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Wild Abandon
A breathtaking new novel from the Stella Prize-winning author of The Strays.In spring of 2011, a young Australian man travels to the USA.It is a quest of sorts, a quest as old as narrative a young man striking out from home in search of experience and culture, which he associates with that talismanic word, America.Beginning in the excessive, uncanny-familiar glamour and plenitude of New York City, Will crashes with expat chef and former nemesis Paul, and his girlfriend Justine, a rising star in the art scene. From here, he embarks on a doomed road trip into the American heartland, where he meets Wayne Gage. This charismatic, fast-living and deeply damaged Vietnam veteran, collector of exotic animals and would-be spirit guide, draws Will towards the dark conclusion of his journey.Wild Abandon is a headlong tumble through the falling world of end-days capitalism, a haunting, hyperreal snapshot of our own strange times and what it means to be a tourist, or indeed a human, within them.
Mass Market Paperback
First published September 28, 2021
74 people are currently reading
1657 people want to read
About the author
Emily Bitto
3 books184 followersEmily Bitto is the author of Stella Prize winning novel The Strays (Affirm Press, and forthcoming from Twelve, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, US). She has a Masters in literary studies and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Melbourne. Her writing has appeared in various publications, including The Sydney Morning Herald, Meanjin, Heat, the Australian Literary Review and The Big Issue Fiction Edition. The Strays was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, the Indie Prize and the Dobbie Award, and won the 2015 Stella Prize. Emily Bitto lives in Melbourne where she co-owns the Carlton winebar, Heartattack & Vine.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 200 reviews
November 2, 2021
The second section of this novel is so much better than the first. Inspired by a real event it’s an intense read which makes the superficiality of the first part even more apparent. The main character, Will is a young Australian who has fled overseas after a bad breakup. A bit naive, and annoyingly full of self pity he’s arrived in New York (on the 10th anniversary of September 11) and is crashing on the sofa of Paul, a friend of his older brother. This section is full of drugs, alcohol, parties etc and Will thinks he’s seeing ‘America’. The story then moves to Littleproud, Ohio where a girl from Wills hometown is now living. He gets a job with Wayne, a Vietnam veteran, helping to feed and look after his collection of exotic animals, including lions, tigers, bears and more. I found it hard to put the book down as a Will becomes more aware of Wayne’s situation. It’s hard to believe that it can be legal for a man to own all these wild beasts. If they were in a zoo there’d be so many more people working to look after them. Wayne also has a cellar full of guns and other prepper stuuf, of course.
A compelling and powerful read.
A compelling and powerful read.
October 5, 2021
DNF. Was holding out for the second section, where Will travels to the American heartland and meets the mysterious Wayne, but made it only a few pages in. I found this book extremely overwritten in parts. It reminded me instantly of Don Delillo (no surprise, as the author excerpts 'Americana' at the very beginning), and I'm generally a fan of his style, and appreciate the way he plays with language, often fusing odd words here and there to form new verbs or adjectives, or at least use words in ways I find new and exciting. But I must admit it's a style I find rather dense and exhausting, as if every word is freighted with meaning, almost like poetry. And it was a similar experience for me reading this book. Maybe I could have enjoyed it more, were it not for the long, abstract passages that cropped up on every second page – ideas-heavy, parapraph-long sentences that would force me to double back and re-read, and which took me out of the story completely.
I also found Will to be quite mediocre - and normally I don't mind an 'everyman' type protagonist, and was nonetheless interested in following him around for the first hundred or so pages. But he didn't feel intellectual or curious enough to warrant the type of observations being made, or the overarching commentary on capitalism or changing landscape of middle America. His break-up with Laura felt very pedestrian, as did his upbringing and relationship with his parents, and it all just resulted in my not caring very much for seeing how things panned out for him.
But I understand it's mostly a style thing, which you'll either gel with or you won't. It was a miss for me this time, but I do give the author props for her fearless, forensic dissection of ideas (she's clearly a lot smarter than I am), and I'm keen to read her debut work, The Strays, as I've heard excellent things.
I also found Will to be quite mediocre - and normally I don't mind an 'everyman' type protagonist, and was nonetheless interested in following him around for the first hundred or so pages. But he didn't feel intellectual or curious enough to warrant the type of observations being made, or the overarching commentary on capitalism or changing landscape of middle America. His break-up with Laura felt very pedestrian, as did his upbringing and relationship with his parents, and it all just resulted in my not caring very much for seeing how things panned out for him.
But I understand it's mostly a style thing, which you'll either gel with or you won't. It was a miss for me this time, but I do give the author props for her fearless, forensic dissection of ideas (she's clearly a lot smarter than I am), and I'm keen to read her debut work, The Strays, as I've heard excellent things.
October 18, 2021
I have a habit of reading the author notes at the end of a book first. More often than not, this will prove spoilerish, with the author referencing something to do with the story that is not disclosed in the blurb. I don’t mind that though, because on several occasions now, reading something in the author note and knowing that ‘this thing’ is still to come, has actually kept me from abandoning a book. That was very much the case here, with Wild Abandon. I really did not get along with this book at the start. In fact, I completely disliked the entire first section that plays out in New York. Will was entirely unimpressive as a character and the constant drug taking and drinking interspersed with intoxicated ramblings of introspection punctuated by random and regretful sexual encounters was slightly repulsive and indeed, a little bit boring. The ‘cocaine set’ that Will got caught up in were just a bunch of self-important tossers, calling themselves artists and personal stylists and getting paid an exorbitant amount to do so whilst demonstrating no measurable talent whatsoever. The truth of these people existing within this microcosm of New York is the truly sad part as their representation of it as a place to be is not doing New York any favours. I’d prefer the sanitised version of New York I get from Friends. If I hadn’t read the author note, I most likely would have abandoned the book before the end of that section and missed out on a quite incredible story.
“He wondered whether Wayne’s act of hospitality was frequent and habitual and indiscriminate or long held in store for just such a figure of young and desperate searching as himself, a fertile anonymous outline on which to project the image of the younger self or son or double still able to receive and act upon the future man’s impassioned impotent and soon-to-be-familiar advice. But hadn’t he vowed, after all, to say yes to everything? To the world? Well, this was what the world was offering: wild animals; the depths and secrets of small-town America; housing and employment with a random, quite likely troubled and possibly even dangerous ageing veteran, creator of his own rogue Midwestern Xanadu and dispenser of philosophy, of what utility to his own vague cause Will was not yet sure.”
It wasn’t until recently that I became aware that American’s can still own exotic animals. I honestly thought (hoped) this was a thing of the past. From the moment that Wayne enters this story, I had a feeling, deep down, that everything I despise about people owning wild animals as pets was going to be realised. It came as no surprise to me that Will and Wayne bonded on some level. Both were incredibly self-absorbed men, both disillusioned about their own grandiosity and unwilling to recognise themselves as masters of their own fate. That Will learned nothing, gained nothing, and achieved nothing on his quest to find himself on an American road trip also came as no surprise. He was utterly paralysed by low self-esteem to the point where it had blinded him and manifested itself into some sort of judgment upon others, as though they were the reason he felt the way he did in any given situation. Wayne’s situation put me in mind of David Koresh (the Waco siege), a man full of his own grand plans, the Messiah of his own kingdom, the anti-government vibe he gave off along with being on the FBI’s radar for his weapons cache – all very much the same. The utter devastation of what played out was horrendous and deeply affecting. The wrongness of it all was so very apparent and I found myself angry at Wayne, angry at those who knew him but didn’t see him for the ticking time bomb he really was, angry at the police for acting in such a cataclysmic and poorly thought out way, and angry at the human collateral damage that comes from war, the people left with PTSD for decades until something finally gives and we all feign shock over it and claim that we never saw it coming because he was ‘such a good guy’.
“For now, he chiefly felt an overwhelming sense of all that he had failed to learn and do on this short aborted quest. At helping Wayne, he had failed. At staying ninety days, he had failed. At forgetting Laura, he had failed. At the gaining of self-knowledge of the kind to make a man of him, he had miserably failed.”
