Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

Even though Kelly Link’s collection, Magic for Beginners, was published in 2006, it still deserves acknowledgement. Link’s stories are surprisingly original and beautiful, and one thing that stands out is her choice of words. The way she savors language is not unlike John Crowley’s writing, such as in his novel Little, Big. She cares about a story’s form as much as its content. Michael Chabon compared her once to Donald Barthelme. I agree with him, but I would also add Thomas Pynchon to the mix.

The first story, “The Faery Handbag,” is as smooth a tale as can be. You start reading and then—wham! You don’t know what got you right between the eyes.

Genevieve is a girl who lost a handbag. It could be a simple problem, but you already know that won’t be the case here. The handbag once belonged to her grandmother, Zofia, an exile from the distant Eastern European country of Baldeziwurlekistan, a place that doesn’t exist anymore. “They call it something else now,” Genevieve’s grandmother told her.

The bag is much more than it appears to be:

“If you called the faery handbag by its right name, it would be something like ‘orzipanikanikcz,’ which means the ‘bag of skin where the world lives,’…”

Zofia hid her entire village in there a long time ago so they could escape from a raiding party that would have otherwise killed everyone there. She then fled to America where she had a baby girl who, in turn, also had a baby girl, who became a sort of guardian of the bag after Zofia died. But many things can happen to a bag in the city. Some of these things include the guardian’s best friend becoming lost inside the bag and the guardian losing the bag right after that. Genevieve starts looking for it, using a Scrabble board and tiles as a divinatory device, a trick she learned from her grandmother, all the while entreating us, the readers, to promise that we won’t believe a word of anything she has told us. As if we could make that promise; we’re already entranced.

We don’t really have a choice but to continue straight on to the second story, “The Hortlak,” which shows us that life in an All-Night Convenience store can be anything but convenient. Eric and his Turkish friend/manager, Batu, live in it, a veritable surrealist hell—with zombies! But these strange creatures are more like disoriented people than brain-eaters, responding to questions with (apparently) nonsensical answers. Eric is in love with a girl called Charley, but he is afraid of going outside because of the zombies (and even though she’s not a zombie herself, she has a car full of ghost dogs). “The Hortlak” is a surreal and also a very uncomfortable story.

“The Cannon” is a sort of follow-up to “The Hortlak,” almost a vignette; it’s a kind of “Interview with the Zombie” where the answers of the zombie (a certain Venus Shebby, although we’re never sure if the interviewed zombie is the same throughout) don’t always match the question. A fine, weird tale, provocative in its use of language and narrative.

“Stone Animals” is a truly terrifying story. A family moves into an old house full of rabbits on the lawn—rabbits that seem to multiply and that seem to be watching the house. Inch by inch, they take over, not the inside, but the outside. This story is a bit like Julio Cortazar’s “Casa Tomada” in which an unseen but terrifying presence forces brother and sister to leave the house they inherited from their parents. Here, the children become almost rabbit-like, the pregnant mother becomes paranoid, and the absent father finally becomes someone else. “Stone Animals” is reminiscent of not only Cortazar but also Hans Christian Andersen—the original Andersen, not the edulcorated, Disneyfied versions, the original “why bad things happen to good people” version.

“Catskin” also begins like an Andersen story but then evolves to a softer vision, something akin to Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird: a Fairy Play in Six Acts or other folk tales like those collected by Italo Calvino in his Italian Fables. An old witch dies and splits her heirloom between her three adopted children (for witches can’t bear children; they can only kidnap them). Flora, Jack, and Small each get one parting gift at the witch’s deathbed. Flora and Jack simply go away, but Small (the youngest) decides he’s going to stay in the house with the dead witch and her myriad cats—even though the children put their former house, a dollhouse, in a grave in the local cemetery. A shallow grave, of course, so the dollhouse remains almost entirely on the surface.

The day after, a big, white cat, one that Small has never seen before, appears and presents itself to him as The Witch’s Revenge. Apparently the witch’s reincarnation, the cat will lead Small on a journey of revenge and what would seem to be a happily-ever-after life. Through all these tribulations, the cat talks Small into wearing a kind of catsuit made of catskin and behaving like a cat himself. In this mixed identities game, it is easy to lose oneself and no longer be able to know who you really are.

