Carnival Wolves

by Peter Rock

Alan Johnson is a man ill-at-ease among people and only slightly more comfortable with animals. His story begins in upstate New York with his rescue of an injured Dalmatian who "came down out of the sky and survived the fall, showed me how gradually I have fallen--how I never touch, never really talk to another person...I am hardly a person at all." The dog heals and is returned to its neglectful owner, but Alan Johnson steals it back and heads west in search of what it means to be human.

As he crosses the United States, he moves through landscapes full of animals half-tamed and people run a fanatical taxidermist, a lonely woman raising tigers on her remote ranch, a tragic circus chimp named Rufus, contemporary polygamists, and the caretakers of boot camps for troubled youths. They are Carnival Wolves, manifestations of our attempts to tame what is dangerous and wild, distorted reflections of parts of ourselves.

After a tortuous journey through various states of depravity--and of America--Alan Johnson ends up in California having reached a reconciliation of instincts and having found a human being he can love. A gripping, hallucinatory read, Carnival Wolves is a provocation, a plea for identification that questions the humanity of its readers and confirms Peter Rock as a unique literary talent.

Genres: Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Peter Rock was born and raised in Salt Lake City. His most recent novel, Passersthrough, involves a murder house, a fax machine, communications between the living and the dead, and a mountain lake that moves from place to place. He is also the author of the novels The Night Swimmers, SPELLS, Klickitat, The Shelter Cycle, My Abandonment, The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves and This Is the Place, as well as a story collection, The Unsettling. Rock attended Deep Springs College, received a BA in English from Yale University, and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He has taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Deep Springs College, and in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. His stories and freelance writing have both appeared and been anthologized widely, and his books published in various countries and languages. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and an Alex Award, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is a Professor in the English Department of Reed College. Leave No Trace, the film adaptation of My Abandonment, directed by Debra Granik, premiered at Sundance and Cannes and was released to critical acclaim in 2018. His eleventh work of fiction, Passersthrough, will be published in early 2022.

Reviews

[Allan MacDonell · Rating 5 out of 5]

The forward motion of Peter Rock’s Carnival Wolves unearths and pushes along a motley human detritus of many an ilk. To a person in common, Rock’s creations are apt to look up in recognition at the call, “Hey, you! Creep!” Bad things happen to folks who are different degrees of fucked up. In the last sentence, though this may spoil Rock’s web of dread diligently and precisely spun, a naked boy and girl slumber peacefully touching one another and will awake that way when the morning comes.

[Spiros · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a long time our Warners' rep T-Murder (not his real name) has been talking up Peter Rock, and since he steered me right with Daniel Woodrell, I decided to give Mr. Rock a look-see.
Carnival Wolves is a set of fifteen short stories which describe the progress of Alan Johnson, mechanic and part-time museum guard, from upstate New York, where he dog-naps a dim-witted Dalmatian, through Wisconsin, Montana, and Utah, to his arrival at his new life in Los Angeles. Early in the book, Alan avers that he does not "believe in accidents...coincidences, neither"; I believe this statement is to be taken ironically, since what ensues can best be described as a series of accidents and coincidences. Had I not read the jacketnotes, reading the first half dozen stories I would have figured that the thematic link between stories was fishing, but no, at the end, it is all spelled out for us: Carnival Wolf is the name of a racehorse, and it represents "Danger tied down in shackles, brought out for entertainment...animals half tamed are people run wild".
There are two obvious pitfalls in constructing a narrative out of a series of short stories: first, unless you happen to be Alice Munro, it is damned difficult to write fifteen good short stories; the quality in these is a little bit uneven, with what I feel are the two best ("Convalescence" and "Beyond Lucky") being stories in which Alan makes no appearance. Secondly, there is a definite danger of the whole thing coming off as just a bit artificial, as if the parts have been hammered together, which is paralleled in the narrative by the manic taxidermist, a recurring character who makes up animals out of body parts and household objects. Some of the stories even take on an incongruous "Where's Waldo" aspect, as you wait for Alan and the Dalmatian to make an appearance on periphery of the action.
All that being said, this is a very audacious, interesting effort; it makes you realize how special David Mitchell's achievement with "Ghostwritten", "Number9Dream", and "Cloud Atlas" really is.

[Lorrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just finished my 3rd Rock book. I liked Carnival Wolves more than The Bewildered but not as much as My Abandonment. The story is about Alan Johnson as he wanders around looking for some form of closeness to another person. He is not perfect and has an assortment of personal oddities. The book touched on Mormom polygamy, chimpanzee attacks, illegal penning of wild animals, drug deals, youth boot camps,and a wide assortment of topics that I've never thought of. I learned things from this book and thought about things I don't normally think of. I can't help but wonder if Rock actually has come into contact with these "things" during his life or if he just writes about them after reading about them in the newspaper. I imagine I'll be hashing this book around in my head for a few days like his other two books.

[Anni · Rating 4 out of 5]

This kind of stories I've been craving to read recently. Curious destinies of people that are all outsiders in their own way. Kind people with a looming dark side.
All this is told about in such talent and a great sense of style in this book.

[Nate Hendrix · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories that are knid of strange. Each story shares one or more characters in kind of random ways. This was better than the last book I read by Rock. I will give him another chance.

[Patrick Fay · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written, eclectic mix of interwoven stories. Unpredictable and enjoyable throughout. It would be difficult to describe it any more precisely than that, but I loved it and will definitely re-read it.

[Heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

..."landscapes full of animals half-tamed and people run wild"

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

strange interstate intersections of backroads Americana, interconnected outsiders, unnatural selection