Meet Henry Parsons — although he’d rather you not.
Henry is socially awkward and reticent; he’s most comfortable in the third-floor New York apartment he shares with a roommate he’d found on Craigslist and two betta fish. He likes “sitting on his own frayed, moss-green couch, in the company of familiar books and plates and towels; they gave him a sense of belonging. Life anywhere else in the city required breathing borrowed air, occupying temporary space, infringing on someone else’s territory.”
So the conflict-averse Henry moves cautiously about his life, going to work, seeing a therapist every week, trying to recover from a friendly break-up three years ago. And things are mostly fine until animals start talking to him.
That might be nice if the animals were friendly, like the woodland creatures who helped Snow White clean the Seven Dwarfs’ kitchen. But the animals talking to Henry in Robert Isaac’s It’s Hard to be an Animal are wicked snarky, with a vocabulary that would make a sailor blush. Also, they seem to hate everybody.
The first time it happens, Henry is in Central Park on a blind coffee date arranged by a coworker. Molly Bent, his date, is admiring a bird, which Henry knows is a magnolia warbler, when it unleashes a torrent of profanities at the pair. But only Henry can hear.
Later, when he goes home, he watches in bewilderment as the two betta fish hurl Shakespearean insults at one another. (Example: “Malodorous and repugnant though you be, I am indebted to you for one thing: your cursed, unenviable existence serves as a sobering corrective to my own baser instincts.”)
After a couple of dogs being walked mock a woman who petted one of them, Henry fears he is losing his sanity. The therapist, who always keeps Henry waiting, is of no help at all. But before Henry has a chance to fully process what is happening, a new problem arises: he learns — from a couple of subway rats — that bodies are being dragged into a tunnel below the subway and left there to rot. “Maybe it was all rat bravado,” he thinks. But maybe not.
Meanwhile, an elderly neighbor that Henry is friendly with is hospitalized and asks Henry to pick up her crotchety Pomeranian, who is at the vet. This is an alarming development — not only will it take Henry away from a planned lunch date with Molly, but it will expose him to a disturbing number of animal conversations, as will a later visit to a dog park in the city.
It all sounds quite absurd, but surprisingly this is a novel with unexpected heart, revealed early on, when Henry is asked to watch the young daughter of a co-worker for a few minutes and the two instantly develop a rapport. Henry, we quickly realize, isn’t quite as maladapted for the world as he initially seems.
Nor is Molly, the human sprite who is making Henry’s heart flutter with hope. She is an effervescent soul who works at an anti-poverty nonprofit and, like Henry, has conversational skills above her paygrade. Their banter is as delightful as the baleful betta fish.
Talking animals isn’t a new literary device — hail, Charlotte — but in Isaacs’ hands, these events feel fresh and whimsical, particularly since most of the animals here are full-on trash talkers, contemptuous of the humans that surround them.
“Although he’d grown up with no pets of his own, due to parental allergies, Henry had always accepted as an uplifting, feel-good truth that humans had ‘befriended’ certain animals thousands of years ago, brought them into their warm, dry homes for comfort and companionship, fed and sheltered and doted on them. … Did all our fellow creatures hate us? Every last one of them?”
This is the first novel by Robert Isaacs, who the publisher notes “in his youth supported himself as a juggler and unicyclist on the streets of San Francisco” and went on to become a Grammy-nominated musician.
Whatever his life experiences, they prepared him well for fiction, and It’s Hard to be an Animal is both charming and witty, despite the dark mystery at the center of it. Will Henry and Molly become a couple and survive a relationship-threatening event? Will they survive an REI-outfitted excursion in an underground tunnel looking for the corpses which the rats foretold? How did the corpses get there? Is Henry having a psychotic breakdown? Is he really hearing voices at all? And most importantly, what will happen to the warring betta fish, who are the breakout stars of this ridiculously endearing show?
And we haven’t even talked about Henry’s Eastern European roommate whose burgeoning English vocabulary is informed by a bathroom thesaurus and doesn’t always come across the way he intends. Or Gracie, the Pomarian, whose philosophical observations about the world differ sharply from those of the other animals that Henry hears.
Some books you don’t want to end because they are absorbing; some, because you love the characters so much. It’s Hard to Be An Animal achieves both. A+
Featured Photo: It’s Hard to be an Animal, by Robert Isaacs
