All That Isn't
Kelly Link, Get In Trouble: Stories
Canongate, 352pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781782113836
reviewed by Miles Klee
Before I read Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble, I only knew her fabulist work by reputation. I actually own an earlier short story collection – she’s one of those literary unicorns who has made a name for herself without bothering about the albatross of a novel – but, and I can’t believe I’m admitting this, its ugly cover is too much. I’ve never brought myself to crack it open. Further evidence of my superficiality: I dived into her new anthology head first, head over heels in love with the pulp-vintage red edges on the pages.
Link’s prose is much like this, full-blooded and pretty. In contrast to the overdetermined lines that wrack devotees to the Cult of the Sentence, she embraces a style that’s artfully inconspicuous, with a healthy dose of benevolent wit. That’s because she’s got to outrun the dread white avalanche of her ideas; she’s got to be able to pivot between multiple alien worlds, usually in the space of a single phrase. This is a tentpole of Link’s appeal, as I understand it – she’s a nimble genre magpie. A haunting here, a robot there, mermaids, rocketships, magic spells. With the right illustrator, most of these tales would make enchanting comics.
When she doesn’t book it down the mountain, she’s buried under the sci-fi and fantasy tropes she’d clearly rather be tweaking. ‘Secret Identity,’ which marries the concept of online catfishing to the alter-ego strategy favoured by costumed crimefighters, is a cutting number, if just a hair too shaggy. But later we have ‘Origin Story,’ which slaps another superhero pastiche against a Wizard of Oz backdrop without the two ever quite fusing. ‘Two Houses’ manages the dazzling feat of a neo-Victorian ghost story in deep interstellar space, while ‘I Can See Right Through You’ labours to humanise a demon who’s also a Hollywood wash-out. Is there anything all that startling about characterising showbiz careers as Faustian bargains?
One ought to have another example of this straining for strangeness, and the final story, ‘Light,’ contains it. Despite the kitchen-sink approach here, it’s a supple, spooky passage:
It’s a lie to say I’m not tickled. On the other hand, must I be so pedantically informed of the story’s bent reality when it has already dealt us amputatable double shadows, warehouses of people in slumberous trances, and a failed marriage to a seven-foot man from a neighbouring dimension who somewhat resembles an iguana? I prefer the story’s opening, in a seedy bar, when a soused side character rants about being raised by wolves. Does he mean it literally? In Link’s labyrinth of freakishness, you really don’t know. But you make a choice anyway.
Indeed, some of the pleasure of a story like ‘The Lesson’ derives from a tense anticipation of the direly unusual. This is a borderline realist affair, despite the intrusion of a strange, island-dwelling creature considered extinct by those familiar with it, describing an ill-conceived destination wedding attended by a young couple anxious about the expensive pregnancy of a surrogate mother back home. It flirts with the edges of the plausible and in so doing acquires the sharp, hot life of a crystalline anecdote. What would be a sly curve-ball from almost any other writer is, in the fluid context of Get in Trouble, a masterful change-up. You swing so hard you wind up sprawled in the dust, wondering how Link fooled you so well.
But perhaps it’s most accurate to say that in Link’s dream world, everything is the case – the ordinary, too. No matter the metaphysics, there’s still homework, jealousy, birthday parties and dentist conventions. ‘Valley of the Girls’ courts narrative whiplash with the sadism of a young, futuristic, wealthy elite and their passing fancy for ancient Egypt’s eternal tombs and curses. Once you get your bearings, though, you’d swear it’s a brat-pack aria that excavates the hollows within a cruelly beautiful and near-immortal Reagan/Thatcher teen. Pyramids are, of course, the ultimate expression of socioeconomic status – why shouldn’t they play a part?
Amid both the gems and duds, the sizzle and the drag, there lies no shortage of wondrous images. The craft-mad fairies of ‘The Summer People,’ an ethereal yet domestic dramatisation of the adage ‘it’s a gift and a curse,’ speak directly to Link’s inventiveness, as well as her compulsion towards creation for its own sake: ‘“They’d embellish a bedazzled jean jacket if you left it there,” Fran said. “No lie. They can’t stand to leave a thing alone.”’ Get in Trouble matches its name, overturning each stone, painting itself into every corner.
Luckily, as with her sprites, Link’s adjustments are rarely meddlesome and always terribly apt. Five words at most ring awkwardly in the entire opus. And some of her finest touches are grace notes: the oblivious parents in ‘The New Boyfriend,’ the insinuation of circular time that threads ‘I Can See Right Through You,’ the drunken, friendly one-night stands of ‘Light.’ She brilliantly illuminates the blackest depths of imagination, and you won’t forget the view.
