How to Be Human
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From Guardian writer Paula Cocozza, a debut novel of the breakdown of a marriage, suburbian claustrophobia, and a woman's unseemly passion for a fox
One summer’s night, Mary comes home from a midnight ramble to find a baby lying on her back door step. Has Mary stolen the baby from next door? Has the baby’s mother, Mary's neighbor, left her there in her acute state of post-natal depression? Or was the baby brought to Mary as a gift by the fox who is increasingly coming to dominate her life?
So opens How to Be Human, a novel set in a London suburb beset by urban foxes. On leave from work, unsettled by the proximity of her ex, and struggling with her hostile neighbors, Mary has become increasingly captivated by a magnificent fox who is always in her garden. First she sees him wink at her, then he brings her presents, and finally she invites him into her house. As the boundaries between the domestic and the wild blur, and the neighbors set out to exterminate the fox, it is unclear if Mary will save the fox, or the fox save Mary.
In this masterful debut, Paula Cocozza weaves together a penetrating portrait of marital breakdown, a social novel of wit and nuance, and an obsessive love story that crosses new boundaries.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cocozza's excellent first novel slyly handles its relatively quiet premise: a woman, Mary, finds fulfillment in the bond she develops with a neighborhood fox. Taking place almost entirely on Mary's London property and in its neighboring woods, "an island of wilderness in the inner city," the novel revolves around territorial disputes between neighbors, between exes, and between humans and animals which accounts for the whiff of menace detectable throughout. Two males are "stalking periphery," a creepily solicitous ex-boyfriend named Mark and a fox, whom she one day spies sleeping curled on her lawn, "his head pok out from the bottom of the curve like an unfinished question mark." The creature will remain an enigmatic presence, undomesticated and ultimately illegible, even as the intimacy between him and Mary grows. Cocozza occasionally switches to the fox's point of view, brief, defamiliarizing glimpses that add a distinctive tang to the narrative. Here is the fox picking up a scent: "Salty snail odor tunneled into his muzzle. From the fresh male who was an old male who was a slithery male." The portrayal of that slithery male Mark vacillates between ominous stalker and harmless sad sack, an unsuitable foil to his vulpine rival. The magnificent and mysterious fox lays claim to the novel, indelibly marking Mary and reader alike.