Wild Abandon is a complex novel that generated complex feelings within me whilst reading. It is written in a flamboyantly literary style that occasionally bordered on being overwritten, but for the most part was also beautifully poetic and deeply meaningful. It is narrated by a third person omniscient narrator that occasionally breaks through the fourth wall and gives an indication to the reader of what lies ahead for our protagonist, not just within the story itself, but also much further down the track beyond the narrative, almost like a crystal ball giving us a glimpse into the future. I’ve always loved this sort of narration and Emily Bitto is definitely an expert at it. Once I’d finished the novel, I could see the entirety of it and the place within Will’s journey that the New York section accomplished. For me, Wild Abandon was about something momentous happening, yet in the end, it being all for nothing. I feel that’s what Emily has achieved for both Will and Wayne. Will’s journey was a failure, Wayne’s Wild Kingdom, likewise, was a failure. In this, Wild Abandon resists the cliched narrative arc where our protagonist(s) journeys through adversity to arrive on the other side triumphant in redemption. Instead, we have two men, one at the end of his adult life, and one at the beginning, but both connected by a propensity for lying and an inability to accept their own fallibility. Wild Abandon was a compulsive read for me. Once Will hit Ohio, I couldn’t put it down. Deeply moving, tragic, and affecting.
“And then at once he was alone, in the wreck of an extravagant and hopeful ruined dream, standing in the doorway of a dead man’s house, somewhere in America.”
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
“He wondered whether Wayne’s act of hospitality was frequent and habitual and indiscriminate or long held in store for just such a figure of young and desperate searching as himself, a fertile anonymous outline on which to project the image of the younger self or son or double still able to receive and act upon the future man’s impassioned impotent and soon-to-be-familiar advice. But hadn’t he vowed, after all, to say yes to everything? To the world? Well, this was what the world was offering: wild animals; the depths and secrets of small-town America; housing and employment with a random, quite likely troubled and possibly even dangerous ageing veteran, creator of his own rogue Midwestern Xanadu and dispenser of philosophy, of what utility to his own vague cause Will was not yet sure.”
It wasn’t until recently that I became aware that American’s can still own exotic animals. I honestly thought (hoped) this was a thing of the past. From the moment that Wayne enters this story, I had a feeling, deep down, that everything I despise about people owning wild animals as pets was going to be realised. It came as no surprise to me that Will and Wayne bonded on some level. Both were incredibly self-absorbed men, both disillusioned about their own grandiosity and unwilling to recognise themselves as masters of their own fate. That Will learned nothing, gained nothing, and achieved nothing on his quest to find himself on an American road trip also came as no surprise. He was utterly paralysed by low self-esteem to the point where it had blinded him and manifested itself into some sort of judgment upon others, as though they were the reason he felt the way he did in any given situation. Wayne’s situation put me in mind of David Koresh (the Waco siege), a man full of his own grand plans, the Messiah of his own kingdom, the anti-government vibe he gave off along with being on the FBI’s radar for his weapons cache – all very much the same. The utter devastation of what played out was horrendous and deeply affecting. The wrongness of it all was so very apparent and I found myself angry at Wayne, angry at those who knew him but didn’t see him for the ticking time bomb he really was, angry at the police for acting in such a cataclysmic and poorly thought out way, and angry at the human collateral damage that comes from war, the people left with PTSD for decades until something finally gives and we all feign shock over it and claim that we never saw it coming because he was ‘such a good guy’.
“For now, he chiefly felt an overwhelming sense of all that he had failed to learn and do on this short aborted quest. At helping Wayne, he had failed. At staying ninety days, he had failed. At forgetting Laura, he had failed. At the gaining of self-knowledge of the kind to make a man of him, he had miserably failed.”
Wild Abandon is a complex novel that generated complex feelings within me whilst reading. It is written in a flamboyantly literary style that occasionally bordered on being overwritten, but for the most part was also beautifully poetic and deeply meaningful. It is narrated by a third person omniscient narrator that occasionally breaks through the fourth wall and gives an indication to the reader of what lies ahead for our protagonist, not just within the story itself, but also much further down the track beyond the narrative, almost like a crystal ball giving us a glimpse into the future. I’ve always loved this sort of narration and Emily Bitto is definitely an expert at it. Once I’d finished the novel, I could see the entirety of it and the place within Will’s journey that the New York section accomplished. For me, Wild Abandon was about something momentous happening, yet in the end, it being all for nothing. I feel that’s what Emily has achieved for both Will and Wayne. Will’s journey was a failure, Wayne’s Wild Kingdom, likewise, was a failure. In this, Wild Abandon resists the cliched narrative arc where our protagonist(s) journeys through adversity to arrive on the other side triumphant in redemption. Instead, we have two men, one at the end of his adult life, and one at the beginning, but both connected by a propensity for lying and an inability to accept their own fallibility. Wild Abandon was a compulsive read for me. Once Will hit Ohio, I couldn’t put it down. Deeply moving, tragic, and affecting.
“And then at once he was alone, in the wreck of an extravagant and hopeful ruined dream, standing in the doorway of a dead man’s house, somewhere in America.”
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
June 8, 2022
I did not enjoy this even half of what I thought I would...
It's so disappointing when that happens, right?
Reading the synopsis and the reviews, this sounded like the perfect book for me:
- A coming of age story, which I usually love
- Introspective and insightful. Well, it is there, I just couldn't make myself care, and connect with it.
- Inspired by a story similar to Tiger King, which I am OBSESSEDDDD and was so excited about! (And it was indeed the best part and only interesting thing about this book to me).
However, this book is just sooo very slow and overwritten.
A philosophical and introspective novel should have interesting characters... you want to get to know them, you care about what they are feeling, and what they go through, and that is why you keep reading the internal, existential monologues. That was not the case with this one.
Both male characters were so obtuse, boring, and self-centered... I was so uninterested to read about another 22-year-old brat who treats his family like shit and thinks he is the center of the universe and an older mediocre man who is completely lost, bland, and doesn't have a personality.
I understand what the author was trying to do and use the man coming of age novel format to deconstruct, make social commentary, and do something new, but I guess this would have been way better done with female characters. To me, it was just more of the same.
Also, it feels like you are reading two books smashed together without finesse or reason, messy and disconnected. And, although the second section of the novel is way better than the first, it also just made the entire first half even more boring and pointless.
My impression was that the author didn't have much to say, or couldn't quite decide what she wanted to say, and the book is lost, and its conclusion is underwhelming.
It's so disappointing when that happens, right?
Reading the synopsis and the reviews, this sounded like the perfect book for me:
- A coming of age story, which I usually love
- Introspective and insightful. Well, it is there, I just couldn't make myself care, and connect with it.
- Inspired by a story similar to Tiger King, which I am OBSESSEDDDD and was so excited about! (And it was indeed the best part and only interesting thing about this book to me).
However, this book is just sooo very slow and overwritten.
A philosophical and introspective novel should have interesting characters... you want to get to know them, you care about what they are feeling, and what they go through, and that is why you keep reading the internal, existential monologues. That was not the case with this one.
Both male characters were so obtuse, boring, and self-centered... I was so uninterested to read about another 22-year-old brat who treats his family like shit and thinks he is the center of the universe and an older mediocre man who is completely lost, bland, and doesn't have a personality.
I understand what the author was trying to do and use the man coming of age novel format to deconstruct, make social commentary, and do something new, but I guess this would have been way better done with female characters. To me, it was just more of the same.
Also, it feels like you are reading two books smashed together without finesse or reason, messy and disconnected. And, although the second section of the novel is way better than the first, it also just made the entire first half even more boring and pointless.
My impression was that the author didn't have much to say, or couldn't quite decide what she wanted to say, and the book is lost, and its conclusion is underwhelming.
October 28, 2021
I struggled with this- felt it was as self-indulgent as its protagonist.
abandoned
October 7, 2021I’m sorry to admit this because I was really looking forward to a new novel by Emily Bitto and I really admired The Strays…
But…
I just did not get on with Wild Abandon. I read up to page 100, wondering why I’d got to page 86 and the art show before there was anything of any interest to me and then the novel reverted to vacuous drinking and drug taking activities. I’ve read an interview with Bitto so I understand that she makes her living by selling cocktails and is probably very familiar with this self-indulgent narcissistic millennial world of excessive drinking and the normalisation of drug-taking, but I just can’t make myself read any more of it.
