Review of Brood by Jackie Polzin
Nature writing is often thought to be non-fiction and to explore ‘wild’ or remote places or physically gruelling experiences. Whilst the genre is thankfully embracing and highlighting different and diverse experiences, discussions still predominantly centre around non-fiction. I was delighted then to be sent an advanced review copy of Brood, the debut novel by Jackie Polzin, which focuses on the main character’s relationship with her four chickens at a time of grief and unsettlement in her life.
What I loved most about Brood is the domesticity of the setting and Polzin’s focus on the minutiae of chicken and human lives. We learn about when chickens lay eggs and when they don’t, what diet is good for them and what is unhealthy, how they exercise dominance and how to help a chicken whose egg has got stuck and also more mundane human concerns like how best to clean a house. All this whilst getting to know the main character intimately and empathising with her ambivalence towards her life where the chickens seem to be the one focal point of warmth. The prose reminded me very much of Elizbeth Strout and was sparse and spare, echoing the rural Minnesotan surroundings the narrator lives in and their scrubby backyard in their non-descript neighbourhood.
I loved reading about the chickens and coming to recognise that the narrator needed them just as much as they needed her; seeing the four hens pivotal role in her life, providing a constancy that neither her best friend nor husband can give. It would have been interesting to see the author lean into this even more and explore the personalities of the individual chickens to a greater degree so that they were as fully rounded characters as the humans. Polzin grants her chickens their differences from humans and makes these meaningful, but I would have loved to have understood the differences between them as individuals more, beyond who’s who in the pecking order.
There was also more space to explore the uneasiness of keeping pets in a society which constantly degrades, tortures and kills animals. The narrator and her husband still eat chicken despite loving the chickens they live with deeply which I found to be one of the most horrifying details of the book - it was only mentioned once, fleetingly but it has stuck in my mind. In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams coins the term the ‘absent referent’, referring to the animal that exists behind the meat we – often unthinkingly, sometimes guiltily – consume. The narrator thinks of her chickens as different to other chickens because the factory chickens don’t live full, satisfying lives which I found fascinating. It is like their very degradation, the thing which makes their lives not worth living in the first place, thus comes to be the justification of it. This struck me as a great piece of characterisation and I understand the main character didn’t want to think about it too deeply, but I would love to see more writing which explores the easily toppled pyramid of distinctions we make between ‘pets’ and ‘livestock’.
I learned a lot from this book as a reader and a writer and I hope to see more nuanced, sensitive nature writing like this which explores the non-human and has the confidence to allow it to be just that; different from the human.
Thank you to Picador Books UK for the Advance Review Copy.