New Yorker Fiction Review #292: "How I Became a Vet" by Rivka Galchen
The first story I reviewed by Rivka Galchen -- called "The Late Novels of Gene Hackman" from back in 2014 -- did not impress me, but I also didn't hate it. The word "snooze fest" was used perhaps a little to liberally, but that's what happens when you don't have an editor or anyone but the occasional bot commenter to keep you honest.
Since then I have read and reviewed two more of her short stories and have grown to enjoy her brand of heavily interior, lightly comedic, but always intelligent prose that deals with how we navigate our families, our personal traumas, and the everyday moral questions that come up in the course of a life. Her main characters are generally good people who find themselves twisted into knots by upheavals in their lives that -- while not ultimately earth-shattering (like, let's face it, most of our self-crises here in the first world) -- are serious enough to those characters at the time. They find themselves faced with the question of: what would a good person do, or what is the right thing to do? Usually, at least in what I've read, they do it, even if that means doing nothing.
This story had me from the very opening line (which is extremely rare):
"When I say 'vet,' I do not mean veteran."
I found this first line intriguing, mostly because I -- and I'm guessing others -- did not assume that she meant "veteran" when reading the title of this story, if for no other reason than that the story's title photo shows the eye of a dog. But also because the term "vet" in everyday use almost always means "veterinarian." I myself can't think of a single time I've used the word "vet" to mean veteran. The narrator of this story is -- already, from the first line -- on strange footing.
Secondly, the narrator is in direct conversation with the title of the story, which is another strange move. Normally, we kind of assume that the title to a story exists in a separate world than the story as some kind of indicator as to the story's contents or even just as a tag so that we have something to put in the table of contents. The fact of the narrator referring to the story's title gives this story a slight meta-fictional, post-modern touch. I'm thinking now of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's night a traveler..., in which you the reader are the main character picking up a book by Italo Calvino called If on a Winters' night a traveler..., but that is the end of this story's brush with post-modernism. From there on out it stays a mostly conventional first-person narrative.
While the narrative structure may be conventional, "How I Became a Vet" is anything but that, operating a number of levels and ultimately serving as a character study of one woman -- over the course of a lifetime -- finding her way towards a profession, being very nearly pushed out of it, and then finding her vocation. Thankfully for the main character, her profession and her vocation are one and the same: she truly is a vet, at her very core.
Animal lovers will be delighted by the Vet's tenderness toward animals, her attempts to understand their inner worlds, and her frustration with their owners -- whom she prefers to refer to as "caretakers" or "pet parents" or even (as she does shortly into the story) referring to the owner as belonging to the pet, as in "the parrot's human." Anyone who loves literature and has ever done the most rudimentary existential examination will find rich material in the Vet's thoughts on life -- some of which come to her through an ideal version of her father she keeps in her own head, but which are, ultimately, her own. The idea being that her father's tutelage has so closely wound itself into her brain and her life, that she has essentially constructed an A.I. version of her father inside her own head. Don't we all -- for better or for worse -- do this to some degree?
"Joy is an ethical obligation. I was raised to believe this. I have not abandoned the proposition."
She was "raised to believe this," we are told. So, this is something her father used to say? Or something she interpreted from his teaching? Or something she interpreted from her exposure to the Anabaptist faith her father adheres to?
The Vet's conversations with the father in her head -- her real father is far away, in Oklahoma, suffering from leukemia -- act as a sort of rhetorical sounding board for her own thoughts and feelings and even as a vehicle for deep inner thoughts she needs a vehicle through which to express.
Take for example when the Vet is on her hands and knees in the mud of a creek bank, searching for what has caused three different dogs (her patients) to jump out of cars that were going over the bridge above. When she finds a family of minks nestled under the roots of a tree, she knows she has found what has tempted the dogs. A profound thought runs through her, which she filters through the voice of her father:
"What had made those dogs jump was the scent of those minks. You might call that scent the scent of love. It had been an error that those dogs had made. But an error of the heart, my dad said to me, there in the mud. So a worthwhile error. We have to make our own rules and our own judgements and not curse ourselves or others for the way we arrived in this world."
In the end, "How I Became a Vet" is as much a powerful statement on what it means to love our parents and to be someone's child as it is about a veterinarian coming into vocation fully. Upon finding a scrap of paper at her father's bedside on a recent visit, a scrap of paper listing out his friends in order of their closeness to him, the Vet marvels that she did not know half of them.
"There was too little that I knew about this man, who had at times yelled at me and at times asked me to finish my entire glass of milk and who had let me sleep with the baby goats when I was afraid. Have I fulfilled my duty of joy to him?"
In truly finding herself in her vocation, just a few lines later in the story, she says that she is on her way toward this destination, truly. If we "owe" our parents anything, is it not at least true that we owe them a genuine and whole-hearted attempt to be happy? Why ever they chose (or did not choose) to bring us into this world, they certainly did not do so with the intention that we be miserable, right? Then the opposite must be true. For the Vet, joy is truly an ethical obligation. What a wonderful way to look at life, parenthood, and careers.
Lying at another topographical layer of meaning is the Vet's story -- her life story, really -- of her journey toward her vocation, including her childhood love of animals, her early years as a crummy student, and then the key people and signposts she encountered along the way who pointed her in the direction of being someone who cares for and attempts to treat the illnesses of animals and deal -- often unsuccessfully -- with their humans.
For those of us who have never felt particularly called to one career (not a directly lucrative, academically sanctioned one that can be taught in schools anyway) and who have tried and moved on from more than one over the years, it is like a roadmap of destiny and intention written after one arrived at their destination. To me it is always fascinating how people got where they are.
There is so much to like in this story, much that I have to leave on the table, unexamined, and available for you to read and enjoy as well. One of the highest pieces of praise you can lay on a book or a film, or any piece of art, is that it stays with you for a while afterward. One of the other highest pieces of praise you can lay on a work of art is that it makes you want to engage with more of the creator's work. In this case, I can lay both pieces of praise on this short story, wholeheartedly.
Title page photograph by Shayan Asgarnia.
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