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Sam
KELLY LINK’s White Cat, Black Dog (2023)
Kelly Link is one of these names that’s been around for a long time. Everybody seems to really like her but without her being a part of sort of mainstream literary culture. I got her book with no idea what it would be like — and had a completely enchanted experience reading it, one of these rare moments of coming across not only a special writer but a whole way of writing that you didn’t know existed.
In a sense, Link’s formula would seem to be simple enough. She takes fairy tales and grafts them onto modern settings — the wicked stepmother archetype, for instance, turning out to be readily applicable to an era of second marriages and corporate largesse; hell easily transposable with suburbia. But Link has, as a friend puts it, “an internal compass that steers her infallibly towards strangeness,” and the real magic of her writing is the sense of, as in a fairytale, being in a world that does have stringent rules but with the rules opaque to everyone except the storyteller.
The main question I had reading Link was: why doesn’t everyone do this? And, to some extent, Link’s ideas about writing may have infiltrated contemporary literature more than I’ve realized. “I’ve heard others refer to it as the Small Beer aesthetic,” says a friend, speaking of the press that Link and her husband founded in Northampton, as if listening to the sound of a distant echo. More globally, Link is part of a dramatic shift in writing from “realism” to the fantastical, and with fantasy, Link’s stated genre, serving a similar role as sci-fi did in the ‘50s or ‘60s, a sort of underground, sort of disreputable movement that doubles as a workshop for developing the most innovative aesthetic and most trenchant social critique of its era. I’ve been skeptical of the shift towards fantasy — in a writer like George Saunders or in the watercolorish magical realism that’s become the standard New Yorker story — but, with Link, it really works and seems to strike the perfect balance of grounding in the contemporary world with an emancipatory flight of imagination.
But the genre may be harder to pull off than Link makes it look. For one thing. Link is extremely intelligent. She has a jaundiced understanding of human relationships —there’s the sense in White Cat, Black Dog of a great deal of water flowing under the bridge, of Link being able to reduce complicated dynamics to their archetypal absolutes. And she has a real gift for economy, of capturing intricate emotions with throwaway lines. “When Gary gets home, sodden pancakes in their hopeful boxes” is the perfect depiction of a man who has just been jilted at brunch returning to his apartment hoping that everything will be normal. “He puts on Gary’s jacket, too, when Gary insists,” from the same story, is just the right way to capture, in a piece of business, the nagging, needling, loving relationship between Gary and Prince Hat.
Even with all of Link’s gifts, the sense is that each one of these stories is difficult to pull off, each one runs a real risk of collapsing under its own conceptual structuring. ‘The White Cat’s Divorce’ is a nice starter story, an intro to the collection, but in the end a bit simple — very close to the macabre genre of fairytale it’s riffing off of. ‘The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear’ and ‘The Game of Smash and Recovery’ don’t particularly work for me. ‘The Lady and the Fox’ is a lovely Christmas story but doesn’t quite know how to land itself.
But there are three stories in here — ‘Prince Hat Underground,’ ‘The White Road,’ and ’Skinder’s Veil’ — that are as good as anything I’ve ever read and that display Link’s ability as well as the abundant resources of her genre.
‘The White Road’ is something of a messy story, but the basic idea of it is central to what Link is doing. In the fairy tale universe, the ordinary logic of society and morality disappears, but another kind of order takes its place. As the story’s narrator speculates, “There is some other logic to the way that all things work now, and someday we will better understand what has happened to make all things change in such a small space of time, and how we might restore ourselves to the place we once occupied in the world.” In ‘The White Road,’ this set of ideas is expressed in quasi-Christian terms. The rapture has occurred. The saved have all left for other planets. Those on earth are already in hell — but the hell-earth looks, in some respects, not all that different from the earth we know. The theater troupe anchoring the story takes care of accounts, puts on shows, has love affairs, gossips about the towns they pass through. But in this fallen-world, the world deprived of order and structure (in a word of God), another dispensation prevails, which is the logic of the fairytale. Of spirit, memory, ritual. Of the sort of surrogate reality in which it may be possible to mourn for an actor passionately enough that the night-walkers — the resident demons — believe or half-believe that it is actually a corpse that is being mourned for. Of traumatic, life-altering childhood memories that turn out — on closer inspection — to actually have happened to somebody else. Imagination takes on a heightened role in Link’s universe — with the given circumstances of the story constantly half-created by the story’s protagonists.