I don't rate books I don't finish.
But…
I just did not get on with Wild Abandon. I read up to page 100, wondering why I’d got to page 86 and the art show before there was anything of any interest to me and then the novel reverted to vacuous drinking and drug taking activities. I’ve read an interview with Bitto so I understand that she makes her living by selling cocktails and is probably very familiar with this self-indulgent narcissistic millennial world of excessive drinking and the normalisation of drug-taking, but I just can’t make myself read any more of it.
I don't rate books I don't finish.
October 26, 2021
I really had to force myself to finish this, and only did so because I had read a review of the Coda section which enthused about the ability of the author to completely occupy the headspace of a 20something year old American helicopter gunner in Vietnam.
I really didn’t enjoy it. It was over-written to the point where it just felt like the author was showing off with how many obscure words she could squeeze into a single sentence. The protagonist Will was self absorbed and boring - actually that bit was realistic, but I’m not interested in reading about 20 something year old boys on their first overseas trip.
It felt like 2 separate stories with, other than the main character, no links at all between parts 1 and 2.
As for part 2 being based on real events, I have subsequently read some articles about these events myself, and it seems as though the author hasn’t “been inspired” by this, so much as copied it entirely. She states the characters are fictional, but the descriptions of Wayne are almost identical to that of the man at the centre of the real life event.
I really didn’t enjoy it. It was over-written to the point where it just felt like the author was showing off with how many obscure words she could squeeze into a single sentence. The protagonist Will was self absorbed and boring - actually that bit was realistic, but I’m not interested in reading about 20 something year old boys on their first overseas trip.
It felt like 2 separate stories with, other than the main character, no links at all between parts 1 and 2.
As for part 2 being based on real events, I have subsequently read some articles about these events myself, and it seems as though the author hasn’t “been inspired” by this, so much as copied it entirely. She states the characters are fictional, but the descriptions of Wayne are almost identical to that of the man at the centre of the real life event.
October 6, 2021
Loved this author’s first book which deservedly won awards and high praise - it was brilliant.
In this book I think the writing is even better. There are passages in this book that are truly exceptional - heaps of them. However, I just really struggled with the characters and I didn’t like them, sadly.
Even the central character, Will, (who clearly is a little lost) I just couldn’t warm to. He’s confused, but selfish, and it permeates the whole book. And the people Will meets are no better - well most!
So although the writing rocked, the story just didn’t grab me.
But I love this writer. Emily Bitto is special, and I’ll be reading her next book, and ideally I’ll love the next book more.
In this book I think the writing is even better. There are passages in this book that are truly exceptional - heaps of them. However, I just really struggled with the characters and I didn’t like them, sadly.
Even the central character, Will, (who clearly is a little lost) I just couldn’t warm to. He’s confused, but selfish, and it permeates the whole book. And the people Will meets are no better - well most!
So although the writing rocked, the story just didn’t grab me.
But I love this writer. Emily Bitto is special, and I’ll be reading her next book, and ideally I’ll love the next book more.
July 6, 2022
Do you ever finish a book and wonder what was all that about? Well this was how I felt about this. The first half is so disjointed I almost gave up then someone had said the second half was better. It wasn’t! It’s about a guy Will leaving Australia to meet up with an old friend Paul and all the messed up people he meets along the way. Then comes Wayne an even more messed up veteran who collects exotic animals, something I abhor about America as you seem to be able to buy and own anything. This finished it for me so it was on a downward spiral from then on. But it never really got off the ground!
September 9, 2022
I found very little to enjoy in the first half of this book, but I'm glad I persevered because the second half was so much better, even if the extended climax was difficult to read.
The more I think about it, the more I struggle to understand the point of the New York section, which was literally the first 50% of the book. I suppose the idea was to develop the character of Will and to establish why he's in the States. Honestly, the context part could have been achieved in a couple of chapters, and it missed the mark on the character development anyway... I didn't feel like I began to know him at all until he hit Ohio.
I was attracted to the book by the exotic animals, and that was by far the best thing - just a shame it needed so much scaffolding.
EDIT: Rating adjusted from 2.5 to 3 after hearing the author at MWF, and realising I remembered her novel more fondly than I’d expected.
The more I think about it, the more I struggle to understand the point of the New York section, which was literally the first 50% of the book. I suppose the idea was to develop the character of Will and to establish why he's in the States. Honestly, the context part could have been achieved in a couple of chapters, and it missed the mark on the character development anyway... I didn't feel like I began to know him at all until he hit Ohio.
I was attracted to the book by the exotic animals, and that was by far the best thing - just a shame it needed so much scaffolding.
EDIT: Rating adjusted from 2.5 to 3 after hearing the author at MWF, and realising I remembered her novel more fondly than I’d expected.
January 20, 2022
Unlikeable protagonist, disjointed plot, self-indulgent writing. Only finished because I have a goal to keep up with.
January 16, 2022
The author of this book must have been looking on in abject horror during 2020 as pretty much the whole planet (or at least those in the English-speaking world with a Netflix subscription) became obsessed with (or at least invested in) Tiger King.
It must have seemed like when this book came out there would be inevitable cries of, "Bandwagon!", which is an inevitable cry that authors of novels (a novel being by definition something new and original) don't really want to hear. The story at the outset (this was written over many years) would have seemed like a really exotic one (pun intended), one that was weird enough to have actually happened (which it did, see below), but also so random - as the young people say - that there wouldn't be any problem with readers thinking, "Hey, didn't I just watch this on Netflix... along with the rest of the English-speaking world?"
It probably doesn't make any difference that the second stop in this two-stop road novel was based on an earlier and quite separate kingdom of lions, tiger, and bears (oh, my, and wolves, and monkeys, and panthers...) to the one shown in the Tiger King... documentary. If you've written a "novel" based on one Latvian goat herder who enters the Olympic Games and becomes the world's leading pole-vaulter, and then Netflix makes a series about another Latvian goat herder who enters a completely different global competition and becomes a world pole-vaulting champion, then readers are going to be thinking, "Hmmm... this seems like a remarkable coincidence...".
Especially if the Netflix thing comes out two years earlier.
So, there's that.
Once you've read this book, you might like to read the wikipedia article on that earlier and quite separate kingdom, the 2011 Zanesville, Ohio animal escape, but I wouldn't recommend reading it beforehand, as it doesn't have a spoiler alert.
What else is going on in here? Is anyone baking sourdough bread?
No.
So, the protagonist - Will Free (winner of the 2021 Premier's Literary Award for Most Obvious Placeholder Character Name) - is a country lad who has found himself chewed up and spat out - not by a tiger...or does he??? - by the perils and pitfalls of love in the Big City of Melbourne. Bitto does a pretty good job of creating this character as a recognisable inner-northern-suburbs hipster, even though he's really just faking it until he's making it with that in the world of the story. It's a fish-out-of-water story, so she decants him and sends him off on a teenangster dummy spit road trip across America.
Which is fun. You'll enjoy reading about his adventures in Stop 1 (New York), especially if you enjoy reading the same thing over and over again.
Which is fun. You'll enjoy reading about his adventures in Stop 1 (New York), especially if you enjoy reading the same thing over and over again.
See? How much fun was that?
Then he ends up for Stop 2 at the Wild Kingdom. You know that part already. From Netflix.
So why bother reading this book? Well, there's the way she does language.
Stories are made out of language, so it's an important thing to consider.
In writing there is this thing called "Show, don't tell!" It's advice to writers who want to make their stories particularly engaging. Here we can see that Bitto is aware that adverbs are basically TELL, and so she has avoided them, in an almost complete but awkward manner. Rather than swapping out the adverb for some SHOW, she seems to have just dropped the -LY ending.
In the region of Radio City Music Hall he returned to his body and to the blunt reality of hunger, and he swerved impulsive into a diner and ordered a burger and another beer.
or
He awoke abrupt in darkness and checked his watch.
