This week's book is Magic for Beginners, short stories by Kelly Link. This one comes from a magical realism recommendation list that I didn't bookmark and now have no way of finding ever again.
There are nine short stories here, so let me give you an overview of a couple of them. In "The Faery Handbag," a young woman is charged with keeping track of her eccentric grandmother's handbag, which holds the refugees of the village where she was born, but the girl's best friend takes it to lose himself in the handbag when his life takes a turn for the worst. In "Stone Animals," a family trying to recover from the wife's infidelity and the husband's inability to prioritize his family over work, buys a house that is eerily haunted, possibly by rabbits. In "The Great Divorce," a man and his wife are getting a divorce and take a last family trip to Disney Land, only the wife is a ghost who he met and must talk to through a medium, and their three kids "take after their mother" meaning they're also ghosts. "The Cannon" is a transcript of an interview with someone...who is in love with a cannon? It's stream of consciousness and the main character changes throughout the interview.
I liked that in several of the stories, it's possible that no magic is happening at all. In "The Faery Handbag,"it's possible the grandmother is lying about being two-hundred-years-old from a village that no one's heard of, and her husband isn't aging slowly in her handbag but rather ran out on her or wasn't ever her husband, and that the best friend too the midnight bus out of town. It's possible that the handbag idea was a lie the grandmother told to a child and that the young woman is now using the same lie. It's possible in "The Great Divorce" there are no ghosts and it's a huge scam set up by mediums. In these stories it's like you get two stories in one, one with weird magic and one with people who invent weird scenarios to make their lives easier.
But overall, these were not my favorites. Often there are ideas, sometimes a lot of ideas piled on top of each other in a single story, that don't go anywhere, that don't add anything to the other ideas or the themes of the story. There's a cool concept and I'm waiting to see where Link goes with it, and the answer is nowhere. I feel like I need a book club to dissect these with me so we can figure out what the painting of the woman with the apple was about, or why Soap is obsessed with zombies or why he kidnapped a kid. I don't get a lot of what's going on and it makes me feel stupid, and I don't like feeling stupid.
The strands don't come together. It's not like all the things going on are different facets of the same problem (which when done well, is so beautiful it's one of my favorite things about literary short stories) or that they all come together in the end. In a lot of stories there isn't really an end, not really a conclusion. In "Lull" there's a story within a story within a story, all of which are cut off before the conclusion because they've run out of time. Maybe there's a reason for this, but...these make me feel so stupid. I shouldn't post this and air my stupidity in the breeze for you all to see.
I think this makes me so twitchy because these are issues I've struggled with in my own writing. If I'm writing a story about a yeti, I have to ask, "why does this character have to be a yeti? What does being a yeti bring to the table and what themes can I build or highlight with that?" If I have a cool idea, a neat premise, I'll stress over "okay, but then what happens?" It feels like Link didn't do this. Maybe she's freed herself from the stress or the "have tos" and writes what she wants to write, and it doesn't matter if there's a point to everything or if there's a reason or a why. But this is such a sensitive topic to me right now that I can't get past the feeling that she just didn't do the work.
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Next week: Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, a feminist anthology of short stories.
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