On 'Alice, or the Wild Girl'

“Never love a wild thing,” Holly Golightly advises. Because “you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky.” This is the problem examined at length in Michael Robert Liska’s debut novel. With Alice, or the Wild Girl, he has built an expansive historical tale around a fabular hypothetical. In the novel’s imagining, a girl named Alice Kelly is discovered by the American navy on a small island in the South Pacific in 1856, having been orphaned and stranded there on her way from Boston to San Francisco. Lieutenant Henry Aaron Bird takes her into his care, or, as others might see it, takes her captive. She is mad and close enough to savage that she must be pacified with laudanum, though she is coaxed sometimes into speaking and remembering her American past. Through storms and adventures on other islands, she is brought back to Portsmouth, Virginia, where much interest awaits her. Billed as the “female Robinson Crusoe”, she is taken on tour by Bird, and they settle in San Francisco, where an extravagant musical based roughly on her life makes her yet more famous. Bird enjoys his own career as a celebrity while keeping her locked up, because she can be shown around but can’t behave among polite grown-ups. Inevitably, she resents this. Encouraged by the examples of women that Bird would never approve as role models, she decides to do her own thing.