Link’s prose is much like this, full-blooded and pretty. In contrast to the overdetermined lines that wrack devotees to the Cult of the Sentence, she embraces a style that’s artfully inconspicuous, with a healthy dose of benevolent wit. That’s because she’s got to outrun the dread white avalanche of her ideas; she’s got to be able to pivot between multiple alien worlds, usually in the space of a single phrase. This is a tentpole of Link’s appeal, as I understand it – she’s a nimble genre magpie. A haunting here, a robot there, mermaids, rocketships, magic spells. With the right illustrator, most of these tales would make enchanting comics.
When she doesn’t book it down the mountain, she’s buried under the sci-fi and fantasy tropes she’d clearly rather be tweaking. ‘Secret Identity,’ which marries the concept of online catfishing to the alter-ego strategy favoured by costumed crimefighters, is a cutting number, if just a hair too shaggy. But later we have ‘Origin Story,’ which slaps another superhero pastiche against a Wizard of Oz backdrop without the two ever quite fusing. ‘Two Houses’ manages the dazzling feat of a neo-Victorian ghost story in deep interstellar space, while ‘I Can See Right Through You’ labours to humanise a demon who’s also a Hollywood wash-out. Is there anything all that startling about characterising showbiz careers as Faustian bargains?
One ought to have another example of this straining for strangeness, and the final story, ‘Light,’ contains it. Despite the kitchen-sink approach here, it’s a supple, spooky passage:
The sky was swollen and low. Lindsey loved this, the sudden green afternoon darkness as rain came down in heavy drumming torrents so loud she could hardly hear the radio station in her car, the calm, jokey pronouncements of the local weather witch. The vice president was under investigation; evidence suggested a series of secret dealings with malign spirits. A woman had given birth to half a dozen rabbits. A local gas station had been robbed by invisible men. Some cult had thrown all the infidels out of a popular pocket universe. Nothing new, in other words. The sky was always falling. U.S. 1 was bumper to bumper all the way to Plantation Key.
It’s a lie to say I’m not tickled. On the other hand, must I be so pedantically informed of the story’s bent reality when it has already dealt us amputatable double shadows, warehouses of people in slumberous trances, and a failed marriage to a seven-foot man from a neighbouring dimension who somewhat resembles an iguana? I prefer the story’s opening, in a seedy bar, when a soused side character rants about being raised by wolves. Does he mean it literally? In Link’s labyrinth of freakishness, you really don’t know. But you make a choice anyway.
Indeed, some of the pleasure of a story like ‘The Lesson’ derives from a tense anticipation of the direly unusual. This is a borderline realist affair, despite the intrusion of a strange, island-dwelling creature considered extinct by those familiar with it, describing an ill-conceived destination wedding attended by a young couple anxious about the expensive pregnancy of a surrogate mother back home. It flirts with the edges of the plausible and in so doing acquires the sharp, hot life of a crystalline anecdote. What would be a sly curve-ball from almost any other writer is, in the fluid context of Get in Trouble, a masterful change-up. You swing so hard you wind up sprawled in the dust, wondering how Link fooled you so well.
But perhaps it’s most accurate to say that in Link’s dream world, everything is the case – the ordinary, too. No matter the metaphysics, there’s still homework, jealousy, birthday parties and dentist conventions. ‘Valley of the Girls’ courts narrative whiplash with the sadism of a young, futuristic, wealthy elite and their passing fancy for ancient Egypt’s eternal tombs and curses. Once you get your bearings, though, you’d swear it’s a brat-pack aria that excavates the hollows within a cruelly beautiful and near-immortal Reagan/Thatcher teen. Pyramids are, of course, the ultimate expression of socioeconomic status – why shouldn’t they play a part?
Amid both the gems and duds, the sizzle and the drag, there lies no shortage of wondrous images. The craft-mad fairies of ‘The Summer People,’ an ethereal yet domestic dramatisation of the adage ‘it’s a gift and a curse,’ speak directly to Link’s inventiveness, as well as her compulsion towards creation for its own sake: ‘“They’d embellish a bedazzled jean jacket if you left it there,” Fran said. “No lie. They can’t stand to leave a thing alone.”’ Get in Trouble matches its name, overturning each stone, painting itself into every corner.
Luckily, as with her sprites, Link’s adjustments are rarely meddlesome and always terribly apt. Five words at most ring awkwardly in the entire opus. And some of her finest touches are grace notes: the oblivious parents in ‘The New Boyfriend,’ the insinuation of circular time that threads ‘I Can See Right Through You,’ the drunken, friendly one-night stands of ‘Light.’ She brilliantly illuminates the blackest depths of imagination, and you won’t forget the view.