The Concept Story: Karen Russell's VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE

It’s a rare pleasure when, at the same time, two out of ten books on various “best-seller” lists are collections of short stories--which was indeed the case for a few weeks last month when George Saunders’ Tenth of December and Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove claimed that coveted place.  Although the two collections share some characteristics that partially explain their popularity—fantasy, satire, social criticism, whimsy, witty intelligence—in my opinion, George Saunders’ collection is more “inspired” and imaginatively unpredictable than the stories of Karen Russell.

In several of these stories, it looks like Karen Russell is up to her old tricks. Well, actually new tricks, since she was only 25 when her first book St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves came out six years ago.  Her first novel Swamplandia was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, unfortunately and inexplicably, the year that the judges decided not to award a prize for fiction. In my blog on the St Lucy’s collection, I suggested that it was a youthful book in many ways. My old guy reaction to the stories was that they were fun to read as childlike fantasies that illuminated some of childhood’s strangeness, but that they lacked the depth that real exploration of these experiences require.

Although I enjoyed reading Russell’s stories in both her collections, I sometimes felt it was, if you will forgive me, a cheap thrill—a kind of Ray Bradbury, T.C. Boyle, Stephen King kind of thrill  (apologies to all Bradbury/Boyle/King fans), whose stories I enjoy reading, but who cleverly stay on the surface.  In my opinion, Russell is a fine writer who knows her away around a sentence, an image, a metaphor with what one reviewer has called “pixie” charm—apologies to Tinkerbell—but I still fail to see any depth in her work.  Yeah, yeah, I know—everything doesn’t have to have depth!

The basic problem I have with Russell is that she writes concept stories—stories that start with an idea and stick with it—e.g. the idea of kicking a habit vis-à-vis vampires and lemon juice; the idea of feminist liberation, vis-à-vis Japanese girls rebelling against producing silk from their own bodies.

Ron Rash (whose new collection Nothing Gold Can Stay I will talk about in a week or two) expressed my reservations about the “concept” story quite well in a short piece in The Wall Street Journal, 3/8/13.  Rash said that like most fiction writers, he is often asked where he gets his ideas, to which he answers, “I have no idea,” adding that if ideas were gettable, like in a secluded cave somewhere, he would not go get them, for “an "idea," especially one adhered to from start to finish, can be disastrous for a compelling piece of fiction.”

Rash says the best example is the difference between Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and A Fable.  Faulkner once said that The Sound and the Fury began as a single image—“a child in a tree watching adults at a wake.” The Fable, however, began and ended with an idea—if Christ returned to earth he would be crucified again—an idea that Faulkner outlined chapter by chapter and followed scrupulously.  Whereas The Sound and the Fury is a dynamic, living book one of Faulkner’s best, a Fable is “tedious, lifeless, imprisoned within its idea.”

  

The fact that Russell’s stories are concept stories springing from some “idea” is suggested by Fiona Wilson’s review in The Times of London, who says she wishes she could have been there at the moment when a story like the title story was conceived.  In fact, Karen Russell has talked a bit about when this story was conceived.  She says she was in a lemon grove with her siblings and saw a very tan, elderly man sucking on a lemon and said something like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if lemons were just like vampire methadone and that man is a vampire with a tan.” 

Even though none of her siblings thought the “what if” idea was funny, Russell says there was something about the premise: “The ‘what if’ was set up in such a way that it felt like: here was the place where I could explore some questions.  A diorama where I could explore the question that seems almost too huge to confront in realist fiction.”  Well, I am not sure what “huge” question Russell had in mind, unless it was addiction as a social problem.  If so, it seems to me that the cleverness of the story undercuts any serious such intention.  And furthermore I am not sure I would be interested in a story that existed solely for such a serious intention.

Joy Williams, one of my favorite short story writers, also suggests the concept nature of Russell’s stories by opening her New York Times review with the notion that if you gave Karen Russell an assignment to write a story about an ex-president who is reincarnated as a horse and put her in a room with a couple of pencils and one arm tired behind her back, she would come up with “The Barn at the End of Our Term.”  The result is a comic romp, but little else, about Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19^th president of the United States who exists in a sort of limbo state after death as a horse longing for his wife Lucy, who maybe has been transmuted into a winsome sheep. Other ex-presidents are featured, such as Woodrow Wilson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and James Garfield.

