Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler
291 pages
Published 1991
Read from November 23 to November 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
As with a number of books I picked up this year, I was inspired to read Sarah Canary by (and in fact I only heard of Sarah Canary in the first place because of) this Buzzfeed list of 99 alleged "classic" science fiction novels. What fantastic element exists within Sarah Canary is so attenuated, however, I for one would hesitate to ascribe any fantastic intent to it at all. Which is kind of neat, in that it ties into one of the book's through-lines: the titular character is perceived by those around her according to what they want her to be. The Chinese laborer at first believes her to be a ghost lover, come to enchant him or to bring him good fortune in return for his consideration and protection. The female suffragist believes her to be a woman wanted for murder, and thinks only she can return Sarah Canary safely and vindicate her supposed crime. The biologist sees her as a feral child. The drunken showman who believes he's cursed with immortality concludes she's a vampire loose in the West, and only he can track her down and kill her. The storylines form circles within and around each other, and underneath, on "the level of what is," Sarah Canary moves through the world and her identity and her purpose are never explained.
On one level, then, Sarah Canary is a work of esthetics, lingering on sharply observed (and quietly lovely) descriptions of rain and moon and reflections; on another, more structural level it is a social, didactic novel, put together almost like a doctoral thesis on social conditions in Washington and San Francisco in 1873. Each chapter introduces a topic related to life in the post-Civil War era -- Chinese labor, the conquest of the Native Americans, Mesmerism and life in asylums, Darwinian biology, freakshows and sensations, women's suffrage, just about everything, in fact, except black life in the aftermath of failed Reconstruction -- and tallies it toward the thrust of the central theme. It is also a novel of comic misadventure, though told with such grunge-era seriousness, such attention to the cold and the rain, that I'd hesitate to say it becomes funny beyond one or two clever bits of dialogue and certain ironic callbacks.
Sarah Canary is beautiful, and it works its way into you, but I think it works better as an incisive lecture and teachable moment than as a novel.
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