POOR DEER, by Claire Oshetsky
Midway through Claire Oshetsky’s beautiful, terrifying sophomore novel, a mother asks her daughter: “Did you leave Agnes Bickford in that cooler to die, Bunny?”
This turns out to be the central question of “Poor Deer.”
Bunny is Margaret Murphy, our protagonist; Agnes Bickford is her childhood best friend and neighbor. On a rainy day when the girls were 4 years old, they raced out of their respective houses to play. Later, Margaret’s mother found her daughter silently cowering under her dining room table. Agnes’s mother found her daughter dead in a tool shed.
What happened, who’s at fault, and is this person deserving of forgiveness? These uncertainties haunt just about everybody in the novel, especially Margaret herself. But she doesn’t want to talk or think about what led to her friend’s demise — and that’s where Poor Deer comes in.
When we meet Margaret, now 16, she’s sitting at a desk in a motel near Niagara Falls, attempting to write a confession at the behest of the titular beast, who acts as a sort of ghost, urging her to confront her past. “Enough of your pretty lies,” Poor Deer commands. “It’s time to tell the truth.”
But the truth is too much to handle. Initially, Margaret writes that Agnes ran into the magical woods near their houses, reached the Land of the Pirate King and became a pirate. “You’ve told it all wrong again — you little monster,” Poor Deer chastises. It takes two more drafts before Margaret gets anywhere near the facts of what happened; still, the whole story remains just beyond reach.
This setup frames “Poor Deer” like a thriller, but the novel is less a mystery about what happened on that fateful day, and more a psychological deep dive into how Margaret, and all those who orbited the girls, grapple with the tragedy.
“Guilt is the worst of all. Guilt is the hollow heart of it,” Oshetsky writes. “Guilt will follow her everywhere, two steps behind.”
Grief is a well-trod territory in fiction, but in Oshetsky’s hands, this familiar topic becomes fresh and strange. The book’s narrative structure mirrors the grief-stricken mind — starting, stopping, looping back, stuttering, marching grimly forward. With her voice “like the drilling of a tooth” and eyes that “flash in primary colors,” Poor Deer is a frightening anthropomorphism of the cruel inner monologue that so many of us hear in our lowest moments. (Her name is a malapropism of the response people said when they found out about Agnes: Poor dear.)
As Margaret struggles to grow up under the shadow of death, she becomes more and more isolated. Her mother embraces and then rejects her. She suffers a terrible accident of her own; and, finally, yet another tragedy leads Margaret to her peculiar situation in the motel.
“Poor Deer” is the inverse of Oshetsky’s debut, “Chouette,” about a woman who gives birth to a baby who is half-human, half-owl. That book was a rowdy and dark meditation on motherhood, juxtaposing the rawness of a newborn with the savagery of an animal on the hunt. “Poor Deer,” however, is quiet and somber. It’s less about someone grappling with external pressures and more about someone trying to understand the weight of trauma. Despite their differences, if you were to encounter these stories with no name attached, you could easily identify them as Oshetsky tales. They both display her probing eye and ferocious imagination.
With “Poor Deer,” Oshetsky proves herself the bard of unruly psyches. She shows how loss warps our realities, and how that distortion can be both a coping mechanism and a destructive force.
“Are you my angel or my devil?” Margaret asks.
“I am Poor Deer,” the beast responds.
It’s Margaret’s job to figure out what this means. With nuance, grace and a touch of the uncanny, Oshetsky brings us along for the ride.
POOR DEER | By Claire Oshetsky | 227 pp. | Ecco | $26.99
