Ms. Hen reviews Portrait of the Walrus by a Young Artist

Portrait of the Walrus by a Young Artist

Laurie Foos

1997

Coffee House Press

Ms. Hen read this novel several years ago when she took a class with Laurie Foos at the Boston Center for Adult Education when she was a student. She decided to read it again because she was doing research for a speech, and she wanted to refresh her memory of the book. It had been about seventeen years since the first time she read it, and that is a lot of time in a young hen’s life.

The first time Ms. Hen read this novel, she was dazzled by the magic of the story. This novel is about a teenage girl named Frances, who with lives with her mother and her stepfather, and her family is obsessed with bowling and pizza. She wants to be an artist like her father who had passed away. She sculpts sharks, but one day she goes to the aquarium and sees some walruses mating there, and she become obsessed with them. She writes fevered poetry about the walruses, and the walruses escape from the aquarium and chase her and her family friend/ employee, Bessie down the highway.

When she took the class with Laurie, she had a chance to ask her how the walruses escaped from the aquarium. Laurie said it was simply magic.

When Ms. Hen read the novel this time, she paid attention to Frances' desire to be an artist; however, she has to overcome the fact that she lives immersed in the world of bowling with her stepfather’s chain of bowling alleys. Frances’ father was an unstable artist who ate voraciously and came to the point where he never left the basement where he sculpted his chainsaw men, which made him a star in the art world. Frances becomes unstable also when she sees the walruses mating, and does not leave her room or bathe. Her mother does not understand art, and her stepfather is just as bad as her mother, but Bessie wants to help Frances, and she does what she can.

When she goes to the bowling alley with her family, Frances meets the man who makes pizza, Dirk, and they have a strange encounter. Dirk breaks into the house and attacks Frances, which disturbed Ms. Hen when she read it this time.  There is a lot of teenage angst in this novel, but Frances does not go to school, which Ms. Hen thinks is curious, and she also does not have any friends, which is unusual for a teenager. Ms. Hen tried to figure out why, but she thinks her father might have wanted her to be homeschooled, but that was never explained in the novel.

This novel has a lot of fairy tale qualities to it, and it’s magical and weird and full of sexual innuendo with Frances inspecting everyone’s underwear lines under their pants. Ms. Hen didn’t know if she would like this novel after reading it so many years ago, but for the most part, she did! It’s charming and odd, and that’s the type of thing that Ms. Hen fancies.