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The Natural History of Uncas Metcalfe: A Novel
Uncas Metcalfe is a sixty-five-year-old botany professor from a once prosperous central New York town, whose habitat is changing much too his wife is ill, his daughter has returned home, and an unusual new friendship unexpectedly stirs up memories of an almost forgotten infidelity. Uncas is rooted in a life of plants and manners. When his routine is upended by the menacing demands of a former student, Uncas finds his comfortably obstinate nature at odds with his family's growing impatience and a newfound, terrifying uncertainty.
The Natural History of Uncas Metcalfe follows an unforgettable hero as he struggles to right himself and adapt to changing expectations, even as he approaches the end of his life. Beautifully wrought and wonderfully imagined, the intricacies of the Metcalfe family will linger in your imagination long after the last page.
The Natural History of Uncas Metcalfe follows an unforgettable hero as he struggles to right himself and adapt to changing expectations, even as he approaches the end of his life. Beautifully wrought and wonderfully imagined, the intricacies of the Metcalfe family will linger in your imagination long after the last page.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published May 2, 2006
29 people want to read
About the author
Betsey Osborne
1 bookBetsey Osborne graduated from Harvard, attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and has a master of fine arts from Columbia. She has worked at Grand Street, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. She lives in Cranston, Rhode Island. You may visit the author’s Web site at www.betseyosborne.com and contact her at betsey@betseyosborne.com.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 30, 2013
It's one of those hanging endings that I like. Somehow, Uncas's story gave me a glimpse of understanding my father's personality.
April 28, 2025
What was the point of this book?
The more I read, the less I liked Uncas Metcalfe. I held on, because it seemed that as he became less and less able to detach from his emotions - a healthy development for this frozen man! - he might actually learn something about himself and those around him. I thought he was reaching a crisis that might lead to growth.
And the final line of the final page?
He regrets an action not taken.
Maybe this is the turning point to something positive in his life, because he never seems to have regretted (or apologized for) anything he'd ever done prior to that. Maybe? But we'll never know, because the book ends there.
It felt like the book ended where I wanted it to begin. We've met the man, we've seen his weaknesses and foibles, we've been how these impact those who care for him, we've seen him be shaken and begin to see that perhaps things aren't as straightforward as he's always believed ... and then, just when the growth might begin ... The End.
Meh.
The more I read, the less I liked Uncas Metcalfe. I held on, because it seemed that as he became less and less able to detach from his emotions - a healthy development for this frozen man! - he might actually learn something about himself and those around him. I thought he was reaching a crisis that might lead to growth.
And the final line of the final page?
He regrets an action not taken.
Maybe this is the turning point to something positive in his life, because he never seems to have regretted (or apologized for) anything he'd ever done prior to that. Maybe? But we'll never know, because the book ends there.
It felt like the book ended where I wanted it to begin. We've met the man, we've seen his weaknesses and foibles, we've been how these impact those who care for him, we've seen him be shaken and begin to see that perhaps things aren't as straightforward as he's always believed ... and then, just when the growth might begin ... The End.
Meh.
September 5, 2008
I dream of New England….
American literature is as diverse as perhaps its defining characteristic, its terrain. As such, each region has produced its own literary styles and heroes. California has Steinbeck. The sweep of the rugged west has Nabokov and the many Western genre-specialists. The Midwest has William Gass. The mid-Atlantic has Philip Roth, Gore Vidal, William Carlos Williams, the beat poets. The Open Road has Kerouac. The south has Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, and Faulkner to name a few. It also has my two favorite American novels: Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, and, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. But no region has produced more resonant literature that is singularly identifiable with American life as New England.
While Betsey Osborne’s The Natural History of Uncas Metcalfe is set in upstate New York, her novel is New England drawing from and interpreting classic regional themes. From the onset, I felt her Sparta, New York was interchangeable with the aesthetic and township character of any disappearing and idyllic New English hamlet. Her characters are as at home in her small town New York as they would be in say Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, Maine.
New England, as a literary construct, is built on paradoxes.
Paradox #1: Progress or Return. The theme seems as deep as time itself articulated throughout Western Philosophy and literature alike, this paradox has found its American home in New England, which boasts a history that lends itself to stark contrast.
