hen we go down into the world of Kelly Link, we go way down; it
is a long journey down to there. "The underworld," she tells us in a story
called "The Girl Detective," "is everything I've been telling you." The
underworld is Hades, it is memory and desire, it is a cauldron containing
all the stories that never quite reached the light because Orpheus looked
back. It is all the stories in Stranger Things Happen, which contains
most of the stories Kelly Link has yet published.
As with the best writers of her generation—those who are now 30
or so and just entering the years of creative pomp—it is very nearly
impossible to describe Link's work in terms of the old categories: SF,
fantasy, horror, supernatural, gothic. ... Like her peers (the oldest
of them probably being the now-hoary Jonathan Lethem, who is at least 37),
she knows intimately the genres of old, the genres which sustained us for
nearly two centuries and are now in managed care; she knows them, loves
them clearly, and uses them with utter ruthlessness to gain her ends.
Whatever those ends may be. I do not think Kelly Link much wishes
to be easy to describe. It is possible, however, to suggest a few things
she is not, so far as the 11 stories here collected, plus the few
which have appeared elsewhere, depose. As we've already suggested, they
are not SF or fantasy or horror, in any traditional sense. They do not
display much of the doctrinal coherence of mimetic realism; nor do they
play gingerly with isms (surrealism, magic realism, postmodernism, jism-ism) after the fashion of noli me tangere writers of the late 20th
century like John Updike or Stephen Millhauser (one is now increasingly
inclined to call them authors of Fine Fiction). And although they deal
with situations of profound anxiety, her stories are not anxious.
This is important. For the past couple of centuries, the authors
of the Western World have wrestled like Laocoons with what Harold Bloom
neatly and definitely termed "the anxiety of influence," the harried
wrestling with all the mothers and fathers of Western literature who had
already done it, had already said everything first. The writers of 1950
are still caught in the coils of trying to say it new, and their work
reeks of the anxiety that they are just regurgitating Ma and Pa. In 2001,
Link's work borrows from everywhere, from every parent imaginable, and it
doesn't give a stuff.
Words as comfortable as old shoes
Take "Shoe and Marriage" (2000), a loose meditation on the
isomorphies of Fetish and Love, whose changing glyphs pop up like islets
in the channels of desire, where they are cleansed, maybe. It is in three
main parts. Part One reads a bit like a revisionist fantasy by (say)
Angela Carter, or (maybe) Karen Joy Fowler: a prince juggles his love for
the large-footed cinder maiden he married, and his obsession with tiny
feet. Part Two reads like (say) Donald Barthelme: in a honeymoon suite,
newlyweds watch a beauty contest on TV. The various contestants are a
lexicon bricolage of postmodern strangenesses of modern America:
Miss Virginia and Miss Michigan are Siamese twins. Miss
Maryland wants to be in Broadway musicals. Miss Montana is an arsonist.
She is in love with fire. Miss Texas is a professional hit woman. She
performs exorcisms on the side. She says that she is keeping her eye on
Miss New Jersey.
It is all hilarious, forgiving, wise.
Part Three reads a bit like Steve Erickson, or like one of the
less well-known European fabulists, Villy Sorensen perhaps: the widow of a
dictator, who may be the dictator in disguise, performs herself daily in
the shoe museum dedicated to her tyrant husband's memory. And there is a
tiny Part Four, told in clear: a fortuneteller reads the shoes of a young
married couple, tells them that they will be all right, that they will be
"comfortable together, like a pair of old shoes."
None of it exactly adds up, because the story is exactly more than
the sum of its parts. Others, like the brilliant "Louise's Ghost" (new to
this volume), are more straightforward: two women named Louise sort, and
fail to sort, their lives; the last moment of the tale, when they are
together again in memory, all the things that add their lives up coming
together in a pair together, is far more moving than the words that tell
it.
Struggling toward an elusive ending
But most of Stranger Things Happen, as the title indicates,
moves in the other direction, toward stories that eschew any resolution
of story and discourse, beginning and end. Indeed, many of them—"Water
off a Black Dog's Back" (1995); "The Specialist's Hat" (1998), which won a
1999 World Fantasy Award; "Flying Lessons" (1995); "Travels with the Snow
Queen" (1996), which won a 1997 James Tiptree Jr. Award; "Survivor's Ball;
or, The Donner Party" (1998)—end as though, in the final words of one of
them, to end the written part of a story is to step "off the edge of the
known world."
In this, Link is a bit like Jonathan Carroll, the seeming
incoherence of whose endings may well be deliberate; but there is one
writer above all whose example (whether directly or not I have no idea)
she seems to have absorbed to the uttermost. This is the British writer
Robert Aickman (1914-1981), whose "Strange Stories" also carry the reader
from normal-seeming outsets into disruptive end sequences which do not add
up. Aickman is very quiet about this; his stories are secret devastations
of our presumption that stories have endings, that lives add up, that (in
the end) we can even begin to understand the stories that are telling us.
Kelly Link is much noisier than Aickman. She incorporates fairy
tales, with all their clattering baggage, into the understories of most of
her work; she has available a wide range of story-pregnant takes of
American life in the new century; she obsessively (or mischievously) plays
with Body Parts (lots of her protagonists are missing bits) and
unpleasant dogs (who incessantly haunt the background of the stories
collected here); her protagonists, most of them female, treat sex with
redeeming casual frankness; she is bright, supple, haunted, dark, and only
cruel when (occasionally) she loses control.
But, in the end, like Aickman, and with a similar valient gaiety
of mien, Link is a storyteller about the end of Story. For most writers,
storylines are a kind of Ariadne's Thread; they lead us out of darkness
into the light. For Aickman, and for Link, it is the reverse; for them,
after centuries of stories, so many stories it is maybe impossible to tell
a new one, it is time to reverse the thread. Time to unravel the skin of
story.
Behind the last word (Kelly Link says) is the old dark.
