Animal Husbandry - Softcover

Zigman, Laura

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385319037 ISBN 13: 9780385319034

Publisher: Dial Pr, 1999

Synopsis

"If someone asked me a year ago why I thought it was that men leave women and never come back, I would have said this: New Cow. New Cow is short for New Cow Theory, which is short for Old Cow-New Cow Theory, which, of course, is short for the sad sorry truth that men leave woman and never come back because all they really want is New Cow. But no one asked me then. If someone asked me now I would have a different answer. I would roll my eyes, look toward the ceiling, raise both hands and shake them toward the heavens the way old Italian women do, and say this: They will never make sense; you will never understand them."

Welcome to the case file labeled "love" of one Jane Goodall--no, not the Jane Goodall, but a late-night TV producer who turns to the annals of animal behavior for an explanation when true love goes suddenly, inexplicably wrong. It began as a simple Cow meets Bull story: he was the young producer with the washboard stomach and the J-Crew good-looks, she the co-worker with her heart on the shelf. They met for drinks, fell in love, looked together for a cozy one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, and then suddenly, in only the third month of their post-copulatory phase, Ray Brown was gone. Not gone gone, but lost to that jungle of unreturned phone calls known as unrequited love. So Jane Goodall, with the help of Freud, Darwin, and her own menagerie of lovelorn friends--a broken-hearted womanizer named Eddie, her best friend Joan, who for the past two years has been dating her boss, a man engaged to another woman, and David, who shares with Jane both a taste for good-looking men and a terminal case of bad luck--delves into the mystery of the male animal.

About this title

Review:

Meet Jane Goodall--though not the scientist who has so beautifully revealed that apes have as much capacity for love and tragedy as do their human relatives. Jane Goodall, the 30-year-old narrator of Laura Zigman's fresh and funny first novel, has a revelation of her own: that the human male has as much capacity for love and constancy as an animal with rather distant DNA--the bull. Her discovery is the result of a botched relationship with a fellow PBS executive, the charming but increasingly evasive Ray Brown. Ray doesn't so much leave Jane as slip away, leaving her in depressed confusion and him having it both ways. Jane's bitter but hilarious revelation eventually transforms her from a fast-talking talk-show booker with a giant Rolodex (and an endless fund of excuses for failing to reach Kevin Costner) by day into "Dr Marie Goodall, delusional fraudulent obsessive monkey scientist by night". In one of Animal Husbandry's many delightful (and clever) twists, the false Dr Goodall achieves a high profile and a New York Times rebuff once her article is published in Men's Times. Zigman has clearly spent some time researching human mating behaviour, which her heroine is forced to see as a dance of male deception and female hope. If one occasionally wonders whether Animal Husbandry has its origins in revenge, no matter. It's an artful, sparky one.

Review:

"Girl meets boy, boy dumps girl ... Zigman siphons off the tears and the curses and by alchemy converts them into laughter."
-- People

"Clever, engaging...continually amusing."
-- The Washington Post

"Wit, wisdom, and a sure comic voice...this is great fun, a dog-eared hoot."
-- The Philadelphia Inquirer

About this edition

• Publisher: Dial Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0385319037
• ISBN 13: 9780385319034
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256