In my discussion of Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves, I suggested that Russell raises the suspicion that many of her early stories were written as class assignments. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except writing to an assignment is sort of like teaching to the test, isn’t it?  It could lead to a narrow sort of focus aimed to please. Now, I am not sure it is MFA-assignment-fulfillment that drives Russell’s stories, but something more linked to her creative procedure of conceiving a concept and following it relentlessly.

A less funny, even somewhat tedious, concept story is “Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Tailgating in the Antarctic,” about--in big sports fan fashion--the Food Chain Games that pits the Team Krill against the Team Whale. As you might guess, in spite of devoted tailgating fans, the Krills have never won a game, always being sucked up into the maw of devouring whales, each year the whole franchise of 60,000,000,000 being eaten.  It is a simple, conceptually comic, trope meant to be a satire on big time sports, but it is just a self-indulgently romp.

As you might expect, the two stories for which reviews have the most respect are the stories that seem to carry the most significant social satire/social message weight:

“The New Veterans,” which focuses on a massage therapist who treats a veteran of the Iraq War suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder.  She discovers that if she massages a tattoo on his back that depicts a roadside bomb that killed one of his friends, the tattoo becomes animated and that she can manipulate images on it, for example moving the sun from one spot to another, indeed, even managing to change history seemingly frozen on the veteran’s back.

“Proving Up,” whose concept is that the Homestead Act of the 1870s in Nebraska had one perverse requirement so typical of politicians out of touch with everyday human reality—in order to be granted claim to a homestead, every house had to have at least one glass window, even though the “houses” were more like animal burrows underground.  Since the poor farmers cannot all afford glass windows, they pass around one single window before the arrival of the Inspector who determines if they are allowed to keep their farm. In the story, the task is given to an 11-year old boy, and the result is a nightmarish journey that comes to a horrific ending

Other concept stories include:

“Reeling for the Empire,” It’s one thing to work in a silk factory, but quite another to do so as a magically transformed silkworm, your body spinning out the silk in a nineteenth-century Japanese extreme version of a sweatshop.

“The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” the subject of which is school bullying, here embodied in a boy who feels guilt for his participation in the tormenting of a kid with epilepsy who disappears and comes back as a scarecrow.

In “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979” an Australian boy finds a hollow tree in which seagulls have deposited lost objects, some of them from the future.

An interesting critical difference of opinion about which Russell stories are most successful and thus whether Russell’s success as a short story writer depends on a poetic fantastical style or on concept-driven socially significant plots can be seen in the contrasting comments made by brilliant short story writer Joy Williams and influential critic/reviewer Michiko Kakutani in bookended New York Times reviews.

Williams says, “A grim, stupendous, unfavorable magic is at work in these stories.  They are not chicly ironic or satiric and certainly not existentially or ethically curious.”  She says, however, that “The New Veterans”(a social/realist/critical favorite) is sentimental, that its fundamental situation is so familiar that its “intention becomes obvious and must be laboriously realized.”   Williams argues that the story is not energized by the” unerringly knowing and mischievous planchette that unequivocally belongs” to Karen Russell.

Michiko Kakutani, the star reviewer for The New York Times, on the other hand, says that “The New Veterans” is the “emotional centerpiece” of the collection, a story that perhaps begins as a takeoff of Ray Bradbury’s famous “Illustrated Man” and “quickly evolves into a complex, deeply affecting exploration of the ways memories can crystallize or redeem the past, and the ways the process of storytelling itself can remake history.”

Perhaps the best mediation between these two perspectives is provided by M. John Harrison in The Guardian, who says that as long as Russell’s stories are “fragile tissues of word, image, and emotions,” they have unbelievable strength, but when she pushes these images into a narrative, they get weak: “The two styles of communication interfere with one another, then the plot prances off with the bit between its teeth, shedding subtleties as it goes.” 

And perhaps here we have the basic critical question about the stories of Karen Russell:  Is she the protégé of Italo Calvino and Donald Barthelme, or is she a child of The Twilight Zone and Stephen King? 

Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

I am trying to catch up with all the collections suggested and recommended to me after posting my “favorite 100 short story collection of the 21st century” list. So, here’s my response to my favorite question—“I would really like to know what you think about…--”vis-a-vis Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006).

