The Reconstruction

Categories: Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Fiction

Here’s an oddball little title that has stuck with me for years:  Claudia Casper’s debut novel The Reconstruction.  It begins as a well-done but fairly predictable story of a woman at a loss at the loss of her marriage.  But midway through, things get considerably more quirky and charming.

Artist Margaret has been plunged into a stagnating depression since her marriage fell apart.  She’s not working or doing anything else too constructive until she is hired to make a museum diorama figure of a (presumed) female Australopithecus afarensis hominid.  This recreation is to show the hominid pausing, half-turned, as recorded in the famous fossil footprints of Laetoli. 

Holed up in her home, she gradually becomes obsessed with her subject, trying to imagine the unimaginably distant life of the hominid she is sculpting.  This leads to some startling scenes, where Margaret privately practices chimpanzee grimaces in the kitchen during a dinner party for her irritatingly too-concerned friends, adopts a chimp swagger for courage as she walks to the dentist, or chimp-hoots outside a bar.  Slowly, her work and this odd form of self-therapy pull Margaret out of her depression.  She begins an affair with an old lover and begins to work on her own art again.

The timid hominid pausing (frightened? bemused? fascinated?) on the ash-covered plain of Laetoli is a wonderful metaphor to explore the character of Margaret, whose life is at such a significant pause.  It’s certainly original and peculiarly appealing.