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Magic acts
Aimee Bender and Kelly Link
BY NINA MacLAUGHLIN
Related Links

Aimee Bender's Web site

Kelly Link's official Web site

Nina MacLaughlin reviews Kelly Link's earlier books.

The desire to create myths and fairy tales may come from the need to make order out of chaos, but that chaos also fosters the urge to report and document. As tumultuous as the world is right now, we can’t get enough Reality. But news reports are fleeting. Stories stick around. Kelly Link and Aimee Bender are both fabulists working in the age of Reality TV. Their stories evoke the timelessness of fairy tales while remaining grounded in a world much like our own.

Populated by pumpkinheads and potato babies, Bender’s Willful Creatures burns along in beaming, piercing prose. Her stories often begin like jokes: "Two teenagers were standing on a street corner"; "Ten men go to ten doctors. All the doctors tell all the men that they only have two weeks left to live." But they end up more like fables, the punch line replaced by moral transformation. In "End of the Line," a man buys a little man at the pet store and tortures him in ways that whisper of Abu Ghraib. He poisons him with household cleanser, wraps him in masking tape and puts him in the fridge, makes him jerk off on command. He lets his pet free in the end — the humor and the delight in power wear off — and "Everything about him felt disgusting and huge." An American allegory if ever there was one.

Human cruelty and sadness are pervasive. In "Debbieland," teenage girls torment Debbie, rip her clothes off, slice her skin. The death of a child is the subject of "Ironhead," as a family of pumpkinheads give birth to a kid with a flatiron where the pumpkin should be. The leaps of fantasy and the surrealism depend on the recognizable human moments, and Bender nails them: "While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on." And in "I Will Pick Out Your Ribs from My Teeth," the narrator, whose girlfriend keeps attempting suicide, has lunch at the house of a friend who "takes a sip of my milk; it’s a big sip and it sort of makes me twitch because I was saving it for last. Even though it is rightfully his. Still. I like milk." Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and An Invisible Sign of My Own, mixes the quotidian and the quixotic.

The stories in Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners are less overtly moral but no less sinister and sublime. They entail a more complex — and ultimately more satisfying — internal logic, and the same is true of her language: "Charley looked like someone from a Greek play, Electra, or Cassandra. She looked like someone had just set her favorite city on fire." Tales nest within tales, and time doesn’t always go forward. In "Lull," a poker game turns into a chat with a sex-line worker who’s "Stephen King and sci-fi and the Arabian Nights and Penthouse Letters all at once," turns into a tale about the Devil and a cheerleader, turns into a story of one man’s wife, her clones, and vats of green beer.

In "Magic for Beginners," a hormonally charged combination of Edgar Allan Poe and The OC, a group of friends are obsessive fans of a fantasy TV show called The Library, and the story becomes a show within the show within the story. And in Stone Animals, in between an increasingly haunted house and an infestation of watchful rabbits, there’s a Revolutionary Road–style disintegration of a marriage. Like Bender’s stories, Link’s are as real as they are magic, and if nothing else, they help guide us through the dark.

Aimee Bender | Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut Street, Newton | September 8 | 7:30 pm | 617.244.6619


Issue Date: September 2 - 8, 2005
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