{"id":373,"date":"2012-04-12T09:00:08","date_gmt":"2012-04-12T09:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/undergrad-students-publishing\/?p=373"},"modified":"2020-10-14T00:02:41","modified_gmt":"2020-10-14T00:02:41","slug":"review-the-call-by-yannick-murphy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/2012\/04\/12\/review-the-call-by-yannick-murphy\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: “The Call” by Yannick Murphy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ellen Duffer ’14 \/\/ Editorial Director
\n\"The<\/p>\n

I spent about an hour scouring the \u201cnewly released\u201d section\/shelf of my local library for anything with a synopsis that didn\u2019t read like a Lifetime movie. Yannick Murphy\u2019s third novel, The Call, not only fulfilled this requirement, but also enticed me with its cleanly designed cover (not exactly a great judge of a book\u2019s quality, but I was desperate, having forgotten to leave enough space in my suitcase for winter break reading materials) and copyright page boasting an excerpt\u2019s appearance in McSweeney\u2019s #29 [Murphy\u2019s work is also featured in the current issue of McSweeney\u2019s Quarterly Concern, #39\u2014a coincidence which I find amusing mainly because I am bored].<\/div>\n
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Of course, The Call is good: I wasn\u2019t going to force myself to read something unsatisfying or dull during my short break from psychology textbooks and literary theory. And it\u2019s good despite the fact that it\u2019s about a veterinarian, taking calls to heal horses and cattle in a small, mountainside town.<\/div>\n
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Wait, that description enticed you? Is the last book you read Misty of Chincoteague? Or was it maybe something from the Animal Ark series? I mean, that\u2019s fine, but then you shouldn\u2019t read this book.<\/div>\n
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The Call is a novel about more than the immature themes of \u201cfamily, community, [and] the human bond with animals,\u201d which Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks applauds Murphy for tackling. Although we\u2019d all love a book about animal activism because, hey, bunnies have feelings too, this one wasn\u2019t written by Jonathan Safran Foer. If you look closely enough (I\u2019m talking eighth-grade-analysis level), it\u2019s about human interdependence. It\u2019s about the decay of American subsistence farming and waning attitudes of self-sufficiency in a country proud of its DIY fetish and rebellious heritage. It\u2019s about aging and losing and slipping away.<\/div>\n
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We watch David, the protagonist whose name really is unimportant, forgettable, fail to save the animals he\u2019s paid to treat. But instead of focusing on the image of a stillborn calf\u2019s carcass being torn in half as David tries to pull it from its pained mother\u2019s uterus, an image Murphy relays with a disturbingly clinical affect, we are struck by the character\u2019s reaction (or lack thereof) to the blatant display of annihilated innocence: \u201cTHOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME WHILE PASSING RED AND GOLD LEAVES ON MAPLE TREES: Is there a nicer place to live?\u201d<\/div>\n
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This is a book of reactions; most of the time, conversations\u2014about a comatose son, a sperm donation, a crime unsolved\u2014aren\u2019t even dictated to us. Murphy, instead, presents us with a slew of David\u2019s silent regrets and desires, and, from them, we feel him straining against piles of problems unresolved.<\/div>\n
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Composed of thoughts categorized and labeled by their subject, The Call is a novel that pushes the notion of a first-person perspective to the extreme. Consider the \u201cmeta\u201d trend that is enhancing\/destroying contemporary art: The Call embraces the fad, going so far as to announce David\u2019s unreliability as a narrator each time he offers up snippets of dialogue by explaining that these are words filtered by the ears of a distressed\/crazed\/vengeful\/homicidal mountain man. It seems that even mainstream authors (because someone published in McSweeney\u2019s can hardly be considered \u201cunderground\u201d) are experimenting with post-modern techniques in addition to shrouding their work in dramatic post-modern attitudes.<\/div>\n
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Does The Call prove that hipster isn\u2019t hipster anymore? Maybe. That is a topic for discussion in an essay to be written for an Emerson literature course.<\/div>\n
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But if you are suffering from an existential crisis and would be pleased with the ability of a contemporary author to capture crushing despair in a book structured like a medical log, you should stop reading when the section entitled \u201cStill Winter\u201d comes to a close. What follows is the emergence of an unforeseen springtime cure, which sprinkles its magical fairy dust along the creases in David\u2019s crumpled life. Oh, spring and it\u2019s stifling aura of rebirth.<\/div>\n
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The change in season renders the world a calming place where the character\u2019s tense muscles are kneaded into a sugary cake iced with vanilla familial love. \u00a0Maybe the intrusion of positivity in Murphy\u2019s exhaustingly depressing novel is merely an indicator of her optimism for the human condition. But David\u2019s decline is preferred to any neat-and-tidy ending fraught with clich\u00e9s and excess sap.<\/div>\n
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I guess I failed to avoid the Lifetime novel, after all.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ellen Duffer ’14 \/\/ Editorial Director I spent about an hour scouring the \u201cnewly released\u201d section\/shelf of my local library for anything with a synopsis that didn\u2019t read like a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":1404,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/60"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1405,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions\/1405"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}