(At this point, a special compliment must be paid to the illustrator. I’ve admired the art of Shelley Jackson for a long time now, especially her story told in tattoos, “Skin.” Here, she does a subtle, sensitive job portraying the sad, creepy little creatures that inhabit the mind of Kelly Link. A wonderful execution.)

“Some Zombie Contingency Plans” begins almost like a Tarantino screenplay, full of loony, half-drunken conversations at a party, and turns out to be much more than a simple—and tragic—story from the plans a guy makes in case of a zombie invasion. It doesn’t help that Soap (the guy) has recently gotten out of prison after stealing a Picasso just for fun. Plenty of good advice on zombie behavior: “Zombies didn’t discriminate. Everyone tasted equally good as far as zombies were concerned” and “There is never just one zombie”—veritable pearls of Tarantinesque wisdom. If there is a moral, it’s “don’t leave your loved ones beyond your reach when talking to a stranger—even if that stranger seems to be the best person ever.”

Sometimes the best stories are simple extrapolations of daily life. That’s what “The Great Divorce” is all about: a divorce. But it is not an everyday divorce. This is a story about the marriage of a living man to a dead woman, a woman who was already dead when they got married. It is a sad, cruel predicament for Alan Robley, the living partner—for what can you do when you can’t even see your loved one and can only communicate by means of an Ouija board or a psychic? They had children—dead children—for, as Link writes beautifully, “Life, like red hair or blue eyes, is a recessive gene.” Stuck in the middle is Sarah Parminter, a mix of medium/matchmaker, who arranged the marriage and now works as a therapist/counselor for the unhappy couple. Sarah likes Alan and doesn’t like what Lavvie (the dead wife) is doing to him (cheating on him, making his life miserable), but her code of ethics requires her to try her very best to patch things up.

The title story, “Magic for Beginners,” is a wild ride between layers of reality, concerning a group of teenagers who are crazy about a pirated TV show called The Library. The protagonist of the show is Fox, a freewheeling adventurer who is always in trouble in the immense, self-contained world inside a library not dissimilar to Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel.” Among the many idiosyncrasies of the show, there is the fact that Fox is never played twice by the same actor (or actress, since he/she keeps changing gender). Another idiosyncrasy is that Fox never dies.

Until, naturally, the day Fox dies.

One of the most fervent admirers of The Library is young Jeremy Mars, a boy from Plantagenet, Vermont. Together with Elizabeth and her sister, Talis (he’s in love with both girls, even though he’s not really aware of it), Jeremy tapes each episode to watch with them. The episodes, by the way, usually air on different channels at different times—since it’s a pirated show. It’s suggested that it may even be a window opening onto another reality, which would account for some, but not all, of the idiosyncrasies.

Jeremy seems content with the way things are until the day (just before Fox died) his mother invites him to go with her to Las Vegas in order to inherit a wedding chapel that belonged to her great-aunt. He doesn’t want to leave, but things around him start to subtly conspire for him to go—maybe forever.

This would seem to be an ordinary rite of passage YA story, if not for the fact that sometimes it looks like Jeremy is himself a character on The Library, though he doesn’t know that. “Magic for Beginners” turns, then, into a kind of retelling of the time-honored story of Chuang-Tzu’s butterfly dream: sometimes you don’t know if you’re watching an episode of a series or are the episode being watched. As the name of the series imply, it’s Borges for the 21^st century. And it’s good.

The final story, “Lull,” seems to follow in the same footsteps as “Magic for Beginners,” but in a different register. A group of friends plays cards on what seems to be a nice, warm, and cozy old friend’s day off—but with Kelly Link, things are never what they seem to be at first glance. These are pathetic men, each with his own burden. Their burdens seem to be lifted somewhat when they call a phone sex line and listen, instead, to a modern-day Scheherazade who tells them a story with all the ingredients each wants to hear—including a bit of their own lives. It would be creepy if it weren’t so sad.

Magic for Beginners is truly a compendium for apprentices. If you want to write non-Tolkienesque, post-modern urban fantasy (or if you just want to read a superb example of it), you would do well reading this collection by Kelly Link.

Publisher: Harcourt Harvest (Sept. 2006)
Price: $11.20
Trade paperback: 320 pages
ISBN: 0156031876