Exploring Transition: Aryn Kyle

A run-down ranch, a family divided by chasms in close proximity, an immersive, increasingly untenable way of life — “The God of Animals” is the story of a thirteen-year-old girl, but it is also the story of a disappearing lifestyle once crucial to the American narrative: work on the land, the horse and its rider, survival because of, in spite of the natural world.

“The people who lived on our side of town had been born here, and their parents before them. There were no new restaurants, no clean white houses. No one complained of dry skin. As the valley transformed around us, the locals relied on the history of weather to discriminate between those who could be trusted and those who could not.” (Pg. 68)

In a library of novels driven by precocious child-narrators, Aryn Kyle’s Alice Winston stands out, not for her gifts, but because she does not possess the right ones. Coming of age in a culture that rewards remarkable riders, Alice is an outsider, a diligent worker, a utilitarian rancher and a child struggling with classic conundrums, textured by context: the strictures of family, the opacity of human relationships, the right angled road away from home. To earn a livelihood, she and her family must perpetuate their clients’ idea that animals’ principle utilities are entertainment and pleasure, while behind the scenes the Winston’s work brings them into daily contact with life’s brutality. Through Alice’s attentive observation, Kyle explores the contradictions that emerge when a way of life is reduced to fetishized culture.

“The boarders whispered and giggled like children, addressing each other as girls — ‘Girls, we need more drinky-drinks,’ and, ‘I’ve had the most fabulous idea, girls!’ … And while I didn’t want to pay attention to them, didn’t want to admit that I noticed them at all, they always seemed to be having more fun than anyone else. I couldn’t stop watching.” (Pg. 95)

In “The God of Animals,” readers confront an America in transition, the threat posed by homogeneity, and the loneliness that envelops those who live at its threshold.    —    Carlin M. Wragg, Editor