginning of the trial—through the glass, I expect more dramatic action, but it is a nice enough conversation, a goodbye, and caught-in-the-loop thematic refrain of lockdown life, where nothing can be done and nothing of actionable value can be said that doesn’t get knocked over by the fatalistic zeitgeist settling over everyone in the second interminable week of the end.

I’m holding all these threads—Baba, Justin, Piper, Leon, Boo, H—in my hands, like so many severed segments of octopus limbs, and am unable to express excitement for how they might be surgically reassembled by the climax and end of the book, but I have a feeling that there’s a whole regrown octopus lingering elsewhere, just outside of frame, a mysterious end approaching that has nearly nothing to do with any of the elements of Neffy’s narrative. Like a riot or a tidal wave or sometime more cliché (the whole book is one Revisiting session, memories within memories). I don’t see it building up structurally, not do I feel the acceleration towards an end. Frankly, and I know I’m repeating myself, but not much of the story since that start has been living up to the early excitement of collapse. I wonder how much of the pandemic is all setting of convenience to simply facilitate getting Neffy and Leon together for the purposes of Revisiting. When Neffy comes back up the elevator from seeing Boo, the other characters seemingly forget that they just saw her open the door to outside air for the first time. They drop all pretense of their safety through isolation, and just...pat her on the shoulder? The boring rollercoaster of how much they give a shit or not about the pandemic is simply weird. I feel like back then we were all in adrenaline lockup those first weeks. That was the era of toilet paper hoarding, which Yahiko crudely brings to this scene. We were also wiping down groceries out of lack of understanding. I’m realizing now that mode of transmission of this book’s virus is vague. And the UK goes into lockdown the day the vaccine trial begins? I know this isn’t the same pandemic, but where’s the misplaced urgency coming from for Neffy to join this trial, when the whole country isn’t hit with the virus until that day? This feels like like a wildly but plausibly different pandemic scenario and more of the same cramming by the author of a time-collapsed world-building of pandemic events as setting for character conflicts. That is, to say, not organic to the context of the story, just useful to the author’s purposes.

Day 11 to Day 12

Where did the hate go, yet again? At the start of Day 10, I’d lost it, but found it again by chapter’s end. And here I am, both the past caught up to the present, and the present nearly on the cusp of the future, and am riveted. Was it just rough in the middle, laying out all that tile of these various hues of Neffy’s story? I love again how they approach convergence. The character of Neffy has fully emerged by this point, painted in all the colors of the ways she expresses and receives love. Her care for agreeing to give so much for Baba’s life, and when that is taken away from her, to redirect it towards the pandemic-suffering general population and willing to try for them, while her inner complexities of motivation are more revealing of a guilty conscience and its search for atonement, a chance at redemption, even at the cost of more love lost through absence. She is almost overflowing with misdirected intentions guided by incomplete information, the eagerness of mangling the good with clumsy hands searching for the great. Is that youthful righteousness I pity in her, or am I demure in the mirror this novel holds up to me? I get the sense of the larger lesson or truth or insight or feeling about pandemic lives lived in isolation and trying to be and do some good in a world disconnected and seemingly incapable, yet more likely drowning in the bad, of receiving any positivity. Positivity is maybe not the right word: positive energy or vibes or light, euphemisms all for thoughts and prayers, empty words on digital missives directed outward and upward, evaporation.

Day 13

On the final day of isolation, we learn that there’s a couple of low-grade murder mysteries lying about in this isolated pandemic journey rife with detours. It was surprising, but wasn’t it also a bit out of left field, like I was along for the ride but not holding a bit of tension or suspense throughout? I almost didn’t care, or felt unbothered to speculate and examine further, the unease of the other characters when certain topics or moments or locations were brought up by or around Neffy. Like Neffy, I thought, “Odd...” and kinda moved on, until the next time it resurfaced. There was so much going on otherwise, either in the Revisits, the letters to H, or the day-to-day dramas of survival and the world outside, that I hadn’t I guess enough space left to also hold a torch for the mystery of the other volunteers in those first days. Only when Revisiting that experience through Neffy’s clearer eyes did some details become possible plot points and not just chaotic noise.

When Neffy finally ventures out on this day, after the power goes out and the A/C stops and the avalanche of rotting smells rolls under the door seams and up the waste chute, does she make some discoveries with the perspective of literal distance looking back at the building (this is Revisiting memories in real life). From Sophia’s room—where it’s likely Neffy’s fault with the signs to one another that Sophia was attacked in her apartment by men and killed when they were tipped off from the street to her presence—does she see into Orla’s room next to her own, and see that Orla is still there, a corpse rotting. Those knocking and screaming noises in her virus haze Revisited now make sense: the other people decided to lock the infected in their rooms. But the details that make it murder come out of seemingly nowhere. I don’t want to bother looking, but the four-day isolation rule that Neffy apparently remembers from television now pops up in the story at the last minute to piece together that Orla was trying to get out of her room on Day Five, and they refused to unlock her door. Okay.

What is it of this book, that unlike others I’ve read recently, I am lost in later parts by details I was supposed to have retained from way earlier? Is it the intended effect of the author to muddle the timeline with both lost days and Revisiting in order to convey the experience of the confusion of the time? We are reading this entirely from Neffy’s perspective, so when she is confused, we are confused; but sometimes she is struck with incredible clarity, and I feel I am catching up, or still in the brain fog of her muddied experiences. Is there instead a missing or underrepresented element in the author’s craft between detail and action, between exposition of the setting and first-person perspective?

Day 685 to Day 19,710

Why, when I think of other recent novels, am I not left with a sense of having blank spaces in my memory of the experience of the story? I think, to some degree, the chronological ordering of the chapters is faulty. The chapter lengths vary, depending on how much happens during Neffy’s day. Which made for some of those middle chapters exhaustingly long; none of the section breaks felt like places where I as a reader could easily still put in the bookmark in and return later and feel oriented. More so, the element not missing but overly present was the layered journal entry of it all. In the clinic or in a Revisited memory, there was so much the reading of a series of things that happened. And so many things happened. And at times I was left with only having seen these things happen through Neffy’s eyes, without knowing how she felt about them. But less how she felt and more what it meant to have that memory or that experience and those feelings.

By the end of the book, and especially with these last chapters, why had all the Revisitings with Baba and Mum and Justin and Margot meant to her life in the clinic or beyond? As I reader I can accept that they were all dead, but for them all to leave the clinic and get to Clive and Mum’s eco house in Dorset and for her to just take up room in the new place, without grief, without mourning, with the telling but not the showing of loss and guilt, I am not fulfilled by this conclusion. Now that she has her daughter, Nina, it was fitting that her final letter to H was left unfinished, except that the whole thread of H is still both dangling and insignificant.

Do I want tidy and closed, or do I need resonance, harmonics, echoes?

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