I also have time for reading other things besides library literature, which brings me to Karen Russell's excellent collection of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. I became familiar with Karen Russell after listening to a particularly good interview with her about her latest collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, on NPR. I was in the middle of a 45 minute commute to work on my master's paper on a Saturday (dismal), and feeling guilty for hating going to work on a Saturday on something I "should" love, and this quote made my morning:
Karen Russell: I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do, so, it's usually not too, too hard.
Scott Simon: Is it your favorite thing to do, writing?
Karen Russell: As soon as I said that I was like, you dirty liar, because sometimes it's the most excruciating thing to do. But when it's going well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, when it's not going well probably my favorite thing to do is eating lunch at like, 10:30am, when it's really not going well!
It's good to know that even recipients of a MacArthur Genius Grant struggle with their process and their passions.
St. Lucy's, to me, is a cunning blend of new southern gothic and magical realism. Its characters live in a landscape immediately recognizable as our own, but somehow different, and twisted. Giant conches, houseboat retirement communities, and arctic pirates blend with yearning, loss, and love. The landscapes are familiar, but we see them with fresh eyes through Russell's characters, primarily children and octogenarians. It's intriguing that there are few adult voices, and when they exist, they are most decidedly not the protagonist. Theirs are voices of repression and order, or alternatively, complete chaos that baffles the child in question. The adults have made mistakes, and have over-corrected to the point that the children now pay for them. My favorite story was the titular St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which leaves the Florida beaches where most of the tales take place and goes to some anonymous forest land, where human children born to werewolves are taken in by long-suffering nuns. They pee on everything, they eat the squirrels, and they struggle not to chew on their shoes. Still, the nuns persist, and gradually attempt to turn the girls into some semblance of human beings. But the littlest wolf-girl, christened Mirabella, struggles. It's a heartbreaking story with moments of hilarity, and it made me think quite a bit about being true to myself, the struggles of being born and raised partially in one culture and then having to adjust and learn a new one, and the terrifying nature of our repressed wildness as supposedly "civilized" human beings.
If I had any criticism, it's that all of the stories were so similar in tenor, and equally unsettling. Each tale ended with the main character (again, usually a child), in despair, or acknowledging that something irreplaceable was lost. It was poignant, but a bit depressing. However, these are stories that make you really think-- there are moments of levity throughout, but Russell doesn't shy away from the hard truths of living, or the overall struggle of being human. In the end, the similarity of their struggles is a thread that connects all of these tales: each a separate bead on the same necklace.
I recommend this, as well as Vampires in the Lemon Grove, if you're looking for a collection of thoughtful tales reminiscent of Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. Writers like these teach us to see magic everywhere, while still stirring our empathy for the harshness and mundane quality everyday life can hold.
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