If you care about fiction, run away from this book. I don't think I've ever read stories so afraid of themselves, so many safe ideas written up in safe, secondhand language. It's the kind of enervating book that made me think, halfway through, that my memory of fiction must be false, that maybe it was all this terrible. (In despair, I grabbed Denis Johnson's 'Jesus' Son' off the shelf and read the first page to instant relief. Any one page of Johnson is worth more than this whole book.)I finished 'The Animal Girl' only because its failures are so instructive. Here are a few of the big ones: 1) There's not a sharply drawn character in the whole book, which is remarkable given that the stories are "character driven." Every character is a summary of a person, not a person. Fulton's men are especially empty, all of them generalized non-entities. His characters are so bland and inexact it makes you wonder whether he really pays attention to people. 2) The language is unambitious, inexact, prosaic, and unconsciously bad. There's a great deal of "fiction" here, and his fictional tics are those of an undergraduate. 3) There is no sexual or romantic energy between his couples despite all the time he spends cutely tip-toeing into their interest in each other. The least immediate parts of the book are the sex scenes. 4) Every thought, feeling, and act is always absolutely spelled out in the blandest possible way. There is nothing for the reader to discover in these stories because Fulton does not trust his reader. 5) The stories don't end in any fictionally coherent way; they peter into the most obligatory kind of summary or (most embarrassingly, in the case of the title story) resort to a dream. When people complain about forgettable careerist workshop fiction, this is the book they're talking about.
