The Good Good Pig, by Sy Montgomery

Now, don’t get me wrong: even though I’m not really an animal lover, I’m not an animal hater either. I can see why people develop such passions for animals, I just don’t have those same feelings myself—much like baseball, say, or American Idol. I don’t fault Montgomery for her love for Christopher Hogwood, the pig she rescued as a runt and basically regarded as a child for the fifteen or so years he lived with her and her husband; I simply fault her for her narcisstic and, frankly, rather dull need to share this love with the rest of us.

In the best animal books—I’m thinking of James Herriott here, or the spare, easygoing children’s stories of Dick King Smith—animals show us our human foibles, our human problems, and show us, through their mute compassion and simple loyalty, the ways out of those problems. They help us overcome grief and despair, reach out to others, and feel at peace with the world. Montgomery wants to join the ranks of these writers, wants to show us how Christopher the pig brought her joy and comfort and happiness—a noble goal, and one I wouldn’t dare to argue—but she lacks the self-effacing humility with which Herriott and King-Smith step into the background, letting their animal characters, sometimes quite literally, speak for themselves. In the best animal books, the animals are on center stage, guiding us quietly but surely towards resolving our own petty dramas.

In Montgomery’s book, instead, it is Christopher, not the narrator herself, who is forced to play a bit part. Ostensibly the focus, his own healing characteristics are upstaged by Montgomery’s whining, Montgomery’s opinions, and, most of all, Montgomery’s insistence on telling us how Christopher helped her. I’m surprised that Montgomery, as a writer, hasn’t learned this critical lesson: show, don’t tell.

I’m sure Christopher was a great pig. I’m sure Montgomery, and her friends, and her family, loved him. I’m sure he was an influence for love in the world. I just wish that the book to prove these statements were not so full of explications and assertions and trite, hackneyed recitations of feelings: that is, not so desperate to prove these statements. Instead of becoming a tome of love and a tribute to a dedicated friend, the book, for me, was a tribute to a shrill, insistent human, to a liberal animal-adoring ideology, to an irritating character hardly redeemed by the pig she kept. Christopher worked his magic without words, you know; perhaps it would have been best for Montgomery to do the same.