Alice and Martin Provensen, Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm
stray hairs & accepted incomprehension
“Her father’s name was Potato Who Disappeared.”
Naming one’s fictional offspring, like naming one’s actual offspring, is an invitation to paralysis. Should you go for something symbolic and discreetly referential (Stephen Dedalus, Guy Montag)? Or should you hew to stringent White Pages plausibility (Denise Thibodeau, David Kepesh)? The freedom — you are essentially inventing your own words — is almost too much: how much musicality can a name bear? To what extent should the sounds echo the personality?
And, unlike most things writers fret about, naming actually warrants hyper-deliberation. Names really do matter; they reveal all that their authors imagine they do, and then some.
Saul Bellow, begetter of Clementi Tablow and Nails Nagel, is energetic, attuned to street life, and straining for vividness almost to a fault. James Patterson (Jonathan Duncan, Megan Rose) is half-asleep at a desk littered with Hollywood checks. Thomas Pynchon (Oedipa Maas, Dr. Hilarius) is cutesy and cartoonish, with eyebrows manically waggling. Character names are the stray hairs of literature: trivial-seeming, but containing the entire blueprint.
The best bit of naming I’ve encountered lately — the funniest, the boldest, the most intriguing — comes from Alice and Martin Provensens’ picture book Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm. The book, suitable for ages 2 through ∞, is an illustrated tour of the Provensens' actual farm in Straatsburg, New York. It has no plot, no named human characters, no moral. It’s little more than a casually elaborated roster of animal names, like one of those skippable stretches in The Iliad. But don’t skip it. Reading it feels like wandering beside a taciturn farmer whose wit and insight you only fully appreciate when you replay his words on the drive home.
The first animals we meet are the cats:
“Here are the four cats curled up together… When they are awake it is easier to tell them apart.”
Already the quiet idiosyncrasies, the aromas of actual (as opposed to storybook) life, are accumulating. When they are awake it is easier to tell them apart — this is the sound of true fondness, true weariness; you can almost hear the farmer taking a thoughtful sip of coffee from his travel thermos.
First we meet Eggnog (“Eggnog has a sweet nature, though she throws up a lot and hates to go out-of-doors.”) And then — having understood, from Eggnog’s frequent vomiting, that these will be cats real enough to aggravate our allergies — we meet Willow.
“Willow is Eggnog’s niece. Her father’s name was Potato Who Disappeared. Willow has beautiful eyes and an elegant tail, but she is not interesting. She doesn’t like to play. She doesn’t like to fight.”
I love the matter-of-fact admission that Willow isn’t interesting. How much time could be saved, in life and in literature, if this were a readier-at-hand diagnosis! How often have we contorted ourselves, imagining depths in what are, upon closer inspection, mud puddles?
But what I really love in the passage is the name of Willow’s father: Potato Who Disappeared. Why was he called that? To what family story (Granny was all set to make her famous mashed potatoes…) does that name possibly allude? And why, come to think of it, was he Potato Who Disappeared? Maybe the cat was the potato, and he ran away? But then when did he receive his name?
Needless to say, the Provensens don’t offer a word of clarification — they’ve got dozens of other animals to introduce. But what they’ve given us already, with the perfectly calibrated strangeness of this name, is the essence of their attitude, their affect, their authorial angle on life. A world in which a cat is named Potato Who Disappeared — and in which that name warrants no explanation — is a world of faded wallet photographs, of rumpled humor, of accepted incomprehension.
Occasionally, in a long relationship, you find yourself explaining to your partner some long-taken-for-granted oddity of your childhood — why the crackers are kept in the first aid kit, why your parents refuse to open the windows in the car. Potato Who Disappeared is a name of precisely this degree of inexplicability. There is undoubtedly a story behind it, and the story would undoubtedly fail to fully satisfy anyone who wasn’t present at the creation.
Alice Munro writes:
“Peoples’ lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable — deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”
Willow — with her inert elegance and her bafflingly named father — is a perfect Munrovian citizen: dull and unfathomable in equal measure. The animals in Our Animal Friends, like the animals in our lives, are stubbornly unknowable — they carry stones from place to place; they form odd alliances; they chew fences. They live naked among us, but they refuse to yield their secrets. And so they refuse, whatever we name them, to truly disappear.
Happened to read while sipping a cold brew at a sidewalk table. Fortunately, there’s a bookstore next door. Thanks, Ben
Your writing never fails to blow me away, Ben— thank you!