As a kid, when I wasn’t allowed to sleep through the morning hours which was my inclination, I would catch the distinctive cultural voice of Charles Kuralt on CBS’s Sunday Morning. I was in particular riveted by the somewhat clichéd reports sent in as Video postcards by roving commentators from around the country. I can remember more than one such segment featuring some middle-aged dude in overalls standing in some all but abandoned New English small town square. He’d be standing on cobble stoned streets with upturned brink scattered in the shot with a broken clock on a stark spire behind him. He’d regale the camera with folksy tales about towns that once prospered thanks to outlying factories or mills and local-owned businesses. With American progress came the demise of traditional industry and with it the fall of the New English Blue Collar communities that have been reduced to struggling to make ends meet while collectively reaching for anti-depression prescriptions. Small, independent businesses have been gradually outpaced by the build-up of corporate interests thriving on scale economies in outlying areas as downtowns and squares fall into disrepair.
Osborne’s title character, Uncas Metcalfe, the son of a prominent family that once owned a farm works outfit, is a botany professor who at odds with the changing face of Sparta, New York. He is reticent to accept change: a recurring theme in New English literature given a regional feel by decaying downtowns and rich descriptions of majestic yet quaint outdoor settings.
Paradox #2: Nature as character and setting. New English literature walks a fine line between humanizing nature and using it as a descriptive setting. “He [Uncas Metcalfe] looked around at the snow-covered spruces and thought, not for the first time, that he might have fared better as a tree. No one expected trees to sort through the wreckage of suppressed history.” Osbourne, like other New English writers, allows her characters flights of fancy based on nature only to land quickly returning to that classic, simple, defiant practical and taciturn nature of New England’s people.
Paradox #3: Optimism and Passion vs. Isolation and Self Sufficiency. Osbourne shows a family thrown off rhythm by an injury confining the matriarch to bed. She is at once optimistic, defiant, and cool, distant. One of the daughters walks the line between New England frigid coolness and passion.
Paradox #4: Its own demise. New English literature has been predicting its demise and confronting death since the ubiquitous utterances of “Nevermore” filled the pages of Poe’s cobwebbed and dark New England. Frost had spare birch branches cast shadows on life. The theme of death permeates the themes of New England as a construct. It is perhaps rendered more powerful by the recent turn of events in politics.
As the ailing Ted Kennedy stood strong, the defiant embodiment of stern New England to pass the political mantle from his royal family to the “nouveau riche” of American politics beginning with Barack Obama, I can’t help but think that New England, the stalwart of American liberalism and remaining tradition, is dying, a death foretold and still told in the gentle stories of loss and moving forward in New England’s literature.
Osbourne’s book is a solid continuation of America’s best literary tradition. The book doesn’t match the spare poetry of Frost or Poe or the sweeping historic perspective of Russo but who does? Osbourne conjures vivid characters in a familiar and comforting setting. In the end, this is a really good book.
American literature is as diverse as perhaps its defining characteristic, its terrain. As such, each region has produced its own literary styles and heroes. California has Steinbeck. The sweep of the rugged west has Nabokov and the many Western genre-specialists. The Midwest has William Gass. The mid-Atlantic has Philip Roth, Gore Vidal, William Carlos Williams, the beat poets. The Open Road has Kerouac. The south has Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, and Faulkner to name a few. It also has my two favorite American novels: Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, and, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. But no region has produced more resonant literature that is singularly identifiable with American life as New England.
While Betsey Osborne’s The Natural History of Uncas Metcalfe is set in upstate New York, her novel is New England drawing from and interpreting classic regional themes. From the onset, I felt her Sparta, New York was interchangeable with the aesthetic and township character of any disappearing and idyllic New English hamlet. Her characters are as at home in her small town New York as they would be in say Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, Maine.
New England, as a literary construct, is built on paradoxes.
Paradox #1: Progress or Return. The theme seems as deep as time itself articulated throughout Western Philosophy and literature alike, this paradox has found its American home in New England, which boasts a history that lends itself to stark contrast.