It's bizarre.
Or, to use her term, "baroque".
There is also this weird disconnect between the voice of the narrator and the voices of the characters. The narrator speaks more often than not as though observing phytoplankton under a microscope, interpreting their futile thrashing about to an audience of undergrads who are taking notes so as to improve their vocabulary and to develop a scientific idiom.
Who is he, then, this fresh and vulnerable protagonist of his own life, this end-times tourist of the failing West, fitting his own desperate headlong to the desperate headlong world and yet, and yet, so filled despite himself with the pheromonal drug of sweet young hope? Late-born son and younger brother; a small-town boy until his recent migration to Melbourne - to the fast-ball game of fakery and the slow spirit-whittling rot that was its consequence - in which metropolis he awoke to culture like a nightmare of public nakedness; awoke to all he had to learn and acquire and pretend he had always possessed. And to love, the swift shock removal of which has spurred this striking out from his antipodean home. He arrives heartsore and humiliated, the latter emotion for which he feels a particular sharp familiar aversion. Better, then, to cry on the plane, his cold grey eye mask applied like an ineffectual compress; better to flee the friends who know him and, worse, know Laura.
Laura Laura Laura Laura Laura
By contrast, here's a text message Will Free receives...
Hey mate,
Welcome! Make yourself at home, take a shower, etc. There's beer in the fridge - sit on the balcony, or there's a rooftop upstairs. Wifi is Celebritychef, password: oink69. See you at Dante or msg me if too knackered.
- P
It's jarring, the different worlds. Still, it could have been worse. There were, in the initial pages, whole half-page paragraphs from the narrator that were a single sentence. It was, like, reach a full stop - drink!
The other reason we read fiction, rather than Wikipedia articles, is that fiction has to make sense. It has to have a message, and it has to make us think about our lives and the way we live them.
In the acknowledgements, Bitto thanks her agent, who "understood, from the first reading, exactly what I was trying to do with it."
Hmm.
Why would you say that?
Why would you feel you need to say that?
I only finished reading this book last night, so I might need a bit more time to work out exactly what Bitto was trying to do with it. It seems to be a Hero's Journey story with the message that sometimes there is nothing to bring back, except maybe a smokescreen for the fact that you (the Hero) have nothing to bring back. No redemption, no atonement, no growth, but, Hey! Look at me in this photo with the tigers!
There are plenty of passages where Bitto tries to capture the ineffable presence of the exotic animals. This is perhaps the best writing in here. Enjoy.
It must have seemed like when this book came out there would be inevitable cries of, "Bandwagon!", which is an inevitable cry that authors of novels (a novel being by definition something new and original) don't really want to hear. The story at the outset (this was written over many years) would have seemed like a really exotic one (pun intended), one that was weird enough to have actually happened (which it did, see below), but also so random - as the young people say - that there wouldn't be any problem with readers thinking, "Hey, didn't I just watch this on Netflix... along with the rest of the English-speaking world?"
It probably doesn't make any difference that the second stop in this two-stop road novel was based on an earlier and quite separate kingdom of lions, tiger, and bears (oh, my, and wolves, and monkeys, and panthers...) to the one shown in the Tiger King... documentary. If you've written a "novel" based on one Latvian goat herder who enters the Olympic Games and becomes the world's leading pole-vaulter, and then Netflix makes a series about another Latvian goat herder who enters a completely different global competition and becomes a world pole-vaulting champion, then readers are going to be thinking, "Hmmm... this seems like a remarkable coincidence...".
Especially if the Netflix thing comes out two years earlier.
So, there's that.
Once you've read this book, you might like to read the wikipedia article on that earlier and quite separate kingdom, the 2011 Zanesville, Ohio animal escape, but I wouldn't recommend reading it beforehand, as it doesn't have a spoiler alert.
What else is going on in here? Is anyone baking sourdough bread?
No.
So, the protagonist - Will Free (winner of the 2021 Premier's Literary Award for Most Obvious Placeholder Character Name) - is a country lad who has found himself chewed up and spat out - not by a tiger...or does he??? - by the perils and pitfalls of love in the Big City of Melbourne. Bitto does a pretty good job of creating this character as a recognisable inner-northern-suburbs hipster, even though he's really just faking it until he's making it with that in the world of the story. It's a fish-out-of-water story, so she decants him and sends him off on a teenangster dummy spit road trip across America.
Which is fun. You'll enjoy reading about his adventures in Stop 1 (New York), especially if you enjoy reading the same thing over and over again.
Which is fun. You'll enjoy reading about his adventures in Stop 1 (New York), especially if you enjoy reading the same thing over and over again.
See? How much fun was that?
Then he ends up for Stop 2 at the Wild Kingdom. You know that part already. From Netflix.
So why bother reading this book? Well, there's the way she does language.
Stories are made out of language, so it's an important thing to consider.
In writing there is this thing called "Show, don't tell!" It's advice to writers who want to make their stories particularly engaging. Here we can see that Bitto is aware that adverbs are basically TELL, and so she has avoided them, in an almost complete but awkward manner. Rather than swapping out the adverb for some SHOW, she seems to have just dropped the -LY ending.
In the region of Radio City Music Hall he returned to his body and to the blunt reality of hunger, and he swerved impulsive into a diner and ordered a burger and another beer.
or
He awoke abrupt in darkness and checked his watch.
It's bizarre.
Or, to use her term, "baroque".
There is also this weird disconnect between the voice of the narrator and the voices of the characters. The narrator speaks more often than not as though observing phytoplankton under a microscope, interpreting their futile thrashing about to an audience of undergrads who are taking notes so as to improve their vocabulary and to develop a scientific idiom.
Who is he, then, this fresh and vulnerable protagonist of his own life, this end-times tourist of the failing West, fitting his own desperate headlong to the desperate headlong world and yet, and yet, so filled despite himself with the pheromonal drug of sweet young hope? Late-born son and younger brother; a small-town boy until his recent migration to Melbourne - to the fast-ball game of fakery and the slow spirit-whittling rot that was its consequence - in which metropolis he awoke to culture like a nightmare of public nakedness; awoke to all he had to learn and acquire and pretend he had always possessed. And to love, the swift shock removal of which has spurred this striking out from his antipodean home. He arrives heartsore and humiliated, the latter emotion for which he feels a particular sharp familiar aversion. Better, then, to cry on the plane, his cold grey eye mask applied like an ineffectual compress; better to flee the friends who know him and, worse, know Laura.
Laura Laura Laura Laura Laura
By contrast, here's a text message Will Free receives...
Hey mate,
Welcome! Make yourself at home, take a shower, etc. There's beer in the fridge - sit on the balcony, or there's a rooftop upstairs. Wifi is Celebritychef, password: oink69. See you at Dante or msg me if too knackered.
- P
It's jarring, the different worlds. Still, it could have been worse. There were, in the initial pages, whole half-page paragraphs from the narrator that were a single sentence. It was, like, reach a full stop - drink!
The other reason we read fiction, rather than Wikipedia articles, is that fiction has to make sense. It has to have a message, and it has to make us think about our lives and the way we live them.
In the acknowledgements, Bitto thanks her agent, who "understood, from the first reading, exactly what I was trying to do with it."
Hmm.
Why would you say that?
Why would you feel you need to say that?
I only finished reading this book last night, so I might need a bit more time to work out exactly what Bitto was trying to do with it. It seems to be a Hero's Journey story with the message that sometimes there is nothing to bring back, except maybe a smokescreen for the fact that you (the Hero) have nothing to bring back. No redemption, no atonement, no growth, but, Hey! Look at me in this photo with the tigers!
There are plenty of passages where Bitto tries to capture the ineffable presence of the exotic animals. This is perhaps the best writing in here. Enjoy.
September 28, 2021
Wild Abandon starts as a story familiar to many: young Aussie heads to NYC seeking culture, experience and the salve for a broken heart in the form of sex, drugs, art and excess. Then quickly, abruptly, it pivots away from the city, along a doomed road trip to a private zoo in Ohio run by an unhinged Vietnam veteran.
