Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild
By Novella Carpenter
240 pages;
The Penguin Press HC
When her eccentric, antisocial father goes
missing in the wilds of the American West (only to resurface later in Arizona),
Novella Carpenter decides to repair their tenuous relationship before
the birth of her first child. Soon, she's driving from Oakland, California to
her childhood home of Orofino, Idaho where her hippy globetrotting parents
bought land in the 1970s, hoping to homestead and start a ranch. As was the
case with other utopian idealists of the period, the dream and reality of
Carpenter's parents quickly diverged, starting with her mother's relationship
with a lover from the commune down the road to her father's increasingly
violent and erratic decisions. So much in this story is lovingly described,
such as her father's bungled attempts, to give the adult Carpenter a homemade
guitar, or to show her how to fly fish...and so much is painfully revealed, such
as his squalid living conditions and his fixation with the evils of
civilization. How do we reconcile our obsession with people who both love us
and drive us away, is the question behind this poignant, honest
memoir—as well as, how do we love them back without hurting
ourselves? The answers may be found with Carpenter's equally eccentric older
sister, who arrives from France for a visit. When their father refuses to let
her hug him, citing a recent illness—as well as Beelzebub, who he
says is living on the land with him—she hugs him anyway, dispelling
both threats with the potent response: "I'm immune, Dad. I'm
immune."
— Leigh Newman