There’s a similar dynamic in ‘Skinder’s Veil,’ the closing story of the collection. The central issue for the protagonist, the statistics grad student Andy, is that he has no imagination. As his roommate, who is not really all that much more imaginative, says of him, “You know how people talk about the unconscious and the id? The attic and the basement? The places you don’t go? If you drew a picture of Andy’s psyche it would be Andy, standing outside of the house where he lives.” But, somewhere in the midst of the hyper-real depictions of Andy’s dissertation travails and roommate dramas, his world starts to enchant. His roommate’s girlfriend — inexplicably drawn to his roommate — turns out to be magnetized to him because she’s hounded by a ghost and he has the handy quality of being “ghost-repellent.” His friend’s summer housesitting gig turns out to be in a very pleasant, very unusual house, constantly visited by fairy tale characters, as well as wild turkeys and bears. None of the stories those characters tell, reports the narrator, “are cheerful — in all of them, someone came to a bad end but there was nothing to be learned from them.” Andy doesn’t really take all that much from his experience — finishes his dissertation, has his career as a statistician, although at critical turns his evaluators are visited in their dreams by a bear who tells them to give him the job or promotion he wants — and then, when he’s much older and his wayward grad school period long behind him, he visits the same house where he spent the summer and finds himself to be a much stranger, more enchanted creature than he would ever have suspected.
But it’s ‘Prince Hat Underground’ that’s really the masterpiece here. The analogic undergirding of the story is straightforward enough. Gary is married to the devilishly handsome, mysterious Prince Hat. The relationship has its well-grooved habits. “This was Prince Hat’s pattern: to find his way into anyone’s bed. And this was Gary’s: to lure him out again.” And, maybe even more tellingly, to have their Sunday brunch at a restaurant where Gary “always orders the eggs Benedict, Prince Hat whatever his heart desires.” As endlessly indulgent as Gary is, he does sometimes, as the story’s opening line has it, wonder, “And who, exactly, is Prince Hat?” And the rest of the story answers that question — with Gary finding himself a very fussy, unwilling, and yet relentlessly brave visitor to hell (which is also suburbia) determined to save his husband from the worst possible fate, marriage to a waterbed-owning bridezilla, a queen of the cul-de-sac. It’s the tacking between the directly-metaphoric and the wildly-whimsical that really makes ‘Prince Hat Underground’ — the sense that the story is following its fairytale architecture and getting at the heart of Gary and Prince Hat’s relationship and is in a place of incredible freedom, Link creating worlds as she works, Link having so much fun as she does so.
SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022)
It’s been a nice couple of weeks for me for my fiction reading — two books, both really interesting and good, in genres that I didn’t know existed, in this case Buddhist noir.
The premise of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is that Maali, “photographer, gambler, slut,” wakes up in the afterlife and discovers it to be pretty much exactly the same thing as the war-torn Sri Lanka he had just been inhabiting. Maali has to solve his own murder — which very much seems to be at the hands of a government death squad — and, most trenchantly, he has to decide whether he wishes to move into The Light, accepting an orderly Buddhistic process of death, or else to stay in the In Between and seek revenge for all the injustices besetting Sri Lanka.
It’s a smart setting for a novel, and a difficult decision. The great strength of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is the feeling that this, as much as anything, does seem a plausible rendition of the afterlife. The questions aren’t all answered. There’s a new sort of spiritual landscape but no great transformation — as all the characters, with bitterness, observe. “Fool, there is no afterlife, only this shit,” says one of the “garbagemen” of the death squad. Which, really, isn’t bad theology. “Karma failed you. God failed you. On earth as it is up here,” says Sena, Maali’s chief guide to the afterlife — as well as the recruiting officer for a demon army.
