The Other Side of Good: On Robin McLean's "Pity the Beast"
Robin McLean | Pity the Beast | And Other Stories | 2021 | 328 Pages
To feel pity, Aristotle writes in the Rhetoric, one must believe in the goodness of at least some people. Robin McLean’s debut novel, Pity the Beast, looks at what its heroine calls “the other side of good.” It’s a Western, full of guns and horses, grit and lawlessness, inhospitable terrain and rogue moral actors who need to be corralled. It warrants the label “eco-feminist Western”—eco- because it privileges non-human perspectives and timeframes; feminist because the male characters, though vividly drawn and often center stage, are ultimately incidental to the underlying feud and affinity between two women (take that, Sam Peckinpah).
The opening drops us onto a ranch in the high plains, mid-domestic crisis: Ginny has cheated on Dan with the neighboring rancher, Shaw, and the childless couple curse past each other while midwifing a mare impregnated by a too-large horse, Shaw’s Percheron. They toss the stillborn foal into the pit of dead and broken things. The mare is in bad shape, and the couple work at getting her back on her feet, eventually building a supportive frame (otherwise known as a “horse”). A reader attuned to coincidence begins to suspect that things are not just things, in this novel, but foils for a plot spun in part from multivalent words: the geologic meaning of “horse” is a large block of displaced rock caught along a fault. Here it’s Ginny’s fault, the dead horse the couple are metaphorically beating while attending the birth of the real one.
Ginny’s half-sister Ella comes by with her husband Saul to help (and accuse), and soon it’s a party, joined by neighbors and rodeo cowboys. Night falls, and Ella tells a family story that arouses the drunken men into impromptu, brutal revenge. The next morning, Ginny climbs out of the pit where she was abandoned for dead and makes for the Mission mountains on her cob (not, notably, Shaw’s Percheron). A posse—Dan, Ella, Saul, a hired tracker Bowman, and a paid mule driver Maul, whose ten mules carry what they need—sets out on horseback after her. Their motivation is ominously ambiguous, even to themselves. “Why rifles?” Dan asks of the others, who point out that he’s holding his own. Fearing Ginny’s retribution or testimony, they cast her as Indian to their Cowboy. (The book makes free with such temporary monikers, unstable archetypes: Pirate, Lawman, Creature, Hero, Lone Wolf, Damsel.) The Rodeo Kid, a virgin before his participation in the group rape and now keen on Ginny, follows on his own, as does the chivalrous, inexperienced deputy who suspects a crime. The rest of the novel is a single sweeping action: following the trail of Ginny—the Beast—to the cathartic end.
Pity, fear, catharsis: McLean drops the words in casually (“Only pity for her, the Beast,” “He wondered why he felt pity [for a fungus],” “He’d never felt fear like this, and he realized the modern world was intent on killing fear off,” “A moment of catharsis, perhaps, buckaroos?”). In a novel as aware of Shakespeare, Beckett, and Stoppard as it is of Cervantes, Joyce, Faulkner, and Proulx, it doesn’t feel amiss to bring in Aristotle’s thoughts on tragedy. Joe Sachs writes of Aristotle’s detractors: “He reduces the drama to its language, people say,… and then he encourages insensitive readers… to subject stories to crudely moralistic readings, that reduce tragedies to the childish proportions of Aesop-fables” (“Aristotle’s Poetics,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Pity the Beast shows the virtue in the caricature: its drama and its language are inextricable, and it raises animal fables to mature tragedy. Crude moralism is the story, as characters spar in stichomythic, punchy lines:
“Most don’t like killing,” Maul said. “It’s simply required by the job of living.”
“Some don’t practice self-deception,” Bowman said. “Everyone likes a kill.”