I relished this book. It is exhilarating, moreish, wildly impressive and whoa-inducing. I always love the acknowledgments in any novel but these blew my mind when I found out it was inspired by the TRUE story of a private American zoo. This sent me down a rabbit hole of googling - full warning though, save your googling until you’ve finished the book!
This is one of those rare novels that gives you absolutely no idea where you’re going and yet you’re 100% there for it. It’s a novel that you can relate hard to in parts, then sit back from and wonder WTF these characters were thinking in others.
I must admit when the story left NY and wedged itself in Bumfuck, Ohio, I was a little sad with the complete pace and story change – from Bret Easton Ellis vibes to claustrophobic Tiger King – but Bitto’s writing is fearless and knows exactly where it’s going. You’ll be thinking about this one for a lonnng time.
I relished this book. It is exhilarating, moreish, wildly impressive and whoa-inducing. I always love the acknowledgments in any novel but these blew my mind when I found out it was inspired by the TRUE story of a private American zoo. This sent me down a rabbit hole of googling - full warning though, save your googling until you’ve finished the book!
This is one of those rare novels that gives you absolutely no idea where you’re going and yet you’re 100% there for it. It’s a novel that you can relate hard to in parts, then sit back from and wonder WTF these characters were thinking in others.
I must admit when the story left NY and wedged itself in Bumfuck, Ohio, I was a little sad with the complete pace and story change – from Bret Easton Ellis vibes to claustrophobic Tiger King – but Bitto’s writing is fearless and knows exactly where it’s going. You’ll be thinking about this one for a lonnng time.
November 21, 2021
I loved The Strays and really enjoyed Wild Abandon. Emily Bitto is a phenomenal writer. Although her writing is at times overdone, some passages are exceptional and stay with me as precious - like the way she describes Will observing the NY girl gangs’ dynamic or his relationship to his small town complex. The way she is able to capture her characters motives and relationship to the world around them is wonderful and I can’t wait to read what she writes next.
February 1, 2022
An appropriate first read of the year of the tiger.
Will leaves behind heartache in Melbourne for a trip to the USA. After partying in New York, he ends up working for an exotic animal keeper in Ohio. This novel is hard to write about because it's very character driven. It's difficult to articulate what i liked about it, but i definitely liked it.
Will leaves behind heartache in Melbourne for a trip to the USA. After partying in New York, he ends up working for an exotic animal keeper in Ohio. This novel is hard to write about because it's very character driven. It's difficult to articulate what i liked about it, but i definitely liked it.
July 6, 2022
It is with the greatest of regret, that, after a number of increasingly desperate attempts to get into this book that I just have to give it up.
I really loved the last book by this author that I read; The Strays was a marvellous read for me. So I was super excited for this one, but it does not work for me as well.
The main character is one that I just CANNOT bond with in any way. He seems two dimensional, his actions seem meaningless and his inner world (which could overcome the previous two problems) seems non-existent.
Young Australian male, goes to USA on a personal quest for something, according to the description. But to me it feels like young Australian male goes to New York to buy drugs and get high for no reason I can see. We do have drugs here you know, it seems a long way to go to get high. He seems uninterested in USA or NY, so we don't see anything much of that.
I just get no sense of identity from Will, as we meet him for the first few pages, always referred to as 'He' and that is how I continued to think of him. there is no sense of inner life or purpose and there was nothing to anchor me to this book. This time, with concentration, I managed to make it to page 103 but I was not enjoying it at all and honestly I was forgetting the events as I was reading about them, as they seemed so banal. Since this book is over 400 pages long, I could not bring myself to continue. Something about the writing style seems very different and unlike that which I loved so much in The Starys; there, events seemed immanent and urgent, imbued with meaning. Here, there is just a sense of blah, the detachment of the story making it impossible to bond with. I actually skipped ahead to the end, when I determined not to continue, and checked out the ending but it seemed just as meaningless and banal.
I tried hard, multiple times. Just not for me.
Thank you to Allen & Unwin for providing me with a pre-release copy of this book, in return for an unbiased review. I feel bad I never could finish it. The opinions stated are, all too blatantly obviously, my own.
I really loved the last book by this author that I read; The Strays was a marvellous read for me. So I was super excited for this one, but it does not work for me as well.
The main character is one that I just CANNOT bond with in any way. He seems two dimensional, his actions seem meaningless and his inner world (which could overcome the previous two problems) seems non-existent.
Young Australian male, goes to USA on a personal quest for something, according to the description. But to me it feels like young Australian male goes to New York to buy drugs and get high for no reason I can see. We do have drugs here you know, it seems a long way to go to get high. He seems uninterested in USA or NY, so we don't see anything much of that.
I just get no sense of identity from Will, as we meet him for the first few pages, always referred to as 'He' and that is how I continued to think of him. there is no sense of inner life or purpose and there was nothing to anchor me to this book. This time, with concentration, I managed to make it to page 103 but I was not enjoying it at all and honestly I was forgetting the events as I was reading about them, as they seemed so banal. Since this book is over 400 pages long, I could not bring myself to continue. Something about the writing style seems very different and unlike that which I loved so much in The Starys; there, events seemed immanent and urgent, imbued with meaning. Here, there is just a sense of blah, the detachment of the story making it impossible to bond with. I actually skipped ahead to the end, when I determined not to continue, and checked out the ending but it seemed just as meaningless and banal.
I tried hard, multiple times. Just not for me.
Thank you to Allen & Unwin for providing me with a pre-release copy of this book, in return for an unbiased review. I feel bad I never could finish it. The opinions stated are, all too blatantly obviously, my own.
August 11, 2022
If you've only recently started this book and are wondering if it's going to get better, the answer is a resounding no and I urge you to abandon it, wildly, immediately. Anyone lucky enough not to have wasted their time and money in this way, count your blessings and run for the hills. Honestly, how is it possible for such mediocre rubbish to have been published in 2021, a wonderful year for books? I understand the pressure to produce a follow-up to a prize-winning debut novel, but surely the editorial process still applies? Perhaps I'm being naive, but if readers hadn't already read 'The Strays', Allen & Unwin have shot themselves in the literary foot because there's no way readers of ‘Wild Abandon’ will be reaching for anything in Emily Bitto’s back-catalogue. (Also, might I suggest that Allen & Unwin are particularly partial to publishing this kind of unedited crap, for who could forget Karen Viggers' 2019 trainwreck, 'The Orchardist's Daughter'?)
It pains me to describe the so-called plot of this book, but I suppose I'd better try. Will, an over-written uni student with no remarkable nor likeable characteristics, travels to New York after a bad break-up. The break-up is dangled before us as a potentially interesting plot point, but no, it turns out to have been normal and uninteresting, in every way. In New York he develops a bit of a drug habit and sleeps with someone. He resents his parents. In other words, nothing happens. All of this could be fine, if only Will were likeable or it was going somewhere. Bitto tries to compensate for the lack of character and plot development by over-narrating how we should view Will. “Our heartbroken hero” is the awkward expression she chooses at one point. I literally covered my eyes. Eventually, Bitto realises correctly that this is all going nowhere and decides to re-tell the story of ‘Tiger King’. She would get points for novelty if we hadn’t all watched this at the same time as her in 2020. Unfortunately, she manages none of the novelty factor nor narrative suspense of the documentary.
I wasted valuable reading hours and headspace on this over-written, meaningless book. I urge you not to make the same mistake. Re-watching ‘Tiger King’ would be much more worthwhile.
It pains me to describe the so-called plot of this book, but I suppose I'd better try. Will, an over-written uni student with no remarkable nor likeable characteristics, travels to New York after a bad break-up. The break-up is dangled before us as a potentially interesting plot point, but no, it turns out to have been normal and uninteresting, in every way. In New York he develops a bit of a drug habit and sleeps with someone. He resents his parents. In other words, nothing happens. All of this could be fine, if only Will were likeable or it was going somewhere. Bitto tries to compensate for the lack of character and plot development by over-narrating how we should view Will. “Our heartbroken hero” is the awkward expression she chooses at one point. I literally covered my eyes. Eventually, Bitto realises correctly that this is all going nowhere and decides to re-tell the story of ‘Tiger King’. She would get points for novelty if we hadn’t all watched this at the same time as her in 2020. Unfortunately, she manages none of the novelty factor nor narrative suspense of the documentary.
