One can be forgiven for assuming that the ultimate message that Bonnie Jo Campbell is trying to convey through the stories in her collection titled Women and Other Animals is that if Virginia is for lovers, then Michigan must be for freaks. There are a lot of freaky people in these stories that all take place in Michigan. One could be forgiven for leaping to the assumption that there must be a link of some sort. Inevitably, however, the truth is revealed. The author writes of Michigander freaks because that is what she knows. And what is both a relief and a little terrifying is that these freaks do not seem alien or strange or likely only to exist in the double-peninsular Wolverine state.
Nothing surprisingly Michigan-centric is inherently related to the characters in these stories. They are about grossly obese overeaters. And cheerleaders and the nerdy boys who adore them. Okay, sure, there is an appearance by the smallest man in the world, a lion tamer, not one but two young woman who take on the carnival role of a feral woman discovered in the jungle and brought back for display as a carny sideshow attraction and a seventh-grader convince her amply overdeveloped bosom is a gift directly from God mean to do God’s work, but there is nothing about them that distinctly associates them with being in Michigan. They happen to live there because the author happens to know the place.
This is what is known as regional writing. Or “local color.” It is similar to Stephen King’s Maine stories but absolutely nothing like Faulkner’s stories about Mississippi. One cannot take the characters Faulkner writes about and drop them into any demographically similar region in another state. (Except, maybe Alabama or Georgia, possibly.) On the other hand, there is little about characters in Derry or Castle Rock that is inherent rooted in the cultural distinction of Maine. Writers have it pounded into their head to write about what they know. And so Bonnie Jo Campbell writes of people in Michigan.
She also writes about freaks, but these are not freaks in the sense of the normal. They are not even freaks in the literary sense like the characters in a Carson McCullers or Flannery O’Connor story. Those people are freaks in a way we intuitively understand. “The Smallest Man in the World” is such a character, but the real freak in this story is not: the most beautiful woman in the bar narrating. The girl with the God-given breasts in the seventh grade would be considered anything but a freak because history has proven much can be overlooked by at last half the population in an amply endowed female. Twenty or thirty years ago the narrator of “Gorilla Girl” would have been considered a freak, but in the age of purple haired, tattooed, nose-pierced, aggressive girls, she is anything but. The closest this book comes to providing a classic example of what is known as a freak is the title character of “Eating Aunt Victoria” but it is not her freakish obesity that makes her repellent.
What Campbell has done is really remarkable: she has even managed to create a classic creepy teenage stalker who becomes endearing in comparison to the object of his voyeuristic tendencies. By the time one reaches the end of this collection, they should by all rights have had their opinion of freakdom at the very least challenged if not overturned. What someone a freak? Is it really to be limited just to things like “a third arm growing out of the center” of someone’s back and other such grotesque deviations from the norm? Or is it to be to applied to all deviations from the norm, whether grotesque or alluring?
