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.
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