The hybrid narrative advances sure-footed as the pack of mules, so that we accept whatever comes our way: a rollicking TV serial narrator, diary entries by the mules, a dream about a cedar census in the year 2179, postcards to the deputy’s mother, a tale of a berry-picker and a Bear, bad Cowboy jokes, a grandmother’s survival lessons, and the progress of the four camps along the Old Swede’s Trail. Well-placed cairns keep us from getting lost. The wheeling-and-dealing narrative sheds what’s stale in fiction’s conventions and restores dimension to what autofiction flattens out. Here, interiority is gleaned through movement, backstory through myth-making, plot through evasion, morals through chasms, while the standard narrative points of view (first through third person, limited, omniscient) are grafted into questionable varieties: double, pack, hypothetical, parodic, deceived, oneiric, cynical, twice-removed, momentary, long. By restoring Aristotle’s emphasis on the imitation of action, on “what is deliberately chosen” and must “be seen and held together just as actively and attentively” by reader as by author (Sachs), McLean shows what fiction can do beyond shape and select found material. Her novel is a radically made thing, built sentence by clear sentence, each loaded ominously yet comically, always this razor’s edge, with shifting symbolic potential. The tension never lets up.
“Things are predictable once the thing begins,” Ginny thinks. We wait for this beginning, for motivation to crystallize, for someone to make the first move. Everything and everyone is Chekov’s gun, a prop to be used or broken or lost or used against you: scissors, a shoeing kit, a leghold trap, dynamite, a blue wooden chair, a spring-loaded rifle. The irony in every sentence is similarly weaponized. At one point Saul—the speechifier, justifier, negotiator in a vacuum—calls out: “What we need now… is a mutually agreeable resolution!” It’s deadly and camp and moving at once.
In one notable lacuna in the action, two thirds in, two of the posse leave camp and then return with the deputy’s horses. We are then treated to this lyrical scene:
They washed their hands, squatted at the creek to do it, clutched handfuls of cold sand in the moon in the water. The grains had once lived in glaciers, had a long silent life there. They scrubbed their callused palms, blood from under nails. Millions of grains, granite, silica, a gray cloud. They resided, they knew, in the big picture together. Nothing is perfect. Nothing is guaranteed. Saul was not exactly happy yet. Saul was almost there. He would be. They were sharing this life right now, Bowman told him, at this creek side, at this junction in time. They shared the elation of coincidence if nothing else.
The sun was coming. They stood together.
“A mind can’t imagine the truth of the moon,” Bowman said, “neither distance nor scale.”
It was private and truthful and innocent and intimate. Saul nodded.
“Occasionally there’s a glimpse,” they agreed.
“The truth must be seen or felt.”
If anyone could, it was them.
McLean is a master of the throwaway line, the oracular cliché. This could be the epiphanic ending of a short story, but it’s a lure, a parody of the cathartic cleansing that tragedy is meant to achieve. The moon stands in for a different enormity, whose only clue is the blood under the men’s nails. The point of view is suspect: who is making the assessment that “Saul was almost there”? People might agree on something, but they don’t speak as one person, in quotation marks. Bowman’s persuasion becomes, in that moment, Saul’s interiority. They merge as other characters merge and delude themselves before splintering again. So that, when Dan reports after an encounter with Ginny, “We forgive each other,” we almost believe it, as Saul is almost happy. Who isn’t prone to “the elation of coincidence”? It isn’t much. But it’s enough for falling in love—as a boy, Dan’s idea of wooing Ginny was to insist that they were twins—and for all human entanglement that sets off tragedy.
“What are we after now?” Maul asks, near the end. “Why not go home now?” Why don’t we turn back—from doing evil or attempting good? How much freedom do we have? “He was free but what was that really,” one of the mules wonders. Pity the Beast shows what fiction can do that nothing else can: enact the etymology of such questions. It’s a brilliant, comic, tragic novel—“truly worth study,” like the cedars of the 2179 census—but its greatest brilliance is the way it sends us back into ourselves, as catharsis is meant to: moving us from laughter to compassion, transforming pity and fear into wonder—“the Wonder, the Devastating Wonder, the devastating improbability that [we] should exist at all.”