Nobody from California dreams about winding up in North Carolina, but plenty of girls from North Carolina dream about winding up in California. I’m one of them. On the highway where I grew up you’ll see two sorts of semi-trucks: regular semis and semis with gauged holes in their steel beds carrying the hogs to slaughter. Nobody wonders about the cargo that they can’t see in the regular semis. North Carolina is second in the nation for pork production; everybody knows where the hogs wind up, in the middle of a fast-food sandwich, and then, in your body.
The hogs cruising down I-40W in Wilmington pass by a highway sign that mocks you. It mocks you in a way only bureaucracy is capable of mocking, with concrete nouns and big-ass numbers. White day-glow capital letters chuckle the blunt, impossible signifier of: BARSTOW, CA 2,554 miles away.
In 1913, naturalists captured a flock of penguins from the Antarctic and brought them to spend the rest of their lives in the Edinburgh Zoo. The birds that survived the transition came to enchant the Scottish public with their antics. They could go from suave to goofy and back again, simply by gliding in the water, toddling around on land for a bit, then diving in once more.
Over the years, the zookeepers struggled to determine which penguins were male and which were female, renaming four of the five in the process. The complications only grew from there. Like most birds, penguins are socially but not sexually monogamous. Though they form lifelong unions, they are very happy to canoodle on the side — and there were only so many sexual configurations five of them could go through before one truth became self-evident: The penguins were bisexual. As zoo director T.H. Gillespie wryly observed in his 1932 recounting of these sexual triangulations, they “enjoy privileges not as yet permitted to civilized mankind.”
In “The Crane Wife” — the book, that is — Hauser takes stock of her life from the vantage of her late 30s, widening her lens beyond the scope of that story about a broken engagement. She’s hellbent on better understanding how the person she is now differs from the person she thought she would be — and what that difference means for the years that lie ahead.
Caring for an infant while working as a hired killer is not a good mix, and the inevitable complications soon threaten to get Patrick and Olivia killed. The result is a fast-paced crime novel that is both hilarious and hard-boiled, its main character both ruthless and oddly sympathetic.