Short StoriesKaren Russell is 25. A graduate of the Columbia MFA, a creative writing programme, she includes a full page of acknowledgements in this, her first, book, thanking everyone from her seventh grade teacher to the cat's mother - worse than a speech after a GAA fund-raiser in Mullingar.
Young people, especially ones from writing MAs, tend to do this sort of thing. It's touching or tiresome, depending on which side of the bed you got out of. Personally I feel that editors who permit such acknowledgement lists should be burned alive, on a bonfire of effusive acknowledgements, but perhaps they feel that youth must have its fling.
It's a minor transgression on the part of the author, though, and Karen Russell will be pardoned for it. She will be pardoned almost anything, because she writes so well. Like this:
As she walks towards the water, flying sparks come shivering out of her hair, off her shoulders, a miniature hailstorm. It's the lizards! I realize. She is shaking them off in a scaly shower, flakes of living armour. The geckos fall from her arms, her breasts, they plink into the pond, her hissing, viscous diamonds.
... ( Ava Wrestles the Alligator)
Very modern, mostly hiding any links with mythology, her writing is reminiscent of Alice Maher's painting: the blurring of the boundaries between animals and people recurs throughout the collection of 10 stories. The first, Ava Wrestles the Alligator, is, like many more in the book, concerned with a young person on the cusp of adolescence - in this instance a 12-year-old girl, Ava, who is struggling to save her 16-year-old sister, Ossie, from drowning - in the swamp of sex, possibly sex with alligators. Located in a very strange swamp (#1 Gator Theme Park and Swamp Café) the story conveys the fecund, fetid, crazy atmosphere of its setting perfectly. Karen Russell brings us there, to the rickety bungalow close to the alligator pond where Ossie indulges in vigorous ritualistic masturbation with her imaginary boyfriend. The desperate attempts of the innocent Ava to prevent Ossie from succumbing to the more devastating aspects of adulthood are moving and quite convincing, although expressed in exceptionally fantastic terms.
Similarly, in the story Haunting Olivia, the Herculean efforts of the brothers Wallow and Timothy Sparrow to find their sister Olivia, who drowned when she slid down a sand dune on a crab sled into the incoming tide, are heart-rending. The brothers blame themselves for their young sister's disappearance. They helped Olivia into the crab sled - which, lest you are unfamiliar with crab sleds, is a giant crab shell, fashioned into a sled. (Maybe it's plastic, or maybe it's real crab. In Karen Russell's world, you don't ask too many pedantic questions.) The boys cannot accept that Olivia is dead. They hunt for her, among the fishes, until the terrible truth reveals itself in a luminous moment of sub-aqueous epiphany:
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.
This story succeeds in being very funny, outrageously imaginative, and profoundly moving. Quite a feat for any story.
SIMILARLY IMPRESSIVE IN its power of imagination and its power to move is From Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration. This account of a family travelling from New England to the west coast on the wagon trail is narrated by a young boy, who finds, during the arduous journey, that the responsibility for the family's well-being, for its very survival, shifts to his reluctant shoulders. Given that his father is a minotaur, who pulls the family wagon, and that the moment of epiphany arrives when they are only halfway to California, and one of the party has recently been eaten by a wolf, the allegorical account of the struggle to grow up gains in power. The complexity of the boy's relationship to his bull father is so delicately expressed that the story works as a universal coming-of-age tale.
Possibly the only piece that is mildly disappointing is the last and title story, St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. This - also surreal, funny, and impressive in many ways - tells of girls taken from wolves to a convent, which seeks to civilize them, mostly with good results.
It would seem to be an allegory for the sort of homes Americans had for the children of Indians, or the Australians for children who made the mistake of being born Aboriginal, or even our own delightful institutions, Letterfrack and so on, for Irish children who were poor, or not up to the mark in some other way.
Not unpredictably, one wolf girl rejects the convent life and refuses to conform. She reverts to wolfhood. I found it disappointing that she did not at least eat a teacher - simply escaping and running back to the wild seems like a tame denouement (there is another, also tame). In addition, and this is a quibble from a very Irish perspective, St Lucy's Home is nice. As we have been taught, sadly, the real homes for children raised by wolves were often considerably less civilised than a wolf's lair. It seems that even the power of Karen Russell's imagination cannot stretch to inventing a reformatory for wolf girls as horrible as those homes.
That is an endearing failure. Like her exuberant acknowledgement list, it arises from one of her great strengths: her own writerly innocence - I use the word deliberately, and admiringly. A stylist of great sophistication, and possessed of a most mature compassion for human distress, nevertheless her ability to allow her imagination to lead her where it will seems to me youthful, innocent, childlike, in the very best way. Her imagination is agile, like the body of a champion gymnast, and she lets it dance.
Is this an American trait? Does anyone over here write like this, with such freedom, such vivacity?
This collection will not be everybody's cup of tea, but it is a wild and brilliant first book. A book in which youth has its fling.
• Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a novelist and short story writer. Her Irish-language novel for children, Hurlamaboc, won a Bisto honour award at the Children's Books Ireland/Bisto Book of the Year awards in Dublin last week
• St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by WolvesBy Karen Russell Chatto & Windus, 246pp. £11.99