Pigtopia

Not all reads can be what you hope. Pigtopia, by Kitty Fitzgerald, is the story of a macrocephalic man who, due to the abuses heaped on him by his mother, thinks that he is a pig-man. Sounds like a great setup (to me, anyway), and it begins well enough, with his strange, subterranean Pig Palace, where he lives with a "tribe" of pigs bearing names redolent of medieval gods, with the great sow Freya as their chief.

Clearly, Fitzgerald is heavily influenced by Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, with two narrators telling the same story, but separated by a gulf of understanding. As with Faulker, one narrator (the "hogboy" Jack Plum) is fairly inarticulate, but here, he not unintelligent, just deeply stunted by his limited contact with the outside world; other narrator (Holly Lock, a lonely girl who lives down the road) is likewise intelligent, but while worldly in so far as a young teen can be, she is limited by the perspective of her years. Both, though, make tragically bad choices as a result of their limited knowledge of the world, and the story becomes more gruesome than compelling at points. As an exercise in point-of-view for a writing course, it succeeds marvelously. As a novel, though, it comes up quite short.