The title of Rob Roensch's new novel from Outpost 19, The World and the Zoo, refers to the book's two subjects of inquiry, a modest endeavor, the one used as a lens through which to view the other. It is a book about the act of looking, about being looked at—and about going unnoticed.
     Zack is in his early twenties and lives in Oklahoma City and comes from a background of wealth. Instead of taking an internship at a law firm that would move him one step closer to the life prepared for him by his father, he decides on a whim to apply for a summer internship at the zoo. It is a competitive internship that he has landed, we learn, because of the prominence of his last name, and his lack of directionality immediately distinguishes him from his fellow interns, all of them graduate school-bound in science and zoology. The aspects of this novel that are unusual are offset by ones that are more than customary, the novel serving as a how-to book on constructing a tight plot arc with just enough chaos to keep readers guessing: somebody is stealing animals from the zoo, Zack meets and begins dating a lovely but hesitant coworker, Caroline, who's dealing with money problems and her brother's terminal illness, Zack's friends in his previous life are beginning to show the rotten ideologies that provide us with one of his disincentives for entering that world, and Zack himself exhibits erratic and scary behavior. As early as the first sentence of the book, he admits to losing a sense of time, and, at a party that night, he proceeds to maybe slice his thumb open with a knife on a dare before losing track of a few hours. "It was like waking up from a dream," the opening chapter ends, "and finding myself on a path halfway through a dark forest." Unclear whether or not Zack is aware he's paraphrasing the opening tercet of Dante's The Inferno. Because the narration is in first-person, we as readers experience these gaps along with Zack, feel hesitant ourselves to trust our speaker with handling his own future, much less exotic animals.
      One common tip for fiction writing is to set your story in an unusual place, one that will immediately pique readers' interest. Somehow, aside from Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo and maybe Jurassic Park, I have never read a story that explored this setting before, so one of the book's fascinations is getting to peek behind the curtain of a spectacle usually arranged to specifically prevent both viewer and subject from doing so. Roensch is too good of a writer, however, to save Zack from the ways in which work turns even the most unusual attractions routine. "I stopped and looked up and looked behind me and could not remember taking the steps I'd just taken," he offers, reminiscent of a vignette about Tolstoy dusting his couch that Viktor Shklovsky gave as an example of the numbing effects of habituation in his 1917 essay "Art as Technique." "I'd been at the zoo a handful of weeks and already I'd slipped back into nowhere. Everyone gets bored and tired, I told myself. Just because you get bored and tired and stupid once doesn't mean the world disappears."
      The novel organizes itself a bit like a bestiary, short individual chapters often focusing on one species of animal in the zoo—or one particular human or type of human in Zack's new sphere of discovery. One defamiliarizing gesture through which Zack staves off habituation is the sublime attempt to get into and represent the mind of an animal, their way of moving through this simulation of their world. The novel's simplest of recognitions chide the decades that readers have gone without considering them, like, "All animals, even the strangest to us, know themselves as normal." The bestiary entry for the giraffe reminds us, "The giraffe's height alone does not make imagining what it would feel like to be a giraffe interesting; what does is the distance between the creature's soul-brain… and the earth. Your attention is most often in the trees, much like a bird." There is something about the zoo as a setting, Zach finds, that plays host to a unique variant on people-watching: "A zoo crowd's collective attention is directed away from itself toward the surrounding animal-displaying-and-concealing landscape. In other words, people go to the zoo to look at animals, not to be in relation to each other, so there is a calm feeling to entering a zoo crowd, the way the jackfish in the center of the school must feel." At times like that, and in the title, the comparison between humans and our fellow species is direct; whenever it's not, the margins of the novel are filling up with resonant implication.
      Whatever suspicions we have about our narrator's mental health are accompanied by the increasing pause we're given about the ethics of his spiritual journey. His accepting of an internship offered to him because of his father's status has prevented somebody else from using it as a means to achieving their desired career. This status is also what causes the operations manager of the zoo to call him in for private conversations, showing that he would have to try a lot harder to escape the privilege that attends to him everywhere—if that was what he really wanted. His racist buddy from undergrad sends him a video to show him his life is going perfect, no surprise. Gestures like riding his bike to work to avoid having to accept a free car from his dad begin to fall flat when we see his girlfriend's family choosing between their house and her brother's medical treatment. These aspects of his characterization are there to complicate contemplation itself, the luxury of it, and they do not go uncommented upon. "'It's just,'" Caroline starts. "'Using a summer to go on a search. Like some king told you to go on a quest. I mean. It's hard enough to get through a day. My friend's textbooks for her nursing classes this summer cost four-hundred dollars.'" It's a book about the type of character that literature has historically placed at the center of its inquiry realizing that, despite his power, he was never the protagonist of the world he has deigned to enter.
      Zack makes explicit that he is using the internship to look for answers, but, as the summer speeds by, his experiences and observations do not seem to be producing anything definite. The entry for the gorilla makes note of how the size of its fingers and the shape of its face affects its ability to pick its nose. "Such observations did not exactly instantly add up to the secret name of God." In the most stunning and blatantly experimental moment in the novel, the penultimate chapter further fragments the short, bestiary-entry chapters into one-sentence observations about a random host of animals, some of them facts, others wilder, figurative observations: "The best way to measure the length of a snake is to photocopy it and measure the copy… The elk has a tree growing up through its skull." One sentence further collapses the chapter's trick into a single lexia—"Even the anaconda needs a wellness exam; even the crickets need to be fed; even the fish need water; even the gorillas need quiet"—a reduction of the novel's search for higher philosophical truths into the overall basicness of the care we require to survive. The chapter ends on a note that repositions the observations' arbitrariness into something like the whole point of the searching: "I don't know what any of this means." When the accumulation of facts and experience fails to locate truths and purpose, a sense of the ineffable is always available, a sense of wonder.