Kelly Link‘s short stories, many of them collected in the volume Stranger Things Happen, are marvelous in ways that almost entirely defy description (well, at least they defy my powers of description). I could call these stories surreal, I could call them quirky; both adjectives are accurate, but they are both too bland, and have been overused too much, to give an accurate impression of the singularity of Link’s prose, and the acuteness of her vision. All her stories spell out compelling dreamlike scenarios, with absurdist frameworks, much humor in the details, and undercurrents of dread which nonetheless never gain the upper hand. They are disturbing and perverse in the ways that human desires are nearly always disturbing and perverse, if we look at them honestly and clearly enough; except that such phrases tend to suggest a kind of existential anguish and heaviness that is entirely absent from these stories; they have, instead, a childlike openness (they are in a certain way reminiscent of children’s literature, sort of like a Girl’s Own Adventure), which is also an almost inhuman, or superhuman, lightness, frivolity, and grace (I mean this as the highest possible compliment). Gender certainly has something to do with all this; I cannot imagine these stories, or anything like them, being written by a man, although there is nothing about them that is stereotypically “feminine.” But that is also an inadequate, although accurate, comment. The only comparison I can think of to Kelly Link is Jane Bowles. Actually, Link is not anything like Bowles at all, except for one thing: they both have a sense of humor that is somehow transcendental, that is to say, at the limits of possible understanding, not arising out of the situations being described, but somehow presupposed by those situations instead. I am not sure that I am making sense at all, but it is rare that a fiction writer, especially one I find so wonderful, leaves me so much at a loss for words.
Kelly Link
Kelly Link‘s short stories, many of them collected in the volume Stranger Things Happen, are marvelous in ways that almost entirely defy description (well, at least they defy my powers of description). I could call these stories surreal, I could call them quirky; both adjectives are accurate, but they are both too bland, and have been overused too much, to give an accurate impression of the singularity of Link’s prose, and the acuteness of her vision. All her stories spell out compelling dreamlike scenarios, with absurdist frameworks, much humor in the details, and undercurrents of dread which nonetheless never gain the upper hand. They are disturbing and perverse in the ways that human desires are nearly always disturbing and perverse, if we look at them honestly and clearly enough; except that such phrases tend to suggest a kind of existential anguish and heaviness that is entirely absent from these stories; they have, instead, an almost inhuman, or superhuman, lightness, frivolity, and grace (I mean this as the highest possible compliment). Gender certainly has something to do with all this; I cannot imagine these stories, or anything like them, being written by a man, although there is nothing about them that is stereotypically “feminine.” But that is also an inadequate, although accurate, comment. The only comparison I can think of to Kelly Link is Jane Bowles. Actually, Link is not anything like Bowles at all, except for one thing: they both have a sense of humor that is somehow transcendental, that is to say, at the limits of possible understanding, not arising out of the situations being described, but somehow presupposed by those situations instead. I am not sure that I am making sense at all, but it is rare that a fiction writer, especially one I find so wonderful, leaves me so much at a loss for words.