Having recently slogged through few drably written works of non-fiction (perhaps I’ll write about one or both…or not), I was grateful to join Ellen Gaydos in farm fields and pig pens, in the humid heat and crisp cold, on sleep challenged nights and lolling weekend days off the job.
Pig Years, is so much more than a personal narrative, a memoir of a farmhand, and it isn’t just about pigs. It is neither a chronology of daily activities or an almanac of daily temperatures or rainfall. Rather, Gaydos has given us in this book, a compact, succinct, and evocative meditation on large topics such as social and economic differences in our urban versus rural settings, perceived versus actual abundance, belonging and loneness, and the spiritual and existential reality of the life/death/life cycle.
A writer of lesser skill could attempt such an endeavor but would not likely have succeeded—interesting though a mere journal of a farmhand might be, Gaydos’s ability to make this book about things that include but aren’t just vegetables and weeds, and pigs and chickens is what makes this book a pleasure to read.
In this book the what—the cycles of planting, growing, tending and caring, then harvest, and ultimately decay, is a means by which the narrator not only makes sense of her place in this simultaneously abundant and sparse world, but also establishes a way for we readers to consider our place. As a farmhand, the narrator facilitates coming into fullness and eventual fulfillment of a seed to leaf then fruit, of a chick to its egg-laying expectations, of a pig to a freezer full of meat that’ll last all winter and then some. She also recognizes and thus facilitates for we readers dichotomous truths about how we, as a society, get what we consume.
Such truths are not laid out, they’re not explained or described. They come in scenes deftly wrought by Gaydos’s hand as experienced by her narrator at the market, for example. The farmer’s market in Union Square in New York City, an urban market like many I have frequented in Denver, Madison, LA, or Charlottesville (assuming that by buying there I’m getting closer to the growing of the veg I eat, that perusing the offerings ensures I’m supporting a local farmer). Our farmhand narrator and her co-farmhand, having driven nearly through the night to get to the city, piling drowsiness on top of exhaustion, arrive and set up to serve the needs of urban buyers. The contrast is especially acute in the “profusion of people at the market” including the woman who points out to the narrator “’Ooh, you’re dirty,’” (100) and eyeing the soda drink in the narrator’s hand offers, “‘you’ll feel [a] difference when you’re healthier.’” (100) The farm workers lives, the “non-descript toil” (10) required by other humans is rarely considered, and certainly almost never seen as effort of questionable return—monetary or otherwise.
Further contrast is the sense of perceived abundance, which glosses over the reality of loss and decay in a rural town such as the one in which our narrator works and lives.
Being in this place where things are mined out, vegetables grown, cows milked, and most of it trucked away is being close to a store of fertility, fertility for life led elsewhere. In this way the countryside, flanked by empty storefronts and abandoned mills, contains riches…but it does not insulate from poverty…[b]eyond the obvious [quarry] cavities in the ground, so much of what is taken or sold is a depletion.” (81-82)
Not much comes back. Regeneration, reinvestment, revitalization seems not to happen in the places from which so much is expected in terms of continued growth. Prosperity may happen only in patches, while elsewhere things wither and rot.
Is it inevitable, natural perhaps, that it will be the lot of some to labor in outpost communities so those in “centers” may thrive? Despite the contradictions what matters may be as our narrator says, [i]n the fostering of this raw thing—life—lies the reward.” (18)
Reward itself indeed lies in every raw page of this beautifully crafted book.
Reviewed: Ellen Gaydos, Pig Years. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022)