Fantasy grows up: Gaiman and Sarrantonio's new anthology
The new anthology.
10:37 pm Jun. 16, 2010
Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio’s new anthology of short “fantastic” fiction begins with an ars poetica from Gaiman himself: “Talking to Al Sarrantonio I realized that I was not alone in finding myself increasingly frustrated with the boundaries of genre: the idea that categories which existed only to guide people around bookshops now seemed to be dictating the kind of stories that were being written.” It is the quality of the story that compels the reader, he elaborates, regardless of whether the story contains elements that break the boundary of the possible.
The artificiality of fantasy as a genre category is an axe I’ve been grinding for some time now. The fantastic is a device like any other, and a successful fantasy depends as much on the elements of tragedy, comedy, and horror for its success as any so-called realist fiction. To call, for instance, John Crowley’s Little, Big a “fantasy” is to miss the point as thoroughly as if you called Swann’s Way a romance novel.
It’s exciting to see an anthology of short stories being published with this idea as its organizing principle. The collection succeeds in what it sets out to do: it deftly illustrates the flexibility of the fantastic, the infinite uses to which fantastic elements can be put. It is this flexibility, this ability to illuminate aspects of culture and personality that would otherwise remain hidden, that led J.G. Ballard to claim that the only important fiction being written today is science fiction.
This is of course a defensive stance: Fantasy/SciFi/Whateveryouwanttocallit is the Israel of the literary world, perpetually making the case for its existence and perpetually hostile to perceived challenges to its integrity. As I read, it crossed my mind that perhaps we’ve moved beyond the moment when such defensiveness is necessary: Gaiman and Sarrantonio’s anthology showcases work by authors as diverse as Jodi Picoult and Chuck Palahniuk, each of whom use the fantastic in radically divergent ways. We are free to evaluate this work on its own merit without, as the Brits would say, letting the side down.
Which means, of course, that these stories are free to fail on their own merits as well. Quite a few do, in fact, exemplify the most common complaint against “speculative fiction”: the story functions as a vehicle for the fantastic device, not the other way around. One story in particular veers way too close to the plot of Gaiman’s own novel American Gods, while others feel like jarringly abbreviated versions of longer books. A few of the authors—Jodi Picoult, Roddy Doyle—take a tediously writing-workshop approach to the inclusion of fantastic elements, letting the “fantastic” element serve as an unexplained but potent symbol of the relationship between the characters. In Picoult’s short story, for example, the grieving parents of a dead child begin to change shape: the father begins to shrink, while the mother starts to physically expand. It’s an obvious metaphor for the distorting effect of tragedy in the couple’s lives, but this effect is much better conveyed through Picoult’s descriptive passages. The metaphor’s work is therefore redundant. That those writers—Picoult, Doyle—who have been most successful at writing fiction without so much as a fairy fluttering through their work seem to have the most trouble incorporating the fantastic speaks to the validity of the concept of fantasy as a device and not a genre. Like any device, one can only get good at using fantasy with practice. These are writers who have been (rightly) lauded for their work without honing the particular skill of the fantastic, and who could therefore afford to let this skill atrophy.
But the stories succeed at least as often as they disappoint. In some of the best pieces in the collection, it is unclear whether the fantastic element is actually present or is simply a hallucination. Jeffery Deaver’s “The Therapist” is the best thing in the book, a complex psychological drama in which the sanity of the central character is the unanswered question to which any answer is horrible. Al Sarrantonio’s contribution follows a similar vein. Tim Powers presents a family drama in which the relationship between two sisters comes to a nastily satisfying conclusion a few months after one sister is dead, and the fantastic element—communication beyond the grave—deepens the relationship between the characters rather than merely symbolizing it.
And a few stories choose to challenge what could be considered fantastic. Chuck Palahniuk’s story, in which a young lady drops acid on a game show as part of a sorority hazing ritual, takes a modern approach to the spirit quest. While some of his longer stories may suffer from an abundance of ideas on which he never follows up, the short story format works well for his style. Carolyn Parkhurst and Michael Moorcock both do a wonderful job of showcasing the surreal horror that people are capable of inflicting on those closest to them, creating monsters that have no need for fangs or scales.
While the anthology is uneven, that is to some extent the point: Gaiman and Sarrantonio have cast their net as wide as the contemporary literary world will allow. As such, it’s a perfect summer read: it’s fun, it can be picked up and put down on the beach according to how much fantasy your sunbaked brain will allow, and it provides a compelling snapshot of a genre whose status as “genre” is disintegrating as we speak. And it’s got a big scary octopus on the cover. Everyone likes an octopus.
