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Death and the Librarian |
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his collection of short fiction from Esther Friesner contains 12 stories, including two Nebula Award winners, 1995's "Death and the Librarian" (which gives the collection its title) and 1996's "A Birthday," and one previously unpublished story, "Ilion," written in reaction to the events of 9/11. Although Friesner has the reputation of being a humorist, it seems worth noting that none of the three above-mentioned stories are humor pieces; of the remaining nine, only five can be so classified. Readers familiar with the funny Friesner will find another side of the author on display in these pages ... along with plenty of her trademark in-your-face situational comedy and wordplay. Ten of the stories are fantasies; two are science fiction.
Both science-fiction tales are set in bleak, near-future dystopias. "A Birthday" posits a grotesque solution to the abortion controversy: DNA samples taken from aborted fetuses are used to create a virtual infant, which ages and develops a personality just as though it were alive, appearing to the mother whenever she uses a computer, ATM or any CRT device at all, until the child turns six, when it is, apparently, erased. Thus does the mother learn that her decision cost an actual human life. In "Chanoyu," an android created to help childless couples conceive and give birth develops emotions not foreseen in its original programming when a new owner turns its talents to a darker purpose.
Friesner's fantasies are generally more lighthearted, though never without some serious underlying intent. In "Jesus at the Bat," God sends his only begotten son to pitch for a hapless team of Little Leaguers. "True Believer" features a boy able to bring his favorite superheroes—and villains—to life with a thought. And "A Pig's Tale" traces the future career of the Duchess's baby from the "Pig and Pepper" chapter of Alice in Wonderland, in which, readers will recall, the squalling infant turns into a pig. ("I thought it would," says the Cheshire Cat.)
But Friesner also writes fantasies that are more overtly serious. "All Vows" is a ghost story in which a young runaway girl, a Vietnam vet and an elderly Vietnamese woman help each other come to terms with their unacknowledged pasts. In "Death and the Librarian," the Grim Reaper comes to collect a decidedly uncowed corpse-to-be, a woman determined not to go gently into that good night. And in "Ilion," a writer and an angel struggle to make sense of the death and devastation caused by the act of terrorism that resulted in the collapse of the Twin Towers.
Over-sentimental journeys
Friesner's intelligence and passion come across clearly in her fiction, and her writing is often marked (though sometimes marred) by striking poetic imagery and clever phrasing. But almost all these stories, regardless of whether they are humorous or serious, fantasy or science fiction, suffer from the same flaws. The first is prolixity. Freisner piles her material on thickly, joke upon joke or event upon event, so that the impression one receives is of a writer who equates quantity with quality. If one rather obvious joke on mad-scientist stereotypes in "True Believer" is funny, then 10 jokes on the same topic must be 10 times as funny. It ain't necessarily so. Stories like "Death and the Librarian" take too long to begin, meandering about as if the attention of a reader can be taken for granted, while others, such as "How to Make Unicorn Pie," take too long to end, drawing out the obvious. "Love, Crystal and Stone," a self-consciously literary homage to Lorca, packed to bursting with gorgeous writing, takes too long, period.
This tendency toward overkill is rendered worse when combined, as it often is, with a moralizing impulse. The result is a story like "A Pig's Tale," which, while aspiring to nimbly satirize the critical impulse to wring meaning from art, instead tendentiously belabors the thesis that such analysis invariably spoils rather than enhances one's appreciation of the artwork in question. That may or may not be true, but rarely is one's appreciation of an argument enhanced by being hit over the head with it repeatedly. That Friesner makes Lewis Carroll the victim of this tedious approach while purporting to rescue him from it (he seems to have done pretty well in his own defense for nearly 150 years) is an irony that unfortunately escapes the author.
But the worst sin in these stories is their reliance upon cheap sentimentality as the means of winning readers over to their moral point of view. A child sexually abused and brutally murdered; a woman is driven to madness and suicide by guilt over her aborted child; the ghosts of dead children gathered like starving puppies about a woman dispensing dreams like doggie biscuits from the pages of old books; a writer sick with loss and fear shaping Ground Zero ashes into the body of a child—surely a critic would have to be an unfeeling monster to subject such characters and scenes to literary analysis, much less judgment. Nevertheless, perhaps there is something equally unpleasant and even fictionally dishonest in making calculated use of such tragedies, so many of which prominently feature children, to play upon the sympathies of readers.
Acknowledging in her introduction that some readers may still find the events of 9/11 too disturbing to read about, Friesner leaves the choice of whether to read the story "Ilion" up to them. This is disingenuous, for readers always have the choice not to read a particular story, and there is nothing in "Ilion" that is not present in other stories in the collection, save its overt subject. Friesner writes, "I dealt with September 11 in the idiom of fantasy, but I did not do so to trivialize the horror of what happened." Yet "the horror of what happened" is precisely what is trivialized in this and other stories, not because of the idiom employed but instead because of the way that the author (with the best of intentions) uses universal tragedies as emotional arguments in support of her own particular conclusions, conclusions that do not arise out of the circumstances of the stories, but—like pseudo-profound but actually fuzzy-headed morals—are imposed upon them, often to bathetic effect ... as, for example, this from "Ilion": "If we don't keep faith with the living, we'll never keep faith with the dead."
It's a truism that humor is in the ear of the beholder; I suppose the same is true of all the qualities that attract readers to fiction. Ms. Friesner has many fans, and I'm sure they will enjoy the stories collected here. I wish I could have enjoyed them more myself. — Paul
Also in this issue: Resurgence, by Charles Sheffield
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