I wasted valuable reading hours and headspace on this over-written, meaningless book. I urge you not to make the same mistake. Re-watching ‘Tiger King’ would be much more worthwhile.
October 19, 2021
Long and laborious, written in the American style of long meandering sentences where the style is more important than the substance. Thick on imagery, overly descriptive and wordy. Part 1, young Australian male goes to NY gets drunk and takes lots of drugs. Part 2 he meets an odd American, disaster eventuates. Over hyped and ultimately disappointing.
December 15, 2021
I honestly don’t really know how to feel about this book.
For me, it almost felt like two books, smashed together without rhyme or reason. The beginning centres around Will, a very young (22) year old man fleeing Australia after a bad break up, for America. For some reason, travelling America is some sort of dream for him, particularly driving across the country. He lands in New York to stay with Paul, a close friend of Will’s older brother who was a permanent fixture in Will’s childhood, another older brother figure and maybe a bit of a bully. Paul works as a chef at a popular place and also does private gigs for wealthy people. He appears to be doing well (enough to live alone in New York City anyway) and is happy for Will to crash on his couch for as long as he needs while he figures out what’s next for him.
Will spends about a week in New York and…..I cannot relate to this portion of the story at all. I can’t relate to any of it, frankly, but this part, was the part I could relate to the least. It’s a world of excess, drugs, drinking, partying, pretentious art circles, more drugs, some questionable sexual decisions, repeat. Will isn’t in New York five minutes before he’s texting a contact given to him by someone back home, about scoring some drugs. Look, I know nothing about drugs – I do not indulge and didn’t go through a stage of experiment in my teens/twenties and I’m well aware my outlook is probably considered boring and old fashioned because they don’t interest me. But Will consumes so much cocaine in such a short amount of time and drinks so much alcohol it’s just ridiculous. And everyone is doing it, from Paul (it’s how he gets through shifts after partying all night) to his artist girlfriend and all her friends, and just, everybody else. I was so chronically bored during this part of the book, with Will and his self-pitying inner monologue about Laura and the drinking and drug taking and the art scene with “conceptual art” that makes no sense and isn’t even sold. But I wanted to get to the next part of the book.
Will escapes New York after more questionable life choices and ends up in a tiny town in Ohio, where an old school acquaintance now lives. Through her he meets Wayne, a Vietnam veteran who has a private collection of exotic animals that he’s mostly raised from birth or close to that, thanks to Ohio’s laws which (at the time this book is set) do not prevent the owning of any type of animal it seems, as a pet. Wayne has multiple tigers, lions, bears, a panther, wolves? Monkeys. The list goes on. He also has cubs that are being bottle fed. Will’s excess in New York has depleted his funds so he takes a job helping Wayne with feeding which is a two person job.
What happens in the latter part of the book is based on a truly story and it’s honestly deeply, deeply disturbing. I hadn’t heard of this event but there’s plenty of instances in the media of people in America owning exotic animals with disastrous consequences. Most people aren’t equipped to care for such animals, including feeding them, providing an enriching environment and making sure that their life quality is at the very least, decent. I’ve seen examples on zoo shows where a guy bought his girlfriend a wallaby for her birthday and they kept it in a New York apartment for a year. A man who kept hundreds of exotic snakes in his basement, most of which turned out to be in incredibly poor health. Places like Ohio have so little in the way of regulations and then are completely unequipped to deal with any “situation” that may arise from this sort of disaster. Even in situations where the owner genuinely loves and cares for the animals. They are just such complex animals with needs that I think we as humans, cannot really fathom properly. I have issues with zoos too sometimes, although they’re making really conscious efforts to move to “open” zoos where the habitats are large and allow animals to free roam. Large cats in cages in people’s backyards, even in rural areas? It just hits wrong. And especially as some of them, Wayne says, are “diggers” and you need to make sure they haven’t spent the night merrily digging a hole to escape.
The end of this book is incredibly hard to read and it made me angry for reasons that I cannot say too much about without spoiling it but it sat so wrong with me that they waited some amount of time for Option A when they could’ve tried waiting probably the same amount of time for Option B, which didn’t seem to occur to anyone until the next day. This was an horrific example of humans using animals for their pleasure and then discarding them and Wayne was a troubled individual, that much is certainly true. But it doesn’t excuse what happened here and others were complicit and guilty as well.
If visiting America is your dream, you might gel with this. I didn’t, but found parts of it interesting nonetheless, although a large portion of it wasn’t to my taste. After finding the writing a lot in the first few pages, it settled down a bit, particularly during the Ohio section but a lot of the time Will is so overbearingly judgemental. I tried to remind myself what it was like to be 22 and Going Through Things but that only got me so far with this one. A very mixed bag.
***A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of an honest review***
For me, it almost felt like two books, smashed together without rhyme or reason. The beginning centres around Will, a very young (22) year old man fleeing Australia after a bad break up, for America. For some reason, travelling America is some sort of dream for him, particularly driving across the country. He lands in New York to stay with Paul, a close friend of Will’s older brother who was a permanent fixture in Will’s childhood, another older brother figure and maybe a bit of a bully. Paul works as a chef at a popular place and also does private gigs for wealthy people. He appears to be doing well (enough to live alone in New York City anyway) and is happy for Will to crash on his couch for as long as he needs while he figures out what’s next for him.
Will spends about a week in New York and…..I cannot relate to this portion of the story at all. I can’t relate to any of it, frankly, but this part, was the part I could relate to the least. It’s a world of excess, drugs, drinking, partying, pretentious art circles, more drugs, some questionable sexual decisions, repeat. Will isn’t in New York five minutes before he’s texting a contact given to him by someone back home, about scoring some drugs. Look, I know nothing about drugs – I do not indulge and didn’t go through a stage of experiment in my teens/twenties and I’m well aware my outlook is probably considered boring and old fashioned because they don’t interest me. But Will consumes so much cocaine in such a short amount of time and drinks so much alcohol it’s just ridiculous. And everyone is doing it, from Paul (it’s how he gets through shifts after partying all night) to his artist girlfriend and all her friends, and just, everybody else. I was so chronically bored during this part of the book, with Will and his self-pitying inner monologue about Laura and the drinking and drug taking and the art scene with “conceptual art” that makes no sense and isn’t even sold. But I wanted to get to the next part of the book.
Will escapes New York after more questionable life choices and ends up in a tiny town in Ohio, where an old school acquaintance now lives. Through her he meets Wayne, a Vietnam veteran who has a private collection of exotic animals that he’s mostly raised from birth or close to that, thanks to Ohio’s laws which (at the time this book is set) do not prevent the owning of any type of animal it seems, as a pet. Wayne has multiple tigers, lions, bears, a panther, wolves? Monkeys. The list goes on. He also has cubs that are being bottle fed. Will’s excess in New York has depleted his funds so he takes a job helping Wayne with feeding which is a two person job.
What happens in the latter part of the book is based on a truly story and it’s honestly deeply, deeply disturbing. I hadn’t heard of this event but there’s plenty of instances in the media of people in America owning exotic animals with disastrous consequences. Most people aren’t equipped to care for such animals, including feeding them, providing an enriching environment and making sure that their life quality is at the very least, decent. I’ve seen examples on zoo shows where a guy bought his girlfriend a wallaby for her birthday and they kept it in a New York apartment for a year. A man who kept hundreds of exotic snakes in his basement, most of which turned out to be in incredibly poor health. Places like Ohio have so little in the way of regulations and then are completely unequipped to deal with any “situation” that may arise from this sort of disaster. Even in situations where the owner genuinely loves and cares for the animals. They are just such complex animals with needs that I think we as humans, cannot really fathom properly. I have issues with zoos too sometimes, although they’re making really conscious efforts to move to “open” zoos where the habitats are large and allow animals to free roam. Large cats in cages in people’s backyards, even in rural areas? It just hits wrong. And especially as some of them, Wayne says, are “diggers” and you need to make sure they haven’t spent the night merrily digging a hole to escape.
