One of my idiosyncratic pet criticisms of fiction about animals is that even when the writing is excellent and the story compelling, the representation of nature is too simple. The natural world is either a backdrop against which human dramas play out, or an obvious metaphor for humans and their behavior. While each of these approaches has produced great books, fictional forests have rarely been explored as the culturally complex places they are, whereas urban fiction has grown ever more challenging by imagining the relationship of human lives to the spaces (and traditions) they simultaneously occupy and construct. So it’s always a thrill to read a novel like Justin Courter’s Skunk: A Love Story (Omnidawn 2007) that engages the wild in more complex ways.

Skunk is the picaresque story of Damien Youngquist, a lonely, awkward young man with a fetish for skunk musk and the desire to be left alone to enjoy it. Only when imbibing the pungent liquid he “milks” from his captive skunks does Damien let his guard down:

Most people are unaware of the fact that the skunk gland is the key to an entirely different realm of sensation. I would say the world of a musk dream is the everyday world seen with better clarity, but this is often said about the effect of such inferior chemicals as THC. When embarking upon a musk dream, one graduates to a higher plane of existence than the one people normally inhabit. I would go so far as to say that a person who has not experienced a skunk musk dream is like one who has seen only two dimensions of a three-dimensional world.

As he grows ever more obsessed with enjoying his musk — whether by the shot or added to food — he is driven out of his job in but into the arms of a marine biologist and fish-fetishist named Pearl. Far more happens, of course, set in motion by these first events, but revealing too much of the plot would be both confusing and a disservice to a novel with so many satisfying, surprising moments. Suffice it to say that things rarely — if ever — go easily for Damien.

It’s easy for his life to be disrupted, because every aspect is carefully arranged to support his obsession and protect him from all that he fears (which is nearly everything and everyone, including himself, with the exception of skunks and, at times, Pearl). Even the language with which he engages the world, and by which he makes his living, is an artifice, as in this exchange with a coworker:

Farnsworth’s face began to look as if he’d taken a bite of a rancid piece of cheese. He began sneezing, and sneezed five times in my cubicle without once covering his mouth, though he did turn his face away from me. When he’d finished he said, “God, do you smell that? I think it’s even stronger in here. Jeez, it’s terrible.”

Though my posture is always nearly perfect, I felt myself sit up straighter upon hearing these words. “To what smell do you refer?” I asked.

He stepped toward me and sniffed. He stepped back again and gave me a puzzled look. “Well, anyway, do you know what I should do about my keyboard?” he asked. “I mean, is it okay to just wipe it off with a damp rag or what?”

“I would do nothing without first consulting Mr. Daltry regarding the matter,” I replied. Sean Daltry was the building’s maintenance man.

This obliviousness to his own condition, and to how obvious the aroma of skunk is around him, marks the limit of Damien’s self-invention: he cannot see himself as others see him or conceive of how his obsession might strike them. He is a man drenched in skunk musk so strong that other passengers move away on the train, yet while riding he reads “my paperback copy of Alma Chesnut Moore’s How to Clean Everything, which is among my favorite works of nonfiction.”

Yet in other areas of his life, Damien is more perceptive. He recounts a sad, childhood spent first reaching for the useless affections of a drunkard mother, then later as whipping-boy for boarding school bullies. While each of these elements at first seems cliché and even cartoonish, he states firmly, “I don’t care to delve too deeply into this period of my life because it is irrelevant,” thereby insisting to readers that this story about the child of a dysfunctional home will be different, and will avoid the mundane details of so many interchangeable novels. Courter’s dismantling of expectations is engaging; there are a number of seemingly stock characters — “The Redneck,” and “The Stoner” — who ultimately surprise both Damien and the reader by not playing to type when it matters, and by confounding easy assumptions. For Damien, so dependent on artifice, nothing is more dangerous than other people refusing to play to his expectations.

Skunks, too, are roped into his facade, developing as characters, dramatic foils, believable animals, and metaphors all at once. Courter’s engagement of the physical, wild aspect of skunks and his simultaneous acknowledgment of the cultural constructions projected upon them is refreshing. These animals are neither humanized nor idealized; Skunk is not Charlotte’s Web. There are metaphors layered onto the animals, but not without complication. Damien imagines his captive skunks (dubbed Homer and Louisa) being married to each other, and holds man-to-man talks with Homer while shaving, but such anthropomorphizing always comes from the character’s own skewed perspective, and is balanced by descriptions of realistic animal behavior. The result is an engaging story about humans and animals, coinciding with a thoughtful interrogation of the traditions making that story possible.

This interrogation grows more pronounced after Damien flees his suburban home for a Thoreauvian cabin, and as his blindness to the fabrications of his life becomes literal and dangerous. He seeks a place to give his strange nature free rein, and finds it down a dirt road where “the forest was beginning to reclaim the farm.” Echoing Whitman, he raises, “A toast in celebration of myself. I sing of myself. I throw off my loafers and and invite the grass to tickle my soul!” In those allusions, however, is yet another means for Damien — and for us — to construct his life from illusions inevitably set to be shattered: he knows about rural living because he has read about it, but that easy knowledge can only serve him so far.

Ultimately, his struggle is against change — in himself, in others, and in the world — and that struggle is as futile as always. When, through the interference and misunderstanding of others, Damien loses his earliest skunk companions, he determines to no longer care about skunks, insisting they will only be tools to fulfill his desire for musk. He fluctuates between living with skunks as friends and celebrating his dominion over them, unsure of how he fits into their world and vice versa, trying to codify his connection to the animal world. He struggles, too, against forces as basic and undeniable as evolution, convinced that he “would have been one of the casualties of natural selection” if alive in an earlier age. And yet the harder he resists, the flimsier his increasingly elaborate constructions become. This leaves him more rather than less connected to and reliant on other people, and far more appealing a character than could be imagined at the start of a novel about a sad, lonely man who drinks the musk of skunks. Which is perhaps the strongest praise to be made: Skunk elevates its unusual material beyond expectations, and in doing so challenges the reader to think beyond the familiar.

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