Review: "Impossible Owls" by Brian Phillips

Impossible Owls, the first book by American essayist Brian Phillips is a wonderfully strange and brutally brilliant book that tries and mostly succeeds in filtering our modern American consciousness down to it’s finest and purest distillation. I knew little about Phillips before I picked this book up, but FSG Originals has a pretty good track record, more so with its nonfiction than with its fiction, and with this book, it does not disappoint. Covering a wide variety of topics and subject matters, from people to places, contained within these playful and heavily researched essays is a snapshot of desires, hopes and despairs that are familiar and somewhat alien, painfully honest and finally, transformative. Much like I would do with any short story collection I read and review, I will be picking out my favorite pieces from this collection, and while I like some more than others, there was not a weak link in this book, which is a good because all of these range in length from 30 to over 60 pages. It’s starts off amazingly with “Out in the Great Alone” where Phillips flies to Alaska to cover the 2013 Iditarod Dog Sled Race. When Alaska comes to mind, I, like most people, think of the stories of Jack London and how cut off the state is from the what is seemingly the rest of civilization (Phillips talks about it’s paltry population density, which plays right into our preconceived notions), but in following the “mushers” by plane with his guide and two eccentric Frenchman, he expounds on the importance of the race to a nearly abandoned village, what mushers hallucinate while on the trail and the types of people who end up winning. Throughout this and other essays in this collection, like “Sea of Crises”, which links sumo wrestling with the suicide of Yukio Mishima and “The Little Gray Wolf Will Come” about Russian animator Yuri Norstein, whose volatile career is defined by an unfinished cartoon based on Gogol’s “The Overcoat”, I was reminded of the nonfiction (and fiction) films of Werner Herzog, who is mostly interested in people with odd obsessions who go beyond what is humanly possible to excel at something very few people are even familiar with, let alone are good at. Phillips also attempts in roundabout way to pontificate on our current time, with both “Lost Highway” about Route 66 and the Roswell incident and “Man-Eaters” about his trip to India to visit a tiger preserve having references to Trump’s election (thankfully, these feelings don’t override the narrative of each essay). But where Phillips really shines for me is in his personal recollections, like “In the Dark: Science Fiction and Small Towns”, where a trip to see Wraith of the Titans, his love affair with Star Trek Enterprise and his troubled love of The X-Files are ways, both cynical and optimistic, to reflect on who technology has changed all of us and “But Not Like Your Typical Love Story” the star of the collection, where the Phillips recounts the life of his childhood home’s most famous resident and connects it with his own mixed feelings about living there, and living in general. These are pitch perfect essays, both fascinating and full of life, wit and tons of heart. 

Rating: 5/5