This is a youthful book in many ways. Russell was only 25 when the book came out. Lord, one of the stories, “Haunting Olivia,” came out in the New Yorker when she was only 22! A graduate of Columbia’s MFA program (No. 25 in Poets and Writers' Top Fifty MFA programs in the Sept/Oct issue), Russell raises the suspicion that many of these stories were written as class assignments. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except writing to an assignment is sort of like teaching to the test, isn’t it? Could lead to a narrow sort of focus aimed to please.

I read the first two stories—“Ava Wrestles the Alligator” and “Haunting Olivia” with pleasure. They made me smile. The basic concept that seems to guide the book-- a concept that Russell probably discovered as she wrote the first couple of stories—might be expressed this way: Since from their own perspective, children sometimes feel they live in a quite different universe than their parents (which is why fairy tales appeal to children), why not explore some of the basic conflicts that young people experience—peer pressure, sibling rivalry, conflict with parents, burgeoning sexuality—from the perspective of a world that, while it seems somehow familiarly real, is really most definitely strange and surreal? Not a bad idea, right? But for me, a little of this goes a long way. After reading subsequent stories in the book about alternate worlds—such as a sleep-away camp for disordered dreamers, a palace of artificial snows, and a city of shells—by the time I got to the last story about a home for girls raised by wolves, I was not smiling quite so much.

I will comment only on the two stories that I liked the best. In “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” Ava (whose name she tells us is a palindrome—where she got that little byte of info is not known) is jealous of her overweight sister named Ossie, who, like Karen Russell herself (who is not overweight, but is cheerleader cute) “has entire kingdoms inside of her.” Mainly, Ossie is “possessed” by horny boyfriends, currently one named Luscious, invoked by her for masturbatory fantasies. Ava and Ossie’s family own a Gator Theme Park in the Everglades named Swamplandia (Russell is currently working on a novel named Swamplandia, from which the New Yorker recently published an excerpt in its “20 under 40” series—see my earlier blog on this).

Russell has one little literary tic that trips me up occasionally. I mentioned it in my earlier blog on her New Yorker story. She likes to throw in little “educated” references uttered by her uneducated narrators. But then she has to justify the allusion by citing its origin. For example, she wants to use the metaphor of having Ava “graph the coordinates” of her love and courage, but has to tell us she is learning latitude and longitude in school. She wants to use the concept of language as being what separates us from animals, but Ava must attribute it to her science teacher, Ms. Huerta. Lord knows where Ava got the idea of “affect” when she says she feels a numb surprise at her “own lack of affect” or where she got the word “turbid” when she says she peers into a “turbid pit.”

There’s no doubt that Russell has a facile way with imagery and language. At the end of the story, Ossie, whose fleshy sexuality contrasts with Ava’s pancake-flat breasts, walks naked into the swamp with all her mysterious animality in evidence: “As she walks toward the water, flying sparks come shivering out of her hair, off of her shoulders, a miniature hailstorm. It’s the lizards! I realize. She is shaking them off in a scaly shower, flakes of living armor.” When Ava drags her out of the swamp, her finger nails make little half moon marks on Ossie’s arm which swell into puffy welts, “As if something were still clawing at her from within, pushing outwards, a pressure that is trying to break the skin.” Nice metaphor, don’t you think, for the id-like forces that threaten to break out, like the creature in the first Alien movie that scared the crap out of us.

In “Haunting Olivia,” two brothers are co-conspirators in the accidental disappearance/death of their sister Olivia. The story begins at Gannon’s Boat Graveyard, a “watery junkyard” where people abandon old boats, when they find a pair of magical goggles that allow them to see things in the water that others cannot see (the old magical glasses fairy tale gimmick). Russell has the narrator, Timothy Sparrow, say that his brother, Waldo Swallow, has a thick pelt of black hair because his father jokes that his mother must have had “dalliances with a Minotaur”— (For a little intertextual in joke, the reader should fast forward to the story in the book “from Children’s’ Reminiscences of the Westward Migration” for a tale about a boy who does have a Minotaur for a father).