And Maali’s confusion really is understandable. Going to The Light comes across, in the midst of Sri Lanka’s civil war and its rampant corruption, like the height of selfishness. But, meanwhile, the impotence even of spirits is beyond frustrating. The primary activity of the spirits is to stand behind those they wish to convey messages to and — although the living may well sense the presence of the beyond — futilely attempt to get through to them. “You whisper, you hiss, you bellow, you shout — and still she does not hear,” Maali observes of a typically unsatisfying encounter. The dead, in general, are bewildered and hapless. Many queue up at an eternal bureaucracy — “a gathering point for those with questions about their death.” Others linger in the place they departed — the traumatized most of all. “Like any gathering of crashing bores talking shop, these suicides are talking about suicide,” says Maali of a convocation of suicides hanging off the ledges of the Hotel Leo.
In the landscape of the afterlife, which is so much like the landscape of late 1980s Sri Lanka, Sena’s extreme solution makes a great deal of sense — enlist the demon Mahakali, work with a sorcerer, plan out a suicide bombing to strike at the government’s death squad and the government ministers. And, for much of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, that comes across as a nobler approach than anything related to wisdom or forgiveness. “We are the ones who will give justice for all those killed. Who will allow those without graves to find vengeance,” says Sena in his recruiting pitch.
That’s a strong concept, with ample dramatic tension. As a novel, it does drag a bit, though. The hard-boiled prose, if mostly effective and amusing, can be a bit much (“Follow any turd upstream and it leads to a member of parliament”; “you get that feeling of someone walking over your grave and defecating on it”). I have the sense that the tight plotting of The Seven Moons — and Karunatilaka is really juggling a lot of different plotlines, the story of Maali’s decision and the story of his hunt for the killer and various backstory events involving his war photography work and a search for the incendiary photo negatives he left behind and the cute cosmopolitan story of his relationships with his upper-class boyfriend and with his best female friend — all work at cross-purposes to the real emotional weight of the novel, which is Maali’s anguished decision about whether to try to redeem Sri Lanka or else move on from it.
The surprise for me — and this, certainly, is the first Sri Lankan novel I’ve read — is how venomous Karunatilaka is towards his country. There is much blame to go around — to colonialism, to the CIA’s torture seminars — but most anger is reserved for Sri Lankans themselves. “How ugly we all are when reduced to meat. How ugly this beautiful land is,” reflects Maali. And his dearest wish — never really redeemed by any surge of patriotism — is to have nothing further to do with it. “Let’s go to San Francisco and let this shit country burn to the ground,” says Maali at a tender moment with his boyfriend. “I’m done with this shithole,” he declares as soon as he’s gotten lucky at cards.
Throughout, The Seven Moons reminded me of Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, which, Sorokin says, he wrote “as an uninterrupted stream of bile.” But there are differences. There is a more pronounced sense, in The Seven Moons, of the essential powerlessness of the developing world. “Don’t try and look for the good guys ’cause there ain’t none,” writes Maali in a “cheatsheet” for Western journalists — it’s not even a matter of overthrowing a corrupt and despotic elite; the grinding poverty of Sri Lanka makes it so that meaningful reform is not only impossible but virtually inconceivable. As Sena reports of the deferential habits that follow him into the afterlife: “From a young age we are brainwashed into calling mediocre people ‘hamu’ and ‘sir,’” he says. “It is the only way we can enter parts of the city.” And a suicide in a meditative mood — thinking on Sri Lanka’s high suicide rate — speculates that it is because “We have just the right amount of education to understand that the world is cruel and just enough corruption and inequality to feel powerless against it.”
It really is a very hopeless vision. No solutions, no meaningful reforms — least of all through war photography or through righteous uprisings. All that’s there, really, is the consolations of religion in its purest form — of people helping one another in their small ways, as best as they can, with no anticipation of its leading to anything better.
Poor Sri Lanka has been dealing with a lot of shit in the last few years. They'll end up as a vassal state of China soon enough due to the debt trap they fell into vis-a-vis the Belt and Road Initiative. Then it really will be a situation where reform is impossible. I will check out these authors though, they look interesting. I'd be most interesting in reading what you thought about Vladimir Sorokin. Been collecting his books for a splurge once I get a copy of Day of the Oprichnik. He's one of those guys I know I'll either appreciate or at least find rewarding enough to have visited, but haven't heard many people give their thoughts on him.
This is reminding me of Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur. Have you read it?