Wild Life by Molly Glass
Thrilling, Earthy.
One of the many pleasures of Molly Glosss extraordinary third novel is
watching it repeatedly change shape and direction before your eyes--a
feat all the more wonderful since the narrative consists almost entirely of
the fictional diaries of one woman. Charlotte Bridger Drummond--an
early-20th-century single mother who supports five young sons in the
just-tamed wilderness fringe of western Oregon by writing pulp fiction--
presents herself as a bluff, free-thinking feminist, the kind of woman who
would tumble her youngest son off her lap and onto the floor for whining.
When her housekeepers frail young granddaughter disappears from a
logging camp, Charlotte unhesitatingly sets out to join the inept search
parties. So, within 90 pages, Molly Gloss (The Dazzle of Day and The
Jump-Off Creek) whisks us from pitch-perfect historical fiction to
unsentimental lament over the devastation of the dark and supernatural
woods of the Pacific Northwest to a kind of wild and woolly mystery story.
All of this is immensely engaging, mostly because Charlotte herself is
such excellent if occasionally astringent company. But the book really
catches fire when Charlotte herself gets lost in the woods. The diary
continues through the harrowing days of wet, cold, hunger, hope, despair,

and then her fantastic rescue by a band of semihuman giants of the deep
woods. Introducing the Sasquatch legend into an otherwise scrupulously
realistic historical novel might seem like a risky narrative ploy, but Gloss
brilliantly pulls it off. Indeed, so deft is her fusing of the fantastic and the
actual that by the end, the narrative transmogrifies once more into a
profound and troubling meditation on wildness, nature, and human
nature. Wild Life brings to mind the works of Jean M. Auel, Marilynne
Robinson, Ken Kesey (that dank Oregon setting of Sometimes a Great
Notion), and more distantly Willa Cather--but the breadth and daring of
Glosss imagination really puts it in a class of its own. In a sense, unifying
all of the many strands of this fictional tour de force is a fiercely candid
portrait of the artist, an artist who in Charlottes words fears coming face-
to-face with my Self on the printed page--it would chill me through to the
heart, but who does it anyway. --David Laskin
Personal Review: Wild Life by Molly Glass
This story is sheer joy on so many levels. The protagonist, Charlotte, is a
35 yr old educated and independent widow with 5 sons, living in the
pioneer outbacks in the Washington/Oregon area 100 years ago. She's
managed to support her family writing "minor" romantic novels. When her
housekeeper's little grandaughter disappears while under the care of the
father at work in a logging camp deep deep in the forests, she sets off to
help find the child. The written language is glorious..I remember my great
grandmother using some of the same phrases. Her descriptions of pioneer
life, life in the logging camps, the forests, and her obvious love and respect
for animals and the environment is nothing short of thrilling. Charlotte
becomes separated from her group and lost in the forest, eventually
following a family of wild animals in an effort to survive. Very exciting,
earthy, sensual, basic..
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