STILL LIFE WITH INSECTS

by Brian Kiteley ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 5, 1989

What might have been a precious or merely self-conscious exercise is brought to life with honesty and a touching simplicity in first-novelist Kiteley's hands: the life story of a man who is an amateur entomologist, each short chapter prefaced by a brief field-note identifying an insect specimen and where he collected it at the time the chapter took place. The result of Kiteley's method is a narrative of nimble economies and continually pleasant allure. We meet Canadian-born Elwyn Farmer one day in 1945 (when he's 43) as he stops along a road to find a specimen of a beetle called Kirby's Backswimmer (Natonecta kirbyi); and from then on, in short pieces that continue up to 1984, we become acquainted with the unpretentious but often moving truths of Farmer's life and those of his family. Farmer would probably have finished his Ph.D. in entomology, if in 1931, his brother Eli hadn't stolen his life savings ""from the bottom of my mother's upright dresser."" Instead, he remains a lifelong amateur collector, although he works professionally as an extermination researcher and inspector for a large and unnamed Canadian grain and flour company. For this work, he travels widely in Canada and the central US, his family must move frequently (""My wife and I lived in five different cities from 1930 to 1969""), and Farmer must play his cards skillfully in the power politics of the industry (he's sometimes ridiculed by the profit-blinded executives above him for being unambitious--and for his strange hobby). It's Farmer's observing intelligence and his quiet, unpretentious decency that most mark his story: from the postwar years when he suffers nervous breakdowns, through the growing up of his two sons, and into the early adulthood of his grandchildren and Farmer's very old age. Brush-strokes of closely watched life are made into a canvas that's part Thoreau, part Thornton Wilder, and part Hemingway-esque poet of quietly but deeply lived life. Small in form (140 pp.) but confident and large in its pleasures and unpresuming depths. A modest gem.

Pub Date: July 5, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Ticknor & Fields/Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1989

Categories: FICTION