Olivia, 8 years old, disappears in a whimsical way (everything is whimsy in Karen Russell’s stories). Her brothers simply push her too hard down a slide at in a crab shell (a sort of sled made out of giant crab shells), and a wave takes her away. This does not seem to be a great tragedy in the story overall, for Olivia, like Ossie in “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” is another Russell avatar. Described by her brother as a “cartographer of imaginary places,” she creates an underwater hideaway called Glowworm Grotto.” In an echo of what Russell’s parents may have felt about her as a child, Timothy the narrator says, “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Olivia was an adoptee from some other planet.” The grotto’s walls are coated with the feces of glowworms, which, as everyone knows, glows in the dark, giving it a yucky beauty. At the end of the story, when the brothers try to find Olivia there, Timothy goes into the Grotto with the magical goggles. “Every fish burns lantern-bright, and I can’t tell the living from the dead. It’s all just blurry light, light smeared like some celestial fingerprint all over the rocks and the reef and the sunken garbage. Olivia could be everywhere.”

Another nice concluding metaphor to reflect that basic human desire for transcendence, metamorphosis, spiritual dissolution, and the ultimate return of the self to that which it was before it was.

I enjoyed these two stories. They seem to get at the heart of Russell’s narrative ploy. Although “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” makes for an intriguing book title, I felt that the concept of using fantastical wolfish transformations to reflect childhood and early adolescent feelings of bestial urges and alienation—they are little animals, after all, aren’t they? —was just too predictable. And too much "keeping with the concept."

My old guy reaction to these stories is that they are fun to read as childlike fantasies and illuminate some of childhood’s strangeness, they lack the depth that real exploration of these experiences require. When it comes to magical realism or philosophically significant fantasies, Karen Russell just needs more intellectual background. She is still so young. For profound explorations of the issues she explores superficially here, I prefer the mature vision of Borges, Garcia Marquez, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, George Saunders, and Steven Millhauser. But then, that’s just the way we old guys are. We prefer fiction that makes us think, not just makes us smile.

New Yorker's 20 Under 40: Shun-Lien Bynum, Mengestu, Russell

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, “The Erlking” July 4, 2010

Based on Goethe’s poem of the same name, "The Erlking" was written for an edited collection of fairy tales to be published later this year. And, indeed, it does seem to follow many of the basic fairy tale conventions, although it does not take place “once upon a time,” (However, as I recall, the German phrase from which this is translated is “once there was, once there will be.”) Bruno Bettleheim’s wonderful book on fairy tales, Uses of Enchantment, suggests that fairy tales serve a therapeutic function for children, allowing them to work out many of the fears they have of the adult world—which is why there are so many giants in fairy tales and why there are often wicked step parents. (Children can never really be sure if the person they call mother and dad are truly their parents.)

Bynum’s story takes place in the present world of anxieties experienced both by the mother and the child (In Goethe’s poem, it is a father and son). The mother feels the common stresses of getting her daughter into the best schools, trying to manage her money, wanting to be loved by her child, etc. The child, who is named Ondine (name for mermaid, and also the name of a wonderful fairy tale film my wife and I saw recently, directed by Neil Jordan), but she prefers the more ordinary name of Ruthie. Kate, the mother, wants magic for her daughter, but the daughter is not quite sure about magic and the mysterious, for she seems to be at that crucial point in-between point, where she is no longer really a child, but not quite yet an adult.

The man that Ruthie sees with a cape around his neck is not the same man that her mother sees, who might be a musician at the faire or the actor John C. Riley (I am not quite sure why John C. Riley was chosen by Bynum.) Perhaps the man is that perennial mysterious man who always comes to take the child away from her parents, for indeed every parent fears him. Ruthie knows from the look on the man’s face that her mother does not have to come along, just her. She believes the man is going to give her a present, and when she opens it she will be the kindest, luckiest, prettiest person in the world—“Not for pretend—for real life.”

Ruthie is angry with her mother for naming the mystery man and thus somehow co-opting her adventure. She feels the man is able to do things her mother cannot do, such as let her live in a castle in a beautiful tower and have a little kitten and pet butterflies. The story also makes use of some anxiety about racial difference, (which may suggest the fear of difference) for Kate hopes she will find a brown doll among all the white ones for Ruthie, and Ruthie thinks the man will paint her skin so it’s bright rather than brown and make her hair smooth and in braids like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.

The final paragraph of the story focuses on Ruthie’s feeling that her surprise is turning into something other than a beautiful secret, a thing she knows will happen whether she wants it or not. While her mother looks at the prices of the dolls, Ruthie pees her pants, and while the puddle gets bigger, her mother squeezes her hand—“which is impossible, actually, because Ruthie, clever girl, kind girl, ballet dancer, thumb-sucker, brave and bright Dorothy, is already gone.”

