The Wild Wild Midwest: On Andromeda Romano-Lax’s “Annie and the Wolves”
Andromeda Romano-Lax | Annie and the Wolves | Soho Press | 2021 | 408 Pages
A prominent role in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show made Annie Oakley an international touring sensation and an icon of the American West, but Oakley was, in fact, a Midwesterner. Born in rural Darke County, she and husband Frank are, today, buried in the county seat of Greenville, Ohio. Posthumously made the subject of the Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun, Oakley, her shooting prowess, and her Midwestern roots have largely been overlooked when it comes to historical and literary fiction.
Andromeda Romano-Lax’s novel Annie and the Wolves beckons Oakley to center stage once more, though not as an overlooked figure deserving greater recognition in the frontier mythos but as the survivor of unreported sexual assaults, an unheralded feminist organizer and, most surprisingly, a time traveler. The discovery of a diary belonging to early psychotherapist Josef Breuer, as well as a clutch of correspondence from Annie, his secret patient, reveals that, in addition to having suffered repeated abuse as a child, Annie Oakley possessed (later in life) the ability to relive defining moments from her past.
In one of the novel’s most prescient moments, Breuer tells Annie, “It’s only by reliving the past that we are relieved of it.” With Annie and the Wolves, Romano-Lax has authored a reckoning tale for the historical traumas that still shape America today.
Strict adherence to the Western genre would dictate that Annie use her power to seek revenge on her abusers—the otherwise unnamed “Wolves” of the title. But while Annie’s travels are motivated by vengeance for much of the novel, Annie and the Wolves is not, strictly speaking, a Western. Instead, this modern Mid-Western largely takes place in turn of the twentieth century Ohio and a rural community in present-day Minnesota, neither exactly being the Wild West of Buffalo Bill’s imagination.
And what of the shoot-out between Annie and the black-hat clad bad guys who did her wrong? Were this a Western, such a scene might serve as a cathartic and just resolution, but here it never happens. In fact, the novel builds toward actively avoiding the gun play that seems destined to occur in the small Minnesota town where the novel’s other central characters live.
Ruth, a lapsed doctoral student whose dissertation on the famed markswoman remains unfinished, finds herself not only at the center of an academic quest to verify the Oakley letters (thereby rewriting history) but also with a prominent role in exposing a local child molester who, in addition to having been Ruth’s neighbor, frequently abused her now-deceased younger sister. Ruth is aided in both accounts by Reece, a high school student handy at sharpshooting computer problems and solving who-dunnits. Like Oakley, Ruth and Reece both have visions related to traumatic events—though theirs portend a school shooting perpetrated by a recent victim of the novel’s present-day “Wolf.” Knowing that Ruth’s former boyfriend Scott and Reece himself will be caught in the crossfire, the historian and her unlikely sidekick desperately seek to alter the immediate future by changing the near past.
For Ruth, this means travelling back in time to prevent her sister’s suicide. When she’s only able to delay that tragic death by a few years and is subsequently unable to stop the school shooting at all, Ruth takes a more direct path and confronts the abuser at gunpoint. As is the case with Annie, Ruth ends up not taking justice into her own hands by shooting the Wolf. Instead, she has him arrested and imprisoned, a bittersweet resolution that she admits doesn’t quell the anger that has grown within her throughout the novel. Nonetheless, Ruth goes on to finish her book on Oakley, which, given its ground-breaking insights resulting from the rediscovered diary and letters, brings her national acclaim and the confidence to pursue a life relieved from the past.
Notably, several Native American characters figure into the novel, including brief appearances from one of Annie’s Wild West co-stars. During many of her earliest attempts to travel back to her childhood, Annie finds herself time and again coming to a “pivot point,” the tent of famed Húŋkpapȟa Lakota holy man and leader Sitting Bull, “the only person in whom [Annie] can confide.” One particular trip to the past finds Annie in 1889, picnicking with two friends and following directions printed by the Buckeye Paranormal Society. Their destination? An “Indian” burial site said to be haunted by the young woman buried there. If that last sentence has you rolling your eyes, it is worth noting that Romano-Lax manages to avoid the trope’s major pitfalls. Rather than go along with the sensationalized exploitation of Native genocide that produces “Indian ghosts” à la Pet Sematary, Annie reflects on the very real violence settlers perpetrated against Indigenous women and solidifies her resolve to confront her own abuser.
Ruth’s storyline involves Joe Grandlouis, a former graduate school colleague and brief love interest who refuses to be exoticized simply because he is Indigenous. Himself a professional historian, Grandlouis proves a more willing confidant than Scott, the man whom Ruth is trying to save by preventing the school shooting she’s seen in visions. In a perfectly meta moment, Grandlouis tells Ruth that “Americans are obsessed with time travel because they—we—feel guilty, and for good reason. . . . We’re a nation awakening slowly to the truth of the bad things that’ve been done and wishing there were more reset buttons.”
Annie and the Wolves is a remarkable feat of plotting in that it braids together heavy subject matter Oakley’s biography, the history of psychoanalysis, sexual abuse, gun culture, and, yes, time travel, without becoming convoluted or pedantic. Romano-Lax so skillfully navigates parallel storylines and multiple perspectives that, even at just over four hundred pages, this work of speculative literary fiction, like time, flies by.