REVIEW : CHOUETTE / CLAIRE OSHETSKY
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Chouette
Claire Ohsetsky
Ecco Press
Review by
Lauren C. Johnson
I adore all raptors, but owls are my favorite birds of prey. When I learned that Claire Oshetsky had written a dark-fairytale of a debut novel about a woman who gives birth to an owl, I swooped in to pre-order. Months later, the surreal landscapes and characters that populate Chouette (Ecco Press, November 2021) haunt my imagination.
Chouette unfolds through the eyes of Tiny, a professional cellist who has survived a traumatic childhood to marry into a “stable” middle-class life with her husband in Sacramento. When the novel begins, Tiny is in a world of trouble; Two weeks after a passionate night with her female owl-lover, Tiny is pregnant. She’s certain she’s carrying an owl.
Tiny warns her husband (whose name readers never learn) but he’s too swollen with pride to hear her:
“You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all,” I say.
“This baby is an owl baby.”
“Oh, honey, honey, honey,” my husband says. “That’s just the jitters talking. Don’t listen.
I’m here for you. I love you.”
As her pregnancy progresses, Tiny’s body odor turns gamey, and the fetus wakes her at night. Her husband begins sleeping in an apartment above the detached garage. When the baby arrives, she’s indeed an owl. The delivery doctor observes, “Tufted head. Yellow eyes. Skin exhibits chitinous scaling. Genitals ambiguous. Observations at birth consistent with Strigiformes...”
Tiny names her daughter Chouette, a French word for owl. Tiny’s husband insists on calling the baby Charlotte.
Tiny embraces what it means to mother an owl-baby, procuring fresh meat for Chouette and even allowing her to hunt and fly. When Tiny’s husband isn’t clocking 15-hour days as an intellectual property lawyer, he attempts to find treatments to make Chouette behave more like a dog-person—like himself and the members of his family. These so-called treatments have names like:
“Transcranial Stimulation in Children with Bubo Bubo Complex,” or “The Use of
Temporal Lobe Surgery in Childhood Aves Disorder,” or “The Promise of Artificial
Intelligence in the Treatment of Strigiformes Syndrome.”
It’s ambiguous whether Chouette is an actual owl or if Tiny is an unreliable narrator with challenges of her own, describing postpartum depression and raising a neurodiverse human daughter. At times, Tiny hints toward the latter: “These other wives speak in concrete word-bricks, whereas I prefer to speak in metaphor: That way, no logic can trap me, and no rule can bind me, and no fact can limit me or decide for me what’s possible.”
Yet, Tiny portrays Chouette’s owl traits in such specific, consistent, and soaring detail; As a reader, it’s easy to get lost in the fictive dream and interpret the text literally, no matter how surreal. This mystery is what makes Chouette such a powerful, striking novel. And with its elegant prose and deliberate sprinklings of wry, absurdist humor, reading Chouette is a pleasurable experience, in spite of its darkness. Indeed, the opening sentence—“I dream I’m making tender love with an owl”—sets the tone for the rest of the book.
In interviews and on her website, Oshetsky has shared that Chouette is “an expression of what it was like to be a mother of two non-conforming children, and what it was like to raise children who were remarkable in ways other people don’t always understand.” While writing Chouette, Oshetsky consulted with her now-grown daughter, musician Patricia Taxxon, to whom the book is dedicated.
I’m not a mother, so I can’t claim to fully relate to Tiny or Oshetsky’s experiences. However, I know what it’s like to be a woman in a society that systemically disempowers women, and especially people belonging to trans, queer, disability, and BIPOC communities. I know what it’s like to feel out-of-place and “not good enough.”
In the first chapter of Chouette, Tiny looks at her husband and states, “I love the way he can fit himself into the world so rightly. He’s like a card in the deck that he has just squared up. I’m more like a card somebody left out in the rain.” It’s an apt metaphor that the husband and his family—all privileged white people—are on a mission to turn Chouette into another milquetoast dog-baby. We tend to think of dogs as sweet-natured, obedient, and domesticated. As nocturnal predators, owls have a hard time escaping their wild, chthonic associations.
Ultimately, Chouette is a necessary call-to-action, challenging conformity and oppressive social constructs. Chouette is a call-to-action to embrace ourselves as we are.
Chouette by Claire Oshetsky is out now from Ecco Press.
Lauren C. Johnson is a writer living in San Francisco.