The story is similar to Conrad Aiken’s wonderful parable, “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” in which a young boy becomes so involved in his secret sense of snow falling that he separates himself from contact with the world around him. “The Erlking” is a fairy tale in the sense that it deals in a magical way with that inevitable separation between the adult and the child, the mother/daughter or father/son, in which the parent feels a sense of the child’s otherness. All parents experience it most pointedly when the child reaches the age of secrets and self. I can remember when I felt I knew what my young daughter was thinking; it all seemed simple enough, but then a time came when I did not. I would drive her to school in the morning, and she was no longer that laughing, chatty little girl, but this silent and serious young woman lost in a world of her own creation. I like this story, for like a bit of magic, mystery, and myth, especially when the story glows with a sense of timeless significance of “once there was, once there will be.”



Daniel Mengestu, “An Honest Exit” July 12 & 19, 2010

This is a section from Megestu’s second novel, How to Read the Air, due out in Oct. 2010. Although I usually don’t care to spend much time with novel excerpts, this piece interested me and forced be back to more than one reading. On the one hand, it is a simple narrative in which a man tells the story of his father, who escapes from Ethiopia to a port town in Sudan, where he finds work and, with the help of a friend, stows away on a boat to Europe. It is well told, and I liked it, but what I liked most about it was the method by which Mengestu constructed the narrative, a method that made the story transcend a simple immigrant story.

The narrator is a teacher who teaches a class in Early American literature to privileged freshman in a New York School. His father has died recently, and when he apologizes to his students for having missed class to tend to his father’s affairs, he realizes he needs a history more complete than “the strangled bits” his father had passed on to him. So he tells his students the story of his father, knowing he can make up the missing details as he goes along.

He first tells how his father walks and hitchhikes from his home in Ethiopia to a port town in Sudan. In the process, his students who had hitherto been only just bodies to him, become, as they are transformed into an audience to his story, more individualized as young people still in the process of being made. So the next day, he takes up the story again, introducing the character Abrahim, who befriends his father and prepares him for his eventual escape as a stowaway on a ship. He also tells how a rebellion breaks out in the port city and how government soldiers try to quell it. By this point, the story takes over completely and we forget all about the students sitting in their seats and the teacher in front of them relating the events. Abrahim’s stake in the father’s life becomes clear: He tells the father that when he gets to Europe, he must inform the authorities that he has a wife left behind in the Sudan whose life is in danger. Then Abrahim shows the father a photo of a young girl, Abrahim’s daughter, who lives in Khartoum with her mother and aunts. Abrahim says: “When you get to England you’re going to say that she’s your wife. This is how you’re going to repay me.”

The story now shifts back to the time of the telling; the narrator says that in the halls he hears snippets of his own story in slightly distorted form being played back to him by his students. His students feel a great deal of sympathy for him and his father, and they smile at him when they pass. “I had brought directly to their door a tragedy that outstripped anything they could personally have hoped to experience.”

When the Dean asks him how much of the story he has been telling is true, he says almost none of it, that he has made up most of it, e.g. the invading rebel army, the late nights at the port. The Dean approves, for he says it is good to hear the students talking about something important. “I had given my students something to think about, and whether what they heard from me had any relationship to reality hardly mattered; real or not, it was all imaginary for them.”

The narrator continues telling the story of how Abrahim got the father stowed away in a small box on a ship, so small he is hunched down in an excruciating position. When he ship pulls up anchors and slowly heads up to sea, the narrator knows it is the last thing he will tell his class about his father. But since the story has now sprung free of its dependence on the student audience, he continues to summarize the narrative of how his father got first to Italy and then to England to the reader. The story ends with the father finding a quiet place on Hampstead Heath and burning all the fake marriage license and the picture of the daughter that Abrahim had given him.

Why does the father do this? Because he knows that Abrahim’s dreams are hopeless. “There were no rewards in life for such stupidity, and he promised himself never to fall victim to that kind of blind, wishful thinking. Anyone who did deserved whatever suffering he was bound to meet.”

Since this is part of a novel, I assume there will be further adventures of the father making a home in America, and further stories of the son. There may even be some sort of future meeting of Abrahim and the father. I don’t know. And, since I am not great on “what happens next” I don’t really plan to read Mengestu’s novel.

