Girl Beside Him

by Cris Mazza

Cris Mazza's fiction has been called experimental, and stylistically it is, in the same way that Chekov's prose can be called experimental. Like the Russian author, Mazza uses an impressionistic technique to create characters so unusual, they become emblems for whole orders of social ills. Unfolding with the grim assurance of an autopsy, Girl Beside Him lays bare pathologies of self and society.

As the novel unfolds, a moody naturalist obsessed with target shooting meets his pretty assistant, rebounding from her bitter divorce, via a classified ad. Brian and Leya work together in the Wyoming outback, a landscape quick with beauty, death and sex. Ostensibly they have joined forces to track wild cougar, but humanity is the most endangered species here.
As the story lopes along, the naturalists, made feral by heartbreak and the drone of pop culture, spend the summer tracking cougars....
Taking Sartre's aphorism, hell is other people, to new, dreadful extremes, Mazza's varmits know that the only thing wrong with any landscape is who else is living in it. From deep inside her character's skins, Mazza brings a psychological awareness to her novel that would make Stephen King squirm.
In her ninth work of fiction, Cris Mazza walks the fence between man and nature, instinct and compusion, all the while throwing rocks into the yawning gulch between the sexes. As a portrait of our species, Girl Beside Him is a powerful book.

269 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Cris Mazza is the author of a dozen books of fiction, mostly recently Waterbaby (Soft Skull Press 2007). Her other titles include the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?, and the PEN Nelson Algren Award winning How to Leave a Country. She also has a collection of personal essays, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. Mazza has been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and three Illinois Arts Council literary awards. A native of Southern California, Mazza grew up in San Diego County. Currently she lives 50 miles west of Chicago. She is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago "

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5) Recent forays into the FC/FC2 back catalog yielded this lightly metafictional novel from Cris Mazza that follows tortured wildlife biologist Brian Leonard as he completes field work on relocated mountain lions in rural Wyoming. The study he is working on examines the potential success of such relocation efforts for cougars who have strayed too close to human habitation. Leonard is covering for the lead biologist, Peter Gallway, who was injured while skiing in Switzerland.

The character focus is on Leonard and a woman, Leya Karney, whom he hires as his field assistant. Karney is a Californian, recently divorced, and looking to possibly transition from zoo work to field biology. In order to advance the plot on multiple fronts while slowly filling in the backstory, Mazza utilizes fax cover sheets from Leonard to Gallway, typed letters from Karney to her friend and zoo colleague Sal, and italicized snippets of Leonard’s internal self-dialogue interspersed with traditional narrative and segments of a decades-old conversation between Leonard and his sister Diane.

To avoid plot spoilers, I won’t get into too many other specifics. Leonard is a complicated character who is used to operating solo in all sectors of his life. He is a bit out of his element in rural Wyoming and his attempts to blend in sometimes appear misguided, if not outright dangerous. How much of the mess he finds himself in results from his own missteps and how much is due to the rigidity of the ranching community he barges in on is a central question up for debate. Certainly Leonard has personal issues that are seriously impeding his judgment; however, the men he encounters have their own agendas, which generally run counter to his own. For her part, Karney acts to a certain extent as the foil to Leonard. While she is also struggling in the wake of her divorce, she still appears much more grounded in comparison to Leonard, and this accentuates his own unhinged nature.

Mazza does a good job maintaining the suspense of the story up to the very end. This was what kept me turning the pages, even as other elements detracted from it. For example, I wasn’t particularly invested in either main character, which always complicates a reading experience for me. It was also distracting when Mazza has Leonard adopt a Western dialect when speaking with the locals. It just rang false on the page. I think the main strength of the book is in the openness of its themes; among others, there are questions of an environmental and economic nature, as well as around romantic and familial relationships, all of which Mazza raises in ways that allow for fair consideration by her readers without serving up any easy answers.