The Seal Wife
Kathryn Harrison is best known for her memoir, The Kiss, detailing the incestuous relationship she had with her father. It is no surprise, then, that her fiction is sensuous and unnerving.
The Seal Wife, her fifth novel, is a well-researched, tightly wound tale of a scientist sent to Anchorage, Alaska in 1915 to set up a forecast station for the U.S. Weather Bureau. A city boy in the last frontier, Bigelow is confounded by his inability to communicate with the world. The natives don’t respond to the Chinook he has learned, the woman he courts stammers, and the Aleutian woman for whom he yearns is all but mute. Even the information he collects with his precise instruments cannot consistently predict the weather.
Struggling with loneliness, isolation and frustration, Bigelow becomes creative. He builds an enormous kite to hold his instruments and sends it into the heavens in an attempt to better understand weather patterns. He probes the female mystique: in the mouth of a gap-toothed pickpocket, in the arms of a whore, in the parlor of a ‘respectable’ woman.
A moody rendering of one man’s attempt to understand wind, women and the world, The Seal Wife is whiskey-strong literary erotica. Harrison is a master of the form.
