The Brooklyn Rail

Rare among contemporary writers, Kate Zambreno does not produce books that are “about” one subject, or even three or four. They are about themselves. As well as about an infinitude. (Pity the poor catalogue copywriter.) They encompass, to be slightly more precise, a view on the world using a deep field of focus that renders details near and far with equal clarity. Ostensibly unrelated figures are thus united within the writer’s rich conceptual frame. Among Zambreno’s continuing concerns: writing and the community of writers, motherhood, teaching, reading, film, painting, the lives of artists, and what I would call “the work of the unfinished”—the ways in which art and the life from which it arises both resist narrative completion.

The author of novels and creative nonfiction including Drifts, The Light Room, and Heroines, Zambreno has been hailed as “genre-defying,” as the originator of a new form. What that form is to be called is yet undetermined. On the basis of Animal Stories, her entry in Transit Books’ Undelivered Lectures series, one might file a continuance; she is still inventing.

Appropriately, the book’s form most closely resembles those galvanizing two hours in a lecture hall eagerly awaited every week because the blazingly erudite professor wheels from discipline to discipline, bringing literature, philosophy, criticism, history, and personal experience to bear on any given topic. (Indeed, Zambreno teaches in institutions of higher learning, and she frequently chronicles these lectures in her written work, including here.) The bipartite structure of Animal Stories—only tangentially concerning animals, but also very essentially a look at our looking at them—reflects her vital unboundedness.

Part one, “Zoo Studies,” consists of four sustained essays on the experience of visiting zoos, primarily in the company of her two young daughters, while also scrutinizing others’ work about menageries. Naturally, then, she examines John Berger’s writings on zoos and Garry Winogrand’s first book, The Animals. But Zambreno is not one to stop with the obvious. She surveys their critics, too, looking at how Janet Malcolm and Hilton Als look at Winogrand looking at animals. (The title of the photographer’s book is slyly ambiguous, but the fairly animal-less photographs within make clear which species it’s referring to.)

In this section of her Animal Stories, Zambreno treads lightly on and around the central reality of zoos: that they are prisons for animals who committed no crime deserving a life sentence. Her intent is less a fire-breathing than an aesthetically distanced indictment, although she drops plenty of disturbing evidence without further commentary. Instead, she calls “zoo feelings” those unexamined emotions that arise when we visit the zoo, most often a buried unease that is redoubled when, as adults, we sense the conflict between childhood memories of “fun” and the unvarnished truth now before us. “For critics,” she avers, “it seems easier to think seriously about photographs than it is to think about the zoo itself.”

This extraordinary statement provokes what may be termed “Zambreno feelings” in the reader.

If she aims to call into question her own tendency to “think seriously about photographs” (and their critics) over the zoo itself, shrewdly forcing the viewer into a reckoning with reality and its mediated reflections, then she deserves a whole sticker book’s worth of gold stars for ingenuity; here we are at page fifty-eight in a section titled “Zoo Studies,” and it has indeed been easier for the critic to think about representations than the place itself.

But hold up—I realize it is too easy to miss the second word of the section title. The word “zoos” is itself like the so-called charismatic megafauna that are their big draw, leaving the equally important individuals—small rodents, bugs, frogs—bereft of fans.

I belatedly see that she did clearly forecast her project: to study the studies on the culpability of looking without seeing. This makes the section a lecture with a heady moral gotcha at the end, stoking great anticipation of where next week’s class will go.

Part two, “My Kafka System,” is a series about human animality. It comprises short dispatches on the life, weirdnesses, and work of Franz Kafka, interrupted by an expressive account of Zambreno’s Kafkaesque experience as an adjunct delivering a lecture about The Metamorphosis on Zoom while ill during the pandemic.

Many of these glimpses into Kafka’s life and predilections make for pure entertainment (even if Zambreno has more complex designs for the totality of these briefs). We are informed he was an adherent of the exercise program developed by a Danish gymnast. The “Müller system” required a series of exercises performed for fifteen minutes a day in the open air—wearing underwear at most. Kafka also favored “fizzy drinks” and prostitutes. Zambreno feels a kinship with the great writer not only on the basis of her own peccadillos—which extend to collecting anecdotes by the bucketload and finding their commonality with her working methods and interests—but also in collecting patterns of understanding in the twentieth century’s knottiest thinkers, including Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida. Like Kafka, she is often writing about her writing when writing about something else. Occasionally, she addresses it directly: “The word bordel is associated with chaos. Perhaps this essay (or is it a story?) reads like a bordello, all these figures crowded together.”

She can’t help but entwine many “stories”—Picasso and his works, the escapades of Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, W. G. Sebald’s method, J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello—because their acts get at something essential about the animal behavior of men. That which we cannot escape.

Zambreno’s own “story” conjoins theirs at the point of alienation. Feeling strange, a specimen, observed, pulled between the life of the mind and the exigencies of the body that is able to produce a small human who depends on food the body also produces.

Her personal version of the zoo cage is the Zoom screen, where she is reduced to a disembodied head attempting to communicate with other distant heads through a flawed medium that sometimes renders language unintelligible.

Zambreno reveals herself a zookeeper of sorts, too: on display is her own thought, which goes where it will; her literary forebears, especially those who are wily and “difficult”; her idea collections, of such varied species. But the reader will evince no ambivalence on entering the gates of this particular prison. It is indeed fun, and all its captives are paradoxically but fully free. A book of refractions, connections, wanderings through spacious refractory.