Wild Thing

Wild Thing

PURSUITS

KATHERINE FORBES-RILEY ’96

THE BOBCAT ARCADE 2x2 pp. $23

MELVILLE HAD HIS WHALE, FAULKNER HIS BEAR, AND FORBESRiley’s debut novel has at its symbolic center a bobcat. And not just any feline predator. Her cat limps, having been shot in the leg by a hunter. Belly distended, she is about to give birth. In this tightly crafted magical realism novel, she is pregnant, not just with kittens, but with meaning.

Laurelie, an art major at a sleepy Vermont college, first sees the bobcat from the forest as it laps at the riverbank “slowly, dreamlike.” She watches as a hiker emerges, crouches, and caresses the animal. “He and the cat shared akind of family resemblance,” she thinks.

The hiker is Lucien, a landscaper who has trailed the cat for 300 miles. His name means “light-bringer.” Brightness is what Laurelie needs. She fled another college after being drugged and raped by “shark faced” frat brothers. Now living in a “fairy cottage,” she struggles to heal herself through painting. Her works mimic the fractured violence of Picasso’s Guernica, Bosch’s freaks, and DeKooning’s monsters.

But with a name like Laurelie, a homonym for the mythic German river siren who lured men to their doom, readers will wonder what fate awaits mysterious Lucien, who we are told sees like an owl, hears like a hawk, and whose touch is as sensitive as a mole’s. He has his own wounds, and when the pair falls in love, he tells her, “You can raze a plant all the way to the ground and it won’t die. Not unless you get the roots.”

Forbes-Riley is well grounded in words. She has a Ph.D. in computational linguistics, a field whose members “view language as hot and alive, something that grows and changes,” the author tells DAM. It took six years for her to write The Bobcat. “You have to bleed—the creator and the art. You can’t just be slick on the surface,” she says. “You have to dig, and if it’s not bleeding enough, you have to make it bleed.”

The author lives in Norwich, Vermont, with her husband, studio art professor Enrico Riley ’95. She says her character’s rape reflects an all-too-common occurrence on college campuses generally and is not about Dartmouth.

“College is a microcosm of the entire world,” she says. “Sexual assault goes on all the time in college, and it’s mostly not reported. Laurelie just kept it to herself. She had no proof. That’s a common scenario.”

George M. Spencer

For an excerpt from The Bobcat, visit our website.