"She liked to be brushed, especially with a stiff boar's-bristle brush that went all the way down to her itchy scaly black skin and brought up gigantic flakes of piggy dandruff. She liked to be picked over during a tick hunt." (150)
Toor is into her animals like few novelists before her -- except maybe Jack London. And as a result, Rachel's (very long line of ) men get the raw end of the stick. Being a pet-lover myself, my dogs are as much family as Rachel's pets are. But in the early pages of the book, even I had trouble watching Rachel's life revolve around her pets without thinking it bordered on the pathological. However, the book matures as the author does. And we come to see that Rachel's love for her pets is the love that shapes her life because it is a selfless kind of love. As this idea develops, the Rachel (and the story) grows out of the demanding, forward-thrusting arrogance of youth to a reflectiveness of middle age. Rachel's heavy demands on romantic love ultimately temper her.
So it turns out that The Pig and I is a very easy read. Each chapter starts with what look like home pictures of her now-famous pets. And it reads like a kind of autobiography focused on the author's love life (as it intersects her pet life) from college years to her latter thirties. While Rachel marries, divorces, loves, loses -- all the regular things -- her relationship to her pets remains constant. And each pet -- rat, mouse, dog, pig (her life reads like a Chinese calendar) -- is a character and lots of fun to meet, as we follow along with Rachel in getting to know its ways. That said, the book makes us wait a pretty long time for the titular pig to show up. I found myself wondering, "Where's the pig? Where's the pig?" for about the first hundred pages. Ultimately, it's the author's experience with the behavior of Emma the pig that brings about her greatest self-revelation, and so the pig duly deserves the title credit she gets. Besides, Emma is a nasty, "pig-headed," funny creature well worth the wait.
Meanwhile, each man Rachel becomes involved with gets his own set of superlatives: "I'd never felt so safe, so comfortable in a relationship." And a pattern is set up, so that when you hear the superlatives, you start waiting for the ax to fall. Rachel learns most of her maturing, expansive lessons through loving her pets. That's probably the uniqueness of the book, showing that real growth happens best in the fertile ground of unconditional love.
From pet to pet, from one failed relationship to another, Toor grapples in creative ways with a lot of the relationship questions that plague most singles -- the difference between "settling" and being too picky; how to remain oneself in relationship, or how to be selfless, or how to allow a partner space to be himself; how to be happy single, and the big question: "Why is it so easy to love an animal and so hard to live with a man?"
Like most real human beings (and like Rachel's lovers) Rachel can be funny, entertaining, frustrating, annoying, sympathetic, and at times, totally incomprehensible: "At a certain point," she tells us, "I stopped thinking about dumping Jonathan and instead wanted to marry him." For anyone with failed relationships, The Pig and I will make you feel better and better about yourself with every page because Toor is the queen of failed relationships. And her love life is far from conventional, so that the book also has the added lift of encouragement for anyone standing on the outside of the standard "married with children" arrangement.
