Deserted and Desired
On Alice, or the Wild Girl
Note: This is a book review originally commissioned by The Metropolitan Review but subsequently killed for schedule capacity reasons. As such, the typical hijinks and hints of psychosis you’ve come to expect from this corner of the internet are, for good or ill, nowhere in evidence. It’s just me putting the analytical screws to a pretty good first novel. It is before edits, to be sure, as it was never edited.
Michael Robert Liska’s debut novel Alice, or the Wild Girl is rife with conflicts between perception and reality, and in which perception usually wins out. The valiant rescue of the titular Alice by the virtuous naval lieutenant and soon-to-be guardian is closer to an unwelcome accident amid a flight of vanity. Her solitary adventure on a deserted Pacific island, by which she is dubbed “the female Robinson Crusoe,” is the result of capture and abandonment. Moreover, her deterioration into unclothed, filth-caked, malnutrition and muteness brings her closer to a Swiftian Yahoo than to Defoe’s resourceful survivalist. Her subsequent celebrity upon her return to the United States is maintained by coercion, exploitation, and a ungodly amount of laudanum.
The characters who populate Liska’s well-plotted, detail-rich period fiction have a thirst for perception; and they imbibe it in the form of the “Wild Girl.” First in the sheer novelty of her situation as a teenager deprived for years of the niceties of civilized life; and second by how her reintroduction into domesticity compliments their own civilized self-perceptions. Being set in the tumultuous antebellum United States, and especially in the newly established San Fransisco, already makes this a doubtful prospect. But Liska’s narrative skill and lucid, detached prose situates the reader into reality while showing how unsteady the demarcation is between what is “civilized” and what is “wild.”
Such a dualistic work is appropriately guided by two central characters. Henry Bird is the commander of a naval vessel in the Pacific in 1856. Well into middle-age, his career plateaued at the rank of Lieutenant, with no familial connections and a crew that calls him “the Pelican” behind his back, Bird nevertheless retains a high self-regard that craves whatever distinction is left for someone of his stature. In this case it is an apparently uninhabited island on which he can plant his name. In the first page he is struggling ashore from nearly drowning, and he very soon catches sight of a human figure skulking in the distance. In addition to discovering the girl, whom he names “Lucy,” he finds a herd of emaciated goats and a burial site. Once he brings the girl onto the ship, he initiates a grander adventure that over the course of years evolves from a gothic rendition of Pygmalion to a gnarled relationship where he is at turns a father, a manager, and a jailer.
His ambitions are rooted, at least at the outset, by his attachment to the civilizational virtues. Bird addresses inferiors in a remote, sermonizing tone even as those inferiors see a semi-reclusive alcoholic who gives orders in “cryptic, scrawled notes.” Liska’s narration in the named chapters, told from Bird’s perspective, echo his Victorian sense of objectivity while also undermining it. Such as in an early account of Bird investigating a conflict between American whalers and a native population, in which “a thorough retribution” had been taken by the former against the latter.
Nothing in the reports … had prepared him for the devastation he found there. He had at first been unable to locate the village at the coordinates indicated. … Bird found little evidence that such a village existed. A large patch of charred ground and a blank-faced stone monument were all that remained. … There had been nothing for the navy to accomplish here.
Incidents such as these break through Bird’s civilizational edifice like verbal cigarette burns. As if its confidence could not subsist long without violence as its fuel. A ship doctor’s smile reveals self-made dentures using animal teeth. Bird endears himself toward a population of natives by firing the ship’s cannons in the direction of its enemies. A lecture is preceded by a fistfight that leaves an Irishman “beaten to a point where [his face] looked as malleable as clay, as if Bird could simply reach over and push his nose back into its proper place.” All of which grow out into a wider realm of fraud, mayhem, and fanaticism, of which Bird in his privileged position is either inured against or oblivious to, unlike his apparent naif charge who comes to him molded by their force.
Bird’s quest for adventure and greatness is contrasted the by imposition of adventure upon Alice. Liska is methodical in divulging her story as it is told and retold by others with an incredible breadth of fancy, aspiration, and opportunism. Unnamed chapters from her perspective give an account of a girlhood upended by cataclysmic cruelty. Liska’s language, in turn, elevates from mere observation. “After her father and mother were sent away, Alice had fled from the wicked men who remained on the ship. … [O]n that terrible night they’d been changed into devils, dark-eyed and jeering, carrying sharp knives and boat hooks and grinning at her in the moonlight.” And just as barbarism writhes beneath a serene civilizational surface, Alice’s own feral demeanor obscures a shrewd mind that, when it is not hampered by drugs or her painful desire to connect with others, needs only to be brought up to speed. She may not be able to apply her own makeup but she can play the game of celebrity, something that fits well with her ingrained skill of survival. When asked by society ladies what she ate while on the island, she falls into an almost elegiac recounting of eating a newly hatched turtle, only to answer, “I ate fruit and some things that I found.”
The adolescent United States to which the pair return is eager to provide in abundance what has long been denied both of them. Alice is the center of a media frenzy. Though she barely speaks she is the main attraction of a lecture tour, and is depicted on the stage. She is fawned over by San Francisco’s wealthy and, despite malnutrition-stunted growth, the recipient of copious proposals for marriage. Alice captivates simply by existing, and she retains her notoriety for the rest of her life. Though this hardly grants her humanity. Where Bird is tender toward her, it often registers like the tenderness one has toward a luxury item. And he can only control her with laudanum. Even the good intentions of a pious shipmate early in the novel have an air of paternal condescension: she must be redeemed, as if her desertion was of her own making. It is only when meeting the actress playing her that a sympathetic assessment is reached. “I don’t see her as wild at all,” the woman tells a reporter, “I see a young woman in need of a friend.” Bird, for his part, chafes at dwelling in the shadow of his protege. His exploits at sea interest the public much less. Though he is feted by high society and praised by ex-presidents (albeit ones even Americans struggle to remember), his apparent worldliness, his experience in the field, and his moral character cannot prevent his seduction by the limelight or the machinations of cynics.
That these characters break down along timeless gender conceptions is deduced easily enough. But Liska’s progression of this most codependent of bondings plumbs deeper into two contrasting conditions of loneliness: a man who lives almost cloaked his disappointments with a girl put upon by life with no opportunity to live herself. Each, rightly or wrongly, is the most reliable companion of the other, as both are visitors in what should have been their home. Only once the 1906 earthquake hits San Francisco, killing thousands and leaving the city in flames, does this trajectory alter for a now very much elderly Alice. After the upending of so many dualities, Liska offers us something like the completion of a circle. America is its own form of deserted island, but one where its sole inhabitant has some chance at freedom.