I like this little piece just as it is. I think it stands alone quite nicely as a story about how one feels compelled to create a history for oneself when he does not have the facts. I like it that the students sympathize with the story, the father, and the narrator. I like it that they become involved in the story, learn something from it, even though it may not be true. I like it that the narrator and even the Dean knows that it doesn’t matter whether it really happened or not. (I have never met such a Dean. Have you?) Fiction does not have to be based on fact to matter.




Karen Russell, “The Dredgeman’s Revelation” July 26, 2010

Russell says this is a little “story within a story” in her novel Swamplandia, due out in February 2011. And I think she is right to recognize that it is a self-contained story within the larger fiction of her novel. I liked it, mainly because I liked the language that controls the story. I liked it so much that as soon as I read it the second time, I ordered Russell’s collection of stories, St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” which came out a few years ago and which somehow I missed.

The story is simple enough. A young boy named Louis Thanksgiving is stillborn, but survives when his unmarried mother dies. He is dropped off an orphan train and taken up by a German dairy farmer named Auschenbliss, until he comes of age and leaves to join a dredging crew in the swamps of Florida. Louis’s experiences, which make up most of this excerpt, on the dredging crew have an hallucinatory effect that I like.

Some things I like in this story:

“At birth, his skull had looked like a little violin, cinched and silent.”

A nun’s written description of Louis: MIRACLE BABY ALIVE PRAISE GOD FOR LOUIS, THANKSGIVING (But the nun’s comma gets smudged and thus the baby is named Louis Thanksgiving. A little hokey, but it made me smile.)

During the night while the other men sleep, Louis peels a kiwi to eat, and the fruit’s perfume releases through the tent and makes the men smile in their sleep. He does it every night, “smiling himself as he imagined pleasant dreams wafting over them.”

“White-tailed deer sprinted like loosed hallucinations among the tree islands. Sometimes Louis fell asleep watching them from the deck, and it worried him that he couldn’t pinpoint when his sleep began: deer rent the mist with their tiny hooves, a spotted contagion of dreams galloping inside Louis’s head.”

At the end of the story, after the barge has exploded, hundreds of huge vultures arrive and several of them hook their talons into the skin of Louis’s dead friend Gid and carry him off. “’You guys ever see birds do anything like that? Hector asked.” Moe and more buzzards arrive and Louis thinks, with sadness because he is seventeen and didn’t want to go, “Oh God, I’m next.” (It’s a risky business, those damned vultures, and highly unlikely, but it seems to work within the half real/half hallucinatory atmosphere of the story. They spooked me.

Some things in the story I am more than a little suspicious of:

“The drained and solemn pines reminded Louis of a daguerreotype of Lee’s emaciated Confederate forces that he had once seen as a child.” (I suspect the pines remind the author of this photo and that Louis would never have seen them that way)

Louis experiences Terraphobia—a fear “of the rooted urban world, of cars and towns and years on calendars.” (This seems a little forced to me)

One of the men tells Louis: “Jesus, Louis, you’re just like what’s his name? Greek guy. Narcissus. Making puppy eyes down at your face in that bucket.” (Another one of those irresistible authorial intrusion into the mouth of a character who is unlikely to make this kind of mythic connection.)

When the barge blows up and Louis’s friend Gid is horribly hurt, he stands looking at Louis, his mouth moving, but saying nothing. “The mariner, Louis thought—this line bubbled up to him from long-forgotten event, a poetry recitation that the youngest Auschenbliss had given at a church assembly many winters before. The bright-eyed Mariner.” (Again, this reference to Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is unlikely to have occurred to Louis, but it obviously proved irresistible to Karen Russell.) This is the stanza Louis is supposed to remember:

The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

But I like the Ancient Mariner reference, because the Mariner is the archetypal romantic storyteller, who grabs us and holds us with his glittering eye, forcing us to hear a tale that terrifies us with the knowledge of our ultimate loneliness.

That’s all for me and the New Yorker’s “Twenty Under Forty” Fictions for a while. I will come back to them later if they include some stories that grab me like the Mariner.

Next week, I will post my 100th blog since beginning "Reading the Short Story." To commemorate that occasion, I am going to post a list of 100 of my favorite short story collections of the first decade of the 21st century.