FICTION IN REVIEW: KAREN RUSSELL

Abstract

1 4 9 R F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W D A V I D G A L E F The realm of light fantasy, not the dragon-and-elf variety, rests on evocative but impossible set-ups. The trick is to propose one tenet that runs counter to our world, then extrapolate along logical lines until the whole a√air seems plausible. Consider these situations: a special tea that turns Japanese girls into human silkworms; the art of Antarctic tailgating; St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. These what-if premises are the property of Karen Russell, whose follow-through is as uncanny as her pitches. Chained to factory life, the Japanese girls are enjoined to spin silk for the glory of the Emperor. Putting together a party at the South Pole often involves dying of exposure, not to mention the humiliation of continually rooting for the losing Team Krill (vs. Team Whale). And in ‘‘St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,’’ the title story of Russell ’s first collection, lycanthropy and young ladies’ deportment belong in the same paragraph. ‘‘Our pack was hirsute and sinewy and mostly brunette. We had terrible posture. We went knuckling along the wooden floor on the callused pads of our fists, baring S l e e p D o n a t i o n , b y K a r e n R u s s e l l ( A t a v i s t B o o k s , e B o o k , $ 2 6 ) 1 5 0 G A L E F Y row after row of tiny, wood-rotted teeth. Sister Josephine sucked in her breath. She removed a yellow wheel of floss from under her robes, looping it like a miniature lasso.’’ Here and there in its spotted history, fantasy has su√ered a reputation for either wooden or overly coy prose, but as practitioners from Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon to Harlan Ellison and Joanna Russ proved decades ago, the ghetto of genre is largely a critic’s cage. Russell’s what-ifs reveal a great deal about our all-too-human condition, her imagery so fresh and alive that at times it seems to escape the page. In ‘‘The City of Shells,’’ the inside of a giant conch shell has ‘‘a clean, blue smell, like the memory of salt.’’ Outside, the tide is rising. Evening arrives. ‘‘The visible sky is purple and clobbered with stars.’’ Russell must be aware of what every good poet knows: metaphor is magic, down to the figurative use of a verb. Such transmutations occur all over her prose, minuscule versions of major narrative transformations. Her description of nature is so animated, she might almost be a pantheist . Swamplandia!, Russell’s first novel, about a family-owned gator theme park that’s seen better days, came out in 2011, five years after St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. It involves a love a√air with a ghost, a competing theme park called the World of Darkness, and an intricately detailed tour of the Florida marshes, among other plot strands. Her second collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, emerged in 2013. It includes a doleful but funny tale in which U.S. presidents have been reincarnated as horses, as well as a story featuring a seagull ex machina that can alter the future. Even when Russell’s set-ups are just this side of goofy realism, something is o√-kilter: an artificial blizzard that cloaks sexually indiscreet behavior in an ice park, for instance, or a scheme to redirect a midnight march of baby sea turtles with a person imitating the moon. Most recent is the eBook Sleep Donation, a novella in which a global sleep-loss epidemic has created a new medical need. As always, the premise is screwy, the follow-through dead-on: ‘‘As a Corps volunteer, my duties are numerous and varied. Weekends, I mobilize the Sleep Van – a moonlit enterprise that dispatches a volunteer team to the homes of good sleepers, who have signed up to donate their rest to insomniacs...