The end of this book is incredibly hard to read and it made me angry for reasons that I cannot say too much about without spoiling it but it sat so wrong with me that they waited some amount of time for Option A when they could’ve tried waiting probably the same amount of time for Option B, which didn’t seem to occur to anyone until the next day. This was an horrific example of humans using animals for their pleasure and then discarding them and Wayne was a troubled individual, that much is certainly true. But it doesn’t excuse what happened here and others were complicit and guilty as well.
If visiting America is your dream, you might gel with this. I didn’t, but found parts of it interesting nonetheless, although a large portion of it wasn’t to my taste. After finding the writing a lot in the first few pages, it settled down a bit, particularly during the Ohio section but a lot of the time Will is so overbearingly judgemental. I tried to remind myself what it was like to be 22 and Going Through Things but that only got me so far with this one. A very mixed bag.
***A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of an honest review***
May 17, 2022
I REALLY liked this book. The start was a touch slow and it was a bit waffley in places but I could hardly put it down towards the end!
January 18, 2025
Loved the writing, did not love the content. I probably would have liked it when I was 21, taking drugs, and getting over my own heartbreak, but I’m at the stage of life where I thought Will was a whiny little boy who needed to get over himself.
April 21, 2022
Wild Abandon
by Emily Bitto
Published to significant acclaim, I must confess that I wonder what the fuss is all about. With a tiresome lead, irritating support cast to dull and two incredibly disjointed halves.
Will, the protagonist with a recently broken heart, sets out to America searching for self. The book's first half follows him as he says yes to everything food, drink, drugs, and sex. It is all incredibly dull and repetitive. While this is not all due to the incredibly self-absorbed narration of an uninteresting character, he really doesn’t help.
I suspect that this first half intends to be a cutting critique of late-stage capitalism and the vacuous culture that it breeds, but at over 200 pages of long-running, over-written sentences, this approach more than overstays its welcome.
Look, we get Will’s mediocrity and the asininity of the New York art scene. Even the dimmest of readers does not need it replayed over and over. There is little more tiresome than extended forays into the mind of an unimpressive dullard with a fixation on cocaine and pointless introspection.
The second half – concerning Will’s flight from the Big Apple® to the Decaying American Heartland™ – sees him safe from the clutches of the spoiled and effete metropolitan elite into the weary arms of the lumpenproletariat in the rust belt. You will like this section if you enjoy extended descriptions of microwaved chicken nuggets more than long discussions of more elegant epicurean delights.
In Bumfuck, Ohio (or wherever it is he lands), we find Will drawn into the world of equally heartbroken Wayne. A grizzled Vietnam vet® who has found his therapy in a huge menagerie of domesticated (but dangerous) big cats, bears, wolves and monkeys. [Sigh]. Yes, we get something on a continued exploration of toxic masculinity, mental health, the aftermath of heartbreak, and men's astonishing myopia, but does it have to be so extended and cloyingly written?
In the endeavour of resisting the clichéd narrative arc in which our young protagonist finds redemption from the pit of narcissistic and pompous misery, Bitto has instead chosen the clichéd, repetitive and exhausting route of flogging a dead horse via drawn-out explorations of a pair of dim, dull and self-centred men.
Not much fun.
⭐ ⭐
Published to significant acclaim, I must confess that I wonder what the fuss is all about. With a tiresome lead, irritating support cast to dull and two incredibly disjointed halves.
Will, the protagonist with a recently broken heart, sets out to America searching for self. The book's first half follows him as he says yes to everything food, drink, drugs, and sex. It is all incredibly dull and repetitive. While this is not all due to the incredibly self-absorbed narration of an uninteresting character, he really doesn’t help.
I suspect that this first half intends to be a cutting critique of late-stage capitalism and the vacuous culture that it breeds, but at over 200 pages of long-running, over-written sentences, this approach more than overstays its welcome.
Look, we get Will’s mediocrity and the asininity of the New York art scene. Even the dimmest of readers does not need it replayed over and over. There is little more tiresome than extended forays into the mind of an unimpressive dullard with a fixation on cocaine and pointless introspection.
The second half – concerning Will’s flight from the Big Apple® to the Decaying American Heartland™ – sees him safe from the clutches of the spoiled and effete metropolitan elite into the weary arms of the lumpenproletariat in the rust belt. You will like this section if you enjoy extended descriptions of microwaved chicken nuggets more than long discussions of more elegant epicurean delights.
In Bumfuck, Ohio (or wherever it is he lands), we find Will drawn into the world of equally heartbroken Wayne. A grizzled Vietnam vet® who has found his therapy in a huge menagerie of domesticated (but dangerous) big cats, bears, wolves and monkeys. [Sigh]. Yes, we get something on a continued exploration of toxic masculinity, mental health, the aftermath of heartbreak, and men's astonishing myopia, but does it have to be so extended and cloyingly written?
In the endeavour of resisting the clichéd narrative arc in which our young protagonist finds redemption from the pit of narcissistic and pompous misery, Bitto has instead chosen the clichéd, repetitive and exhausting route of flogging a dead horse via drawn-out explorations of a pair of dim, dull and self-centred men.
Not much fun.
⭐ ⭐
January 22, 2022
Thank you to Allen and Unwin for sending me a copy of this book to review!
This is almost like two books in one. In the first part, Will heads to New York after a ‘bad’ breakup (which sounded rather pedestrian to me, but hey 🤷🏻♀️). There he spends a week getting drunk, doing drugs and hanging out with pretentious arty people. And burns through almost all of his money….which brings us to part two….
Will arrives in a small town in Ohio to visit someone he knew from his days of living in an Australian country town and ends up having to take a job as he’s out of money. So he goes to work with a damaged Vietnam vet who has a menagerie of wild/exotic animals as pets. If you’re thinking this sounds like a recipe for disaster, you’d be right.
Unfortunately, I did not enjoy this book at all. Part one was just tedious. Maybe I’m just too old to appreciate it, but almost 150 pages of drinking, drug taking and pretentious characters, written in an overly verbose way did absolutely nothing for me. I really had to push through to continue and I’m almost sorry I did 😖
Whilst part two is certainly powerful, as an animal lover, I was saddened and disgusted by the fact that people (this part is based on true events) seek to reduce majestic, dignified wild/exotic animals to cages in order to try to ‘domesticate’ them into being pets to either stroke their ego or fit some other unfathomable narrative that serves them - never the animal. This was a huge trigger for me, so if you’re also an animal lover - fair warning!
This aside, Will was an absolute bore as a character. Self-absorbed, lacking self-confidence, but constantly trying to do things to make himself look ‘cool’ - he was not a character I could relate to or empathize with in any way. The story is certainly powerful in places, but not one that I enjoyed. ⭐️⭐️/5.
This is almost like two books in one. In the first part, Will heads to New York after a ‘bad’ breakup (which sounded rather pedestrian to me, but hey 🤷🏻♀️). There he spends a week getting drunk, doing drugs and hanging out with pretentious arty people. And burns through almost all of his money….which brings us to part two….
Will arrives in a small town in Ohio to visit someone he knew from his days of living in an Australian country town and ends up having to take a job as he’s out of money. So he goes to work with a damaged Vietnam vet who has a menagerie of wild/exotic animals as pets. If you’re thinking this sounds like a recipe for disaster, you’d be right.
Unfortunately, I did not enjoy this book at all. Part one was just tedious. Maybe I’m just too old to appreciate it, but almost 150 pages of drinking, drug taking and pretentious characters, written in an overly verbose way did absolutely nothing for me. I really had to push through to continue and I’m almost sorry I did 😖
Whilst part two is certainly powerful, as an animal lover, I was saddened and disgusted by the fact that people (this part is based on true events) seek to reduce majestic, dignified wild/exotic animals to cages in order to try to ‘domesticate’ them into being pets to either stroke their ego or fit some other unfathomable narrative that serves them - never the animal. This was a huge trigger for me, so if you’re also an animal lover - fair warning!
