Holy Cow
David Duchovny
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Fiction, General Fiction/Humor
Themes: Anthropomorphism, Fables, Religious Themes
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Description
The cow Elsie Bovary is fairly content on the small dairy farm where she lives... and might have stayed that way had she not snuck out of the stable one night and seen the Box God, the talking screen the humans worship, and its horrific scenes of something called a "slaughterhouse." Suddenly, she knows what happened to the mother who disappeared one day - and what will eventually happen to her friends, and to her. But after showing her damnation, the Box God offers salvation when it tells her of a land where cattle are worshipped: India. Along with the pig Jerry (a recent convert to Judaism, who prefers to be called Shalom) and Tom (a scrawny turkey looking for a way to permanently avoid the Thanksgiving cull, and who is remarkably adept at using a cell phone), Elsie sets out on the journey of a lifetime.
Review
Holy Cow has a fun, original concept, but seems a little unsure of what it wants to do with its setup. In the meantime, it dithers around with amusing (more or less) tangents and asides from the narrator Elsie, whose worldview is remarkably human most of the time; she even drops hints about what actress she'd want to play her should the book become a movie. Even a silly story - and this is indeed a silly, often slapstick story, despite the odd attempt at depth and profundity - requires some suspension of disbelief to enjoy, but it kept tripping me up, if not with Elsie's too-human voice than with other characters also being too human to be animals, or with plain physical improbabilities, like Elsie being a milking cow despite not having been bred or given birth. An afterword by the author tries to paper over these issues, but two problems mar this effort. First, by the time I reach the afterword, I've read the book (unless I'm in the bookstore and flipping through to see how it ends.) Second, if technicalities are preventing me from enjoying an otherwise lighthearted, clearly unrealistic tale, then something else must be wrong. After all, I regularly suspend dibelief to believe far more improbable things, such as sound traveling through space or giant winged reptiles breathing fire (or vast alien conspiracies.) But I just couldn't maintain that suspension here. The book just felt like too much puff and style with too little substance and action, not helped by the ending (no spoilers, though it rendered much of the journey moot... or, should I say, mooo-t.)