While hiking recently, I noticed a sign that implored walkers to stay on the path, because “plants grow by the inch and die by the foot!” (exclamation point included.) I was amused by the felicity of this message as it applies to not only plants, but many things in life. Humans, in a sense, grow by inches, then die as a whole five- or six-feet. More subtly, the phrase also fits with relationships. There’s a certain mysterious element to how intimate connections developed over many years can disintegrate within moments, how one misstep can ruin a steady accumulation.

There are occasions of such near-relationship-disintegration in The Study of Animal Languages, Lindsay Stern’s debut novel, which deals dexterously with communication as it fails and succeeds in human and animal relationships.

The novel begins with a subtly comedic scene in a rest-stop bathroom (in the women’s room, of all places, since the men’s is out of order) where the speaker/main character, Ivan, resents the ramblings of his father-in-law, Frank. The dialogue is perfect, and Ivan and Frank are characterized efficiently. Frank, we quickly learn, has bipolar disorder and dislikes taking his medicine because it keeps him from feeling like himself. At the same time, though, he expresses frustration with the “gaps” he feels when off his medicine, or when he’s in “normality,” as he calls it, and struggles with the “ability to summon the cast of mind required to shop and chat and pay bills.” There’s irony—or perhaps synchrony—in the way he describes what happens when these “gaps” set in: he hears the voices of everyone around him, even in crowded places like Grand Central Station, where “voices untangled into words, hundreds of words, each one significant.” Already, we can see a disparity in the amount of listening Frank does compared to Ivan, as well as each character’s comprehension of what is heard.

At the same time, it’s impossible to know how much of what Frank says is actually comprehended, grounded in reality, and how much simply exists in his head. (This is a particularly salient question as the story progresses and Frank exhibits increasingly strange behaviors in manic episodes.) And as he flips from moments of clarity and fuzziness, Frank gets at one of the fundamental conflicts in this book, and one that is fundamentally conflicting in everyday life: the inability to truly understand others’ experiences of phenomena and feeling, and the imperfect way language attempts to create such an understanding.

Perhaps language will always fall short. Or, even more troubling, perhaps what does manage to be communicated isn’t meaningful to begin with. The latter idea is shown in Frank who sometimes uses words, but without communicating coherent thoughts or ideas. A more extreme representation of this disparity between words and meaning is represented by the birds that Prue, Frank’s daughter, studies. Prue is a successful ornithologist and researcher whose work focuses on—as the title suggests—the possibility of birds communicating intelligently, like humans. She gives a provocative lecture about her research on this topic, which shows that zebra finches can “discriminate between different configurations of the same units of sound,” as she tested by playing recordings of notes in various orders, like rearranging words in a sentence, to which the birds consistently responded differently. When being questioned, somewhat aggressively, by the audience after the lecture, Prue distinguishes between syntax—“the rules that govern vocal symbols”—and semantics—the meaning behind the vocal symbols. While her research so far indicates that bird communications employ syntax, she has yet to prove that there are semantics as well. However, she believes that there are semantics, which, to almost everyone else, sounds preposterous.

The lecture is considered outrageous and taken as apostasy for this logic and for the way Prue beleaguers her colleagues for being hypocritical and anthropocentric. The hypocrisy, she explains, is shown by scientists who accept research—such as Jane Goodall’s—that provides evidence for certain animals’ likeness to humans, while continuing to use other animals as test subjects in unethical ways.

The amount of tension which these ideas diffuse throughout the lecture hall is unprecedented and indicative of the fragile ego which surrounds academia and the “eggheads” who find themselves ensnared in it (as Frank calls them). Prue’s husband, Ivan, the speaker and primary character to whom I have not yet dedicated enough time in this discussion, is particularly affected by his ego, at times consciously, and at others, un-. Stern does a wonderful job of characterizing him, showing his less admirable qualities from the beginning of the book, as he spends time with Frank and considers the recent stress he and Prue have been experiencing in their marriage. He uses language as a tool for harm, telling Frank that Prue is very “touched” that he will be attending her lecture, but immediately admitting (only to himself) that his use of the word “touched” is “an accusation, neither intended nor deserved,” because Prue doesn’t actually want Frank to attend. He continues to act self-interestedly, shamelessly choosing when and when not to speak up for his wife in moments when she could use his help. At one point, she looks at him with a plea for help in steering away from an unpleasant conversation, and he smirks, thinking, “You dug your grave, now lie in it.” The book, then, is all the more interesting because the speaker’s moral fabric is not tightly woven, or at least, is held together by self-interest (for the majority of the story). After her lecture, when Ivan finally has the chance to express his horror for what Prue presented during it, she tells him, quite cleverly, that “your passive aggression is the bravest thing about you.”

At the same time that Ivan is passive aggressive and able to manipulate language, he is unable to accurately read other forms of communication, such as body language, which leads to misunderstandings and an inappropriate situation with a student. In some ways, by reading others’ behavior as sexual cues that aren’t actually sexual cues, he exhibits one form of what you might call (bare with me for being reductionist here) “animal” language, with sex taking priority over rationale. After all, sex is the only positive thing going for Ivan and his wife. There’s a funny moment when Ivan is teaching and struggling to get a response from students who stare at him “blankly, probably thinking of food or sex.” Sure, it’s not the most original thought—his idea that we are all just pleasure-seeking animals—but it’s funny in context of the book’s playfulness with the animal-human boundary.

Ivan himself plays with this boundary as he admits his own unhealthy relationship to food, which he binges semi-regularly. At first, I found this habit odd and unnecessary to the story, but now I see that it pokes fun at the difference between humans and animals and what both do for pleasure. Ivan confesses (for some reason, to us, the mysterious readers of his thoughts) that “while I’d never admit it, I prefer the feeling [of a binge] to sex. It is the closest I have felt to transcendence . . .”

The animal-human threshold, then, is not so impermeable, as we learn through such boundary-pushing moments and boundary-breaking moments, like during a climatic scene at at the aquarium that becomes an awful and awe-inspiring moment.

The book is full of such aw(e)ful moments. Ivan comes across as sharp and witty, thanks to Stern’s sharp, witty writing that creates a tone fitting for a philosophy professor. The conflict falls into place with the marriage of two intellectuals of distinctly different, yet tangentially related fields: epistemology and the cognitive world of birds and animals. By seeing the story through the eyes of one character, we have the opportunity to follow his logic and ways of perceiving each situation as it unfolds. We adopt his biases, blind spots, and denial of reality, like one adopts Elizabeth’s when reading Pride and Prejudice. I found myself most frustrated with the way Ivan failed to talk honestly with his wife throughout the duration of the conflict, how he remained in a mystified state about where they stood until they weren’t even standing anymore. From the first time he expressed marital doubts, I wanted to shake his shoulders and yell, just talk to her! But that, of course, is the point. Language is impossible to use when it’s most needed. And when it’s not needed—well. Perhaps that’ll be the subject of Stern’s next book.

Buy The Study of Animal Languages (Viking, 2019) here.







Author Details Rebecca Hannigan Editor Rebecca Hannigan graduated from the University of the South, where she received the Bain Swiggett Prize for Poetry and attended the Writers’ Conference as a scholar. She’s a junior editor for Brink, a literary nonprofit that publishes ‘F(r)iction’. Her fiction has been published in ‘The Rumpus,’ ‘Juked,’ ‘Wigleaf,’ and elsewhere (rebeccahannigan.wordpress.com).