This aside, Will was an absolute bore as a character. Self-absorbed, lacking self-confidence, but constantly trying to do things to make himself look ‘cool’ - he was not a character I could relate to or empathize with in any way. The story is certainly powerful in places, but not one that I enjoyed. ⭐️⭐️/5.
January 26, 2022
24/01 - Struggling with the over-the-top prose of this one so far after a few chapters in. Completely unnecessary as it doesn't match the protagonist Will at all.
26/01 - I rushed to finish this and it seemed like a chore in the end. Some sentences were so long and exhausting.
pg 109 - 'Will woke from absurdist augeries. *cringe
2 stars but more like 1.5 - I didn't overly dislike it but I wouldn't recommend reading it either unless you have an interest in exotic animals (Part 2). Part 2 was based on the true story of the Zanesville Zoo in Ohio in October 2011 where the owner released his collection of exotic animals before killing himself. Sadly, most of these animals were killed by the police and those that survived were given to other zoos.
26/01 - I rushed to finish this and it seemed like a chore in the end. Some sentences were so long and exhausting.
pg 109 - 'Will woke from absurdist augeries. *cringe
2 stars but more like 1.5 - I didn't overly dislike it but I wouldn't recommend reading it either unless you have an interest in exotic animals (Part 2). Part 2 was based on the true story of the Zanesville Zoo in Ohio in October 2011 where the owner released his collection of exotic animals before killing himself. Sadly, most of these animals were killed by the police and those that survived were given to other zoos.
March 18, 2022
I wanted to like this more but the sentences of 100+ words made the prose dense and impenetrable at times. I also had difficulty with Will, the main character. While other characters were easier to relate to, it was difficult to imagine or relate to - or even to imagine - Will himself.
December 26, 2023
Being at one with nature myself (living close to Edinburgh Gardens) and associating constantly with animals (lawyers), I loved this book. One of those perfect fateful reads that fell in my lap at the right time - I won’t stop thinking about it for ages.
December 6, 2021
Tiger King in book form! A bit disjointed - the two halves were so different.
December 22, 2022
A rollercoaster of heartbreak, self indulgence and grief. I was unsure of this book in the early stages but as it went on it really got it's hooks into me, and I was reluctant to let it end.
February 14, 2022
A strange book. The story doesn’t really go anywhere, the characters are unlikable, the characters don’t develop or grow or reach any insight—the opposite in fact, the narrator notes at the end of the book that nothing has been learned, and nothing has been gained—but for all that the book is very compelling, especially in the second half.
Many reviews on here don’t seem to like the first half, where the protagonist has a drug addled sojourn in New York. I quite liked it, especially because the protagonist (at least in the narrator’s version of him—I personally don’t think him capable of such insights) has many moments of clarity about what’s going on around him, some of which are extremely perceptive as to the tawdriness and ruination of the American dream in America’s premier city. As he muses at one point, “he did not want to be burdened with this knowledge that the real, the authentic New York was gone, long vanished, and that what he had visited was a theme park built upon the ashes.”
And the second half is obviously a contrasting version of America, no more and no less crazy, but in a different way. The second half is very compelling and the attempt by the author to convey the otherworldliness of the exotic animals is some of the best writing in the book.
Some of the insights the character has along the way, or at least the ones the narrator imposes over him, are quite profound and the book riffs on a coming of age type novel playing on the trope of the great American novel/dream and the American road novel in an interesting way.
However neither half of the book really gets into anything that could be called the real America. Both New York and Ohio are presented as extreme ends of America, the character of JT and his wife are the only characters in the novel sort of approaching real middle Americans, and given the lack of development of any of the characters it’s difficult to know what point the author is trying to make.
Overall though, a compelling and enjoyable read though I’m not sure what the ultimate point was: still, recommended.
Coda: I think the point was probably the writing, the baroque style Bitto is going for, and the riffing on the American road novel and the American dream, and how outlandish it is, from an Australian perspective.
It should also be noted that the novel is a fictionalisation of a true incident—the Zanseville Zoo Escape/Massacre. The author says it’s fiction but the story closely follows what actually happened, though the Will character is the author’s total invention, he has no counterpart in the real story.
Many reviews on here don’t seem to like the first half, where the protagonist has a drug addled sojourn in New York. I quite liked it, especially because the protagonist (at least in the narrator’s version of him—I personally don’t think him capable of such insights) has many moments of clarity about what’s going on around him, some of which are extremely perceptive as to the tawdriness and ruination of the American dream in America’s premier city. As he muses at one point, “he did not want to be burdened with this knowledge that the real, the authentic New York was gone, long vanished, and that what he had visited was a theme park built upon the ashes.”
And the second half is obviously a contrasting version of America, no more and no less crazy, but in a different way. The second half is very compelling and the attempt by the author to convey the otherworldliness of the exotic animals is some of the best writing in the book.
Some of the insights the character has along the way, or at least the ones the narrator imposes over him, are quite profound and the book riffs on a coming of age type novel playing on the trope of the great American novel/dream and the American road novel in an interesting way.
However neither half of the book really gets into anything that could be called the real America. Both New York and Ohio are presented as extreme ends of America, the character of JT and his wife are the only characters in the novel sort of approaching real middle Americans, and given the lack of development of any of the characters it’s difficult to know what point the author is trying to make.
Overall though, a compelling and enjoyable read though I’m not sure what the ultimate point was: still, recommended.
Coda: I think the point was probably the writing, the baroque style Bitto is going for, and the riffing on the American road novel and the American dream, and how outlandish it is, from an Australian perspective.
It should also be noted that the novel is a fictionalisation of a true incident—the Zanseville Zoo Escape/Massacre. The author says it’s fiction but the story closely follows what actually happened, though the Will character is the author’s total invention, he has no counterpart in the real story.
October 12, 2021
Thank you Allen & Unwin for sending us a copy to read and review.
Heart broken Will capitalises on cheap flights to New York to fulfil an American road trip and distract the commiserations of a break up.
Men can be described as Islands and Will’s journey highlights the emotional, volatile and mental state of the male species coupled with the bravado and loyalty he displayed.
Landing in New York, the city that doesn’t sleep he immersed himself into a partying and drug induced scene.
Reacquainting with a mate that has his own unlocked issues.
An incident witnessed combined with own fragile state of mind he takes off to sleepy back water in Ohio where another school friend was living.
Life and it’s pace the polar opposite to New York he begins to find himself as he settles in.
Offered a job by an exotic animal collector and Vietnam veteran Wayne Gage he finds an affiliation with the large cats and monkeys.
This solace helping him to find himself and understand a little about Wayne and his issues.
Like lightening bolts life changes in a flash after returning from an errand.
The most horrendous situation unfolds and reveals the tender and vulnerable side of Will as he grapples with the aftermath.
This cleverly written read is remarkable in the way it creates and nurtures the male lead.
It offers raw, confronting and authentic scenes that play out in the readers head clear as day.
I was grateful the climatic and very sad end was only a work of fiction until I read the authors note.
I was taken on an unforgettable journey.
Heart broken Will capitalises on cheap flights to New York to fulfil an American road trip and distract the commiserations of a break up.
Men can be described as Islands and Will’s journey highlights the emotional, volatile and mental state of the male species coupled with the bravado and loyalty he displayed.
Landing in New York, the city that doesn’t sleep he immersed himself into a partying and drug induced scene.
Reacquainting with a mate that has his own unlocked issues.
An incident witnessed combined with own fragile state of mind he takes off to sleepy back water in Ohio where another school friend was living.
Life and it’s pace the polar opposite to New York he begins to find himself as he settles in.
Offered a job by an exotic animal collector and Vietnam veteran Wayne Gage he finds an affiliation with the large cats and monkeys.
This solace helping him to find himself and understand a little about Wayne and his issues.
Like lightening bolts life changes in a flash after returning from an errand.
The most horrendous situation unfolds and reveals the tender and vulnerable side of Will as he grapples with the aftermath.
This cleverly written read is remarkable in the way it creates and nurtures the male lead.
It offers raw, confronting and authentic scenes that play out in the readers head clear as day.
I was grateful the climatic and very sad end was only a work of fiction until I read the authors note.
I was taken on an unforgettable journey.
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