In Karen Joy Fowler's Novel, Words are Part of the Story

In a review for the New York Times Sunday Book Review of Karen Joy Fowler's "readably juicy and surreptitiously smart" We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Barbara Kingsolver describes the novel as "a story of Everyfamily in which loss engraves relationships, truth is a soulful stalker and coming-of-age means facing down the mirror, recognizing the shape-shifting notion of self." 

She might have added that it is an excellent read for anyone interested in vocabulary. Chronicling the fallout from a fictional five-year psychological experiment in which a human baby and a one-year-old chimpanzee are raised as sisters, Fowler writes on her website that she "conceived of the novel as being all about language, who talks and who doesn’t. Who is heard and who isn’t. What can be said and by whom, and what can’t be."

The novel is narrated by Rosemary, the experiment's human subject, now grown, who gleans early on that word learning was the one area in which she could outpace her faster-developing "sister," Fern. When the experiment ends and Fern is sent away as Rosemary begins kindergarten, Rosemary's advanced language ability proves isolating, and then, as she tries to reconcile her memories of her childhood with the reality of her shattered family, the story revolves tightly around Rosemary's pull-push relationship to words.

This means we as readers get to witness Fowler putting her extensive vocabulary to work. Rosemary blithely tosses off words like ineluctable, oneiric, sedulous, solipsism, mimesis, unpropitious, concantenated, and vituperative. In college, drugged and dancing with a friend's boyfriend, she finds herself "telling him his position on superpowers was balderdash...'Poppycock,' I said. 'Flapdoodle. Bollocks. Piffle. Crapola. Codswallop.'" She even accesses words in German, passing a night in prison with her "thoughts turned rhythmical in a Chinese water-torture way: Umwelt. Umwelt. Umvelt." 

We're introduced to frugivorous, verklempt, and psychomanteum. Fowler uses carpe diem as a noun, when Rosemary describes Fern as a "twirling, whirling, somersaulting carpe diem." She even finds a word to describe the silence of "one of those strange moments when all the noise inside the restaurant suddenly stopped. Nobody spoke. Nobody clicked the sides of their coffee cups with their spoon. Nobody outside barked or honked or coughed. Fermata."

Among all this verbosity, however, the novel concludes that connection, interspecies and otherwise, comes not only through language, but from the ways we communicate without it, a lesson worth revisiting whether you're learning new words or simply marveling at the multitude that are out there.