Aryn Kyle’s The God of Animals

By Jenny Shank, 4-25-07

The God of Animals
By Aryn Kyle
Scribner, 305 pages, $25

One summer when I was a kid, I went through a horse book faze, reading all the Maguerite Henry books I could find in the library, books such as Misty of Chincoteague and Stormy, Misty’s Foal, anything that had a portrait of the starring animal looking bright-eyed and spirited on the cover.  Aryn Kyle’s debut novel, The God of Animals, will be of special interest to anyone who used to devour horse books, because it shows the flip side of the world portrayed in those somewhat idealized young adult novels. 

While Kyle does take time to admire the beauty of horses now and then, her focus in this accomplished book is more on the constant mucking out of stalls, the dashed hopes of a rancher trying to make ends meet, and the blunt rituals of the horse world, from hobbling a mare so that a stud can impregnate her, to the forced separation of mewling foals from their mothers, to the bloody accidents that can occur in the riding ring.

Kyle grew up in Grand Junction, Colorado, earned her MFA from the University of Montana writing program, and currently lives in Missoula.  She sets The God of Animals in the fictional Desert Valley, Colorado, a small town with a working-class and upper-middle-class divide that appears to be based on Grand Junction.  The God of Animals is narrated by twelve-year-old Alice Winston, who explains in the opening line, “Six months before Polly Cain drowned in the canal, my sister, Nona, ran off and married a cowboy.”

Alice lives on a ranch with her father, Joe, who trains horses and teaches students to ride and show.  The girl’s mother took to her bed with what appears to be a raging case of post-partum depression shortly after Alice was born, and only rarely makes an appearance outside her bedroom.  Nona was the golden child of the family, winning horse competitions and attracting business for her father.  Alice doesn’t show horses, and leads a lonely existence, ruminating about the death of her classmate Polly, more an acquaintance than friend, and doing the constant work that a horse ranch requires.  Her father’s only current student, when the book opens, is a rather unpromising horse-besotted rich girl named Sheila Altman.  As the Winston family finances continue to founder, Alice outgrows her clothes and nobody notices. 

Joe is forced to start boarding horses, a line of business that he considers beneath him.  This brings in a gaggle of women from the wealthy-side of town who groom their horses, gossip, and drink champagne from paper cups, women Alice thinks of as “the Catfish,” and whom her father describes as “the kind of women who turn to horses when they’re finished with men.” As the stable gets busier, the Winstons become more involved with the complicated lives of the people whose horses they care for, entanglements that spark and build to the book’s conclusion.

Kyle has done an artful, careful job with The God of Animals, packing it with riveting details and insights. There’s this description of a community function that Alice has to attend, for example, which conjures up her entire world in a few quick sentences:

“My father said I had to wear a dress to the posse banquet, which put us at odds for the entire day.  Banquet was a loose term for the party that the sheriff’s posse threw each summer.  A potluck, people showed up in pickup trucks, carrying dishes of greasy food covered with cellophane and wearing cowboy boots so that they could dance in the arena without worrying about horse droppings.”

The inexperienced Sheila Altman, the epitome of a peppy, horse-struck girl with golden braids, asks Sheila questions that allow her to explain the mysteries of the horse business to the reader as well.  Alice knows horses, but she’s seeking the answers to mysteries of her own, such as what goes on between adults, what makes them fight, fall in love, fail, and go crazy. 

Kyle is deft at portraying the way an adolescent makes sense of the world, by adding up the information gleaned from glimpses caught through chinks and voices heard through thin walls, such as in this moment when Alice sees her father, in a foot cast from an injury, talking to one of the women who stables her horse at the ranch: “Through the crack of the stall door, I watched Patty Jo’s foot slide forward, the glossy triangular toe of her boot stopping just before it met the grubby heel of my father’s cast.”

The mood of The God of Animals matches the stifling heat of the drought summer in which much of the book takes place.  There’s a feeling that the people in this book are as restive as the wild, unbroken Pinto mare, Darling, that Joe Winston buys, waiting for their opportunity to break out from the strictures imposed on them by marriage, poverty, community ties, and social mores.  The novel follows the classic coming-of-age formula, but this is material that never gets old when the writer who works it as capable as Aryn Kyle.  Like Nona Winston riding her horse, Aryn Kyle appears to be a natural.