Get
in Trouble: Stories
Kelly
Link
I
have heard no small amount of praise for Kelly Link and her latest
collection of short stories, from both professional reviewers and
personal friends, and I felt that I had little choice but to pick it
up when I saw it at the public library. And boy, I'm glad I did: I
was rewarded with a reading experience that absolutely lives up to
the hype. Link's ability to subtly combine the familiar and the
fantastic is utterly sublime, and there is even a similar quality of
detachment inherent in "The Lesson," the collection's only
story that firmly takes place in our (known) reality. The remaining
stories vary in their fealty to strict realism, from fairly
believable worlds with a slight twist to strange futures with
advanced technology, yet each contains at heart a fierce display of
humanity. Moreover, Link knows exactly how and when to deploy
exposition, often holding certain facts at bay to create a sense of
detachment, a slight fog that readers will be pleased to become lost
in. The resulting sense of mystery, combined with no small amount of
wonder at the worlds she manages to immerse herself and her readers
in, makes it obvious that Link is an absolute master of her craft.
There
is no single common theme that unites the stories in Get in
Trouble, but most rely at least
in part on the surprising power of half-truths, dwelling on both the
truths and the lies that are inherent in them. Whether her characters
omit essential pieces of information to lighten themselves of a
burden ("Summer People", "Origin Story"), overtly
construct alternate identities and truths ("Secret Identity"),
or lie to themselves to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths ("I
Can See Right Through You"), they are held captive to the
strange areas that arise between fact and fiction, much as Link
herself straddles the line. Even those stories that are more overtly
and thoroughly fantastic- such as "Valley of the Girls",
"The New Boyfriend," and "Two Houses"- keep one
foot solidly planted in the familiar, whether it be the painfully
familiar hormonal pangs of adolescence or the uncertainty of life and
truth itself in the age of postmodernism.
There
is a latent power in Link's stories that isn't always evident at the
outset; she gradually sinks your claws into you until you find,
suddenly, that you are completely immersed in the worlds of her
imagination. It is a subtle process that, I suspect, lends her
stories much of their power. While many of these tales may
immediately seem to jettison the reader into completely unfamiliar
territory, their inner logic comes gradually to the fore, until even
the most disorienting among them can become the most powerful
("Valley of the Girls" took me a while to figure out, but
is the story that has made the deepest lasting impression on me).
These aren't so much twist endings as logical outgrowths of the
tenuous bonds that connect Link's worlds to our own, and it is an
absolute pleasure to get lost in worlds that are as remarkably rich
as those in many novels. Ultimately, much of what makes Kelly Link
such a powerful and engrossing writer is the atmosphere that she
creates within and between her stories, and I am eager to discover
her back catalog and to read whatever she comes up with next. Link
is, in short, impossibly good, and Get in Trouble
has a certain indescribable quality about it, a combination of wonder
and sadness that allows Link to touch on profound truths with
shocking depth in continually surprising ways.
Grade:
A
No comments:
Post a Comment