As a kid, when I wasn’t allowed to sleep through the morning hours which was my inclination, I would catch the distinctive cultural voice of Charles Kuralt on CBS’s Sunday Morning. I was in particular riveted by the somewhat clichéd reports sent in as Video postcards by roving commentators from around the country. I can remember more than one such segment featuring some middle-aged dude in overalls standing in some all but abandoned New English small town square. He’d be standing on cobble stoned streets with upturned brink scattered in the shot with a broken clock on a stark spire behind him. He’d regale the camera with folksy tales about towns that once prospered thanks to outlying factories or mills and local-owned businesses. With American progress came the demise of traditional industry and with it the fall of the New English Blue Collar communities that have been reduced to struggling to make ends meet while collectively reaching for anti-depression prescriptions. Small, independent businesses have been gradually outpaced by the build-up of corporate interests thriving on scale economies in outlying areas as downtowns and squares fall into disrepair.
Osborne’s title character, Uncas Metcalfe, the son of a prominent family that once owned a farm works outfit, is a botany professor who at odds with the changing face of Sparta, New York. He is reticent to accept change: a recurring theme in New English literature given a regional feel by decaying downtowns and rich descriptions of majestic yet quaint outdoor settings.
Paradox #2: Nature as character and setting. New English literature walks a fine line between humanizing nature and using it as a descriptive setting. “He [Uncas Metcalfe] looked around at the snow-covered spruces and thought, not for the first time, that he might have fared better as a tree. No one expected trees to sort through the wreckage of suppressed history.” Osbourne, like other New English writers, allows her characters flights of fancy based on nature only to land quickly returning to that classic, simple, defiant practical and taciturn nature of New England’s people.
Paradox #3: Optimism and Passion vs. Isolation and Self Sufficiency. Osbourne shows a family thrown off rhythm by an injury confining the matriarch to bed. She is at once optimistic, defiant, and cool, distant. One of the daughters walks the line between New England frigid coolness and passion.
Paradox #4: Its own demise. New English literature has been predicting its demise and confronting death since the ubiquitous utterances of “Nevermore” filled the pages of Poe’s cobwebbed and dark New England. Frost had spare birch branches cast shadows on life. The theme of death permeates the themes of New England as a construct. It is perhaps rendered more powerful by the recent turn of events in politics.
As the ailing Ted Kennedy stood strong, the defiant embodiment of stern New England to pass the political mantle from his royal family to the “nouveau riche” of American politics beginning with Barack Obama, I can’t help but think that New England, the stalwart of American liberalism and remaining tradition, is dying, a death foretold and still told in the gentle stories of loss and moving forward in New England’s literature.
Osbourne’s book is a solid continuation of America’s best literary tradition. The book doesn’t match the spare poetry of Frost or Poe or the sweeping historic perspective of Russo but who does? Osbourne conjures vivid characters in a familiar and comforting setting. In the end, this is a really good book.
November 30, 2020
Loved, loved, loved it. Big, small and mundane personalities in small town life. Sets a scene of a calm and complacent small town and a good turn that I did not see coming.
Excellent pacing. Kept me reading past midnight and devoured the book in just a few days.
Excellent pacing. Kept me reading past midnight and devoured the book in just a few days.
September 21, 2020
Profoundly human characters. I felt like I was in this family, lived in this town--for better or worse.
September 24, 2025
DNF 50%
This book was so boring that I just gave up.
This book was so boring that I just gave up.
January 22, 2014
This book was a little strange. I just couldn't get a handle on the main character. Uncas Metcalfe seems to have glided through his whole life without paying any attention to it. He seems not to know his wife or his daughter very well as he is always wondering why they do things. At the same time he also seems to want to keep himself hidden from them. His life is jolted when his wife becomes ill, his daughter, son-in-law and their children move back to town to look for work, and a former student terrorizes him - all at the same time. He is even more bewildered and forgetful than previously. All I got out of it all was question after question. I did admire his daughter who appears to have a future of caregiving for her parents looming in front of her, or does she? I don't know. It is an easy read so you can go ahead and try it without spending a lot of time.
April 12, 2013
I liked it very much. As a first novel it was excellent.
October 6, 2015
The absentminded professor
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews