White Cat, Black Dog (2023)
By Kelly Link
288pp, Fiction
Notes
2024-05-15
I'm in the habit of buying Kelly Link books as soon as they come out and then not reading them for half a year or so. She doesn't publish much and I like to keep some in reserve. Of course hot on the heels of this collection she released her long awaited (by fans at least, the big table at the front of Waterstones in Crouch End remains impervious to her appeal) novel The Book of Love (currently waiting on my shelf) so I needn't have worried.
Anyway, yes, it's really good. These stories really double down on the fairy tale aspect of Link's fiction, explicitly so; each story is subtitled with the name of a fairy tale to which it glancingly refers. The way she's able to mix the language and narative logic of fairy tales with believable characters inhabiting the modern world (or something at least a bit like it) really is something else. It seems effortless but I don't know anyone else who even comes close.
The opening paragraphs of the first story:
All stories about divorce must begin some other place, and so let us begin with a man so very rich, he might reach out and have almost any thing he desired, as well as many things that he did not. He had so many houses even his accountants could not keep track of them all. He had private planes and newspapers and politicians who saw to it that his wishes became laws. He had orchards, islands, baseball teams, and even a team of entomologists whose mandate was to find new species of beetles to be given variations on the rich man's name. (For if it was true that God loved beetles, was it not true He loved the rich man even more? Was his good fortune not the proof of this?)
The rich man had all of this and more than I have space to write. Anything you have ever possessed, know that he had this, too. And if he did not, he could have paid you whatever your price was in order to obtain it.
It's Jeff Besoz or Rupert Murdoch as a fairy tale monarch. And that last line! So dark: "he could have paid you whatever your price was in order to obtain it"
Like a lot of my favourite fantasy writing allegorical interpretations exist but they're never the main thing, the fatastical elements are not just in the service of some broader point, they are the point. (c.f. China Miéville, Susanah Clarke etc.)
This is maybe not the easiest introduction to Link's oeuvre (That'd be Pretty Monsters which still has it's uncomfortable edges but is a collection of broadly speaking more conventional stories) but it's right up there with the best (Magic for Beginnners).
another kind of link
It occured to me that I don't think I've ever read anything Le Guin might have written about Kelly Link (I can't believe she hadn't read her) so I did a quick search; couldn't find anything but did turn up this ...