BookBrowse Reviews The Birdcatcher by Gayl Jones

BookBrowse:

A quick-witted novel about art, relationships and attempted murder by Pulitzer Prize finalist Gayl Jones.

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The Birdcatcher has a deceptively simple and darkly humorous premise: A woman tries again and again to kill her husband; each time he has her committed to a mental hospital, and each time he eventually checks her out of said hospital just to start the cycle over again. It's narrated by a third party, the couple's friend Amanda Wordlaw, a novelist and travel writer who is staying with them in Ibiza on some sort of extended holiday. But what begins as a "Get a load of these people" sort of narrative evolves into a deep, complex meditation on art, relationships and the connection between creativity and instability.

You might assume the focus to be on the relationship between Ernest and his murderous wife, Catherine. Why do they stay together if she wants to kill him? Initially, this is where Gayl Jones draws the reader's attention. Catherine is a fascinating character, and her motivations are held up to the light and examined dispassionately, often hilariously, by Amanda.

But as the novel progresses, the view widens to interrogate the larger structures of racism, art and, most importantly, friendship. While Amanda wonders why Ernest stays with Catherine, one might also wonder why Amanda gravitates to the couple over and over. Why has she inserted herself into this strange dynamic? Why does she come whenever Ernest and Catherine call her to wherever in the world they happen to be? This is one of the novel's central puzzles and solving it involves parsing who the narrator really is underneath how she presents herself.

Amanda is a somewhat unreliable narrator; her entanglement with Ernest and Catherine robs her of perspective and she rarely says anything direct about herself. Interspersed with her present-day observations of her friends are her memories, which ricochet through anecdotes involving Ernest and Catherine, the dissolution of her own marriage, her brief relationship with a man who was once a healer but gave it up when he was unable to heal himself. She tips her hand in brief revelations, as when Catherine tricks her into answering a phone call and she discovers it is her former husband on the other line: "She does not know about the girl. She does not know that I put the phone down so quickly because in the next instance he'd have put Panda on the line. And that would have been too hard." We see impressions of Amanda's life in passing and she is always, it seems, fleeing.

Her narrative voice is memorable to say the least. One chapter begins, "Speaking of weird bitches, there's this woman Catherine knows..." The woman in question is a white painter named Gilette, who tells Catherine and Amanda that she'd sooner kill her child or partner than let them get in the way of her work. In a later conversation, she explains how one of her paintings was inspired by the poetry of William Butler Yeats and remarks that it's a pity there is no great Black literature for Catherine to draw from. This and several more scenes at the end of the novel diverge from Amanda's point of view and are narrated from Catherine's perspective, providing depressing context for her behavior.

While The Birdcatcher is titled after a sculpture Catherine is working on, the glimmer of another meaning appears in a conversation the three main characters have over dinner, in which it is revealed that Ernest used to hunt foxes as a boy in Minnesota. Catherine asks him to tell Amanda how to catch one, at which point the discussion turns to how a woman might, or might not, catch a man. Catherine insists that "a woman never catches a man." Shortly thereafter, Ernest raises his sleeve, at his wife's goading, to show Amanda the bite marks Catherine has left on his arm.

So who is catching who here? Catherine may believe that to kill Ernest is to catch him in a way she otherwise can't. But Ernest is not going anywhere — he is in love with Catherine and therefore as "caught" as a person can be. Amanda is caught too — unable to pry herself away from this ongoing spectacle. She's always running away from someone, yet she's always running to Catherine and Ernest. Catherine is caught in the web of the racist and misogynist world around her and asserting control in the only ways she knows how — by making art and attempting to kill her husband.

Jones asks the reader to consider how relationships might impede the creative process, particularly for women; how men and women are never on equal footing in a relationship; how the same goes for Black women and their white peers. The Birdcatcher is deeply philosophical, and so funny in the delivery it begs to be read twice. It's eminently quotable and had me from Amanda's description of Catherine in her nightgown, remarking on how deceptively innocent and sweet she looks, such that "you could eat her up," followed by the declaration:

"Astronomers say that even galaxies eat each other; so why not let's eat this sweet bitch."

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in October 2022, and has been updated for the October 2023 edition. Click here to go to this issue.