<< Now, God help thee, poor monkey! | Front Page | Deconstruction, Street Style >>
Saturday, October 20, 2007
St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves - short fiction edition
Last year, I read scores of stories that felt ... not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf. It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. If the stories felt airless, why not? When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.
And yet. I read plenty of great stories this year. There isn’t a single one in this book that didn’t delight me, that didn’t make me want to crow, “Oh, man, you gotta read this!” I think of such disparate stories as Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” John Barth’s “Toga Party” and “Wake,” by Beverly Jensen, now deceased, and I think — marvel, really — they paid me to read these! Are you kiddin’ me???
But what I’m getting at is this: that it’s just possible that, for whatever reason–perhaps the co-opting of counterculture by all-powerful pop culture, or the rise of delightful but ultimately destructive TV and movie influences, or the proliferation of editors as interested in gathering the same old “names” as publishing excellent anthologies, or a magazine culture rooted in a paradigm thirty years out of date, or perhaps because space aliens have eaten our brains–a lot of today’s fiction is soft, too vapid, without the requisite intellect behind it, with too many stories that don’t go far enough, and too few stories that come from the margins, the fringes, the places that lie outside of suburban, middle-class America or England or wherever. (I have nothing against retold fairy tales, for example, and write them myself, but can you imagine the gaping hole if no one “retold” another fairy tale for the next thirty years?)
Perhaps also there is too much comfort in our own lives, too many distractions in the form of easy, relatively cheap technology that contribute to this softness–make it easy for us to be satisfied with what we’ve done: content, content, content. Happy with the well-rounded sentences, the fulfilling character arc, the recursive plot. Patting ourselves on the back for miracles never earned, epiphanies bartered for with trinkets and trifles. Thrilled just to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
After such solemn throat-clearing, something ought to be offered up, if only an excerpt:
At first, our pack was all hair and snarl and floor-thumping joy. We forgot the barked cautions of our mothers and fathers, all the promises we’d made to be civilized and ladylike, couth and kempt. We tore through the austere rooms, overturning dresser drawers, pawing through the neat piles of the Stage 3 girls’ starched underwear, smashing light bulbs with our bare fists. Things felt less foreign in the dark. The dim bedroom was windowless and odourless. We remedied this by spraying exuberant yellow streams all over the bunks. We jumped from bunk to bunk, spraying. We nosed each other midair, our bodies buckling in kinetic laughter. The nuns watched us from the corner of the bedroom, their tiny faces pinched with displeasure.
Comments
If the story is being told by a wolf-girl, even an ex-wolf-girl now recalling her early happy days, should it really be “kinetic” laughter? The extended excerpt has got “eating their silled fruit pies”, “They had ostracized the local wolves by having [human characteristics]”—wouldn’t it be that the wolves ostracized them?—and “Our pack grew up in a green purgatory”. Good premise, but the language seems out of control, overdone.
Besides which the theme seems quite tired.
There’s even a self-help book entitled “Women Who Run With The Wolves” and that’s without mentioning the French film “Innocence” which beautifully handles the onset of womanhood and the loss of innocence in a similar fairy-tale-ish, Faux-YA style.
Please do not forget Jean Craighead George’s 1972 YA novel “Julie of the Wolves,” about an Inuit teen who escapes from an oppressive patriarchal social order and lives among anarcho-syndicalist (feminist?) wolves. In 5th grade, I was in a reading group at school where we took turns reading it aloud. I think it was my turn when the near-rape scene came along (I vividly remember that Julie’s arranged-marriage husband “bleats” the words “We will mate!"), but it’s possible that we were all so traumatized that every one of us now remembers that it was our turn.
Good premise, but the language seems out of control, overdone
Um, is this the “review a tiny excerpt” book club? What exactly is being gained here?
Also, Hermann Hesse’s classic novel Steppenwolf, about a wolf-intellectual who has been raised by Friedrich Nietzsche and the ghost of Mozart.
“Exuberant yellow streams” does not pass the Great Cornholio test (named for computer scientist Alan Turing), meaning that it causes me to snicker like Beavis and Butthead.