Perfect Little World in Curious Iguana

Jan 20, 2017 Lauren rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction-historical-fiction

4.5 stars. A very engaging read. It reminds me of a light mixture of TC Boyle's Terranauts and Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

The main protagonist is intelligent, quiet, and naive, a pleasing combination that resonates against the contrasted actions of the rest of the complex's adults.

This is good choice for readers who want a good story but something not too heavy. ...more

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Feb 18, 2017 Charlie Smith rated it liked it · review of another edition

I read Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang in August of 2011, mostly on the subway, going back and forth between Manhattan and the ugliest, most blighted, far, far, reaches of Brooklyn, where I was housed in a tiny, un-air conditioned fourth floor hovel next to a subway station and its raised track which caused my room to vibrate each time a train went by during that glorious summer I spent living in New York and performing in the Fringe Festival. So, his work has a special place in my heart, as do m I read Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang in August of 2011, mostly on the subway, going back and forth between Manhattan and the ugliest, most blighted, far, far, reaches of Brooklyn, where I was housed in a tiny, un-air conditioned fourth floor hovel next to a subway station and its raised track which caused my room to vibrate each time a train went by during that glorious summer I spent living in New York and performing in the Fringe Festival. So, his work has a special place in my heart, as do most things connected to my New York adventures.

But, back to Kevin Wilson’s new novel, Perfect Little World. Having just finished a book about the after-effects of communal living and the choosing of a new family, it was interesting to dive into this story of Isabel Poole, an economically disadvantaged young, single mother who makes the decision to enter into a contract with a child psychologist who dreams of building a Utopian child-rearing community; a new kind of extended family in which the children are communally raised by all of the parents without knowing which of their caretakers are their biological begetters.

Having read reviews before I started, as I became involved in this story I was confused at those who had called this a hilarious, funny, amusing novel. Not once did I laugh. Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy this book, because I did, but I didn’t think it a comic novel, or, even particularly witty. I don’t think it was intended to be those things.

I did find it touching, warm, and gently provocative in its exploration of what family means, what it can and cannot do, and I found Isabel far easier to relate to than I had Linda in History of Wolves. Perhaps because the sorts of abandonments and betrayals Isabel experiences make her an Everyperson, a stand-in for what many of us are feeling thanks to current events: adrift and alone in a world where the rules are new and mysterious and not quite working, ever a breath away from fleeing, at the mercy of a world run by corporations and the vicissitudes and mutations in the moods, minds, and moralities of those around us.

Small cavil; I found the members of the Acklen family to be a bit stock-character good-cop/bad-cop cliché, deus ex machinas to facilitate and tie up the Infinite Family Project platform of the novel, but, this didn’t undo the alchemy of Kevin Wilson’s taking a far-out premise and grounding it in prose and plotting that made it seem entirely possible; likely, even. Of course, nowadays, watching the news is not unlike reading the first chapters of a dystopian novel wherein you know, any second, the world is going to erupt into irreparable destruction — thus, real life being what it is, it must be difficult to write an outlandish novel anymore. ...more

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