BINGO: Review, and with that my first EVER bingo!!!!
This was a review from the always brilliant Julia, who could be argued first introduced me to the idea that books and reading could be more than just a thing that I really liked, but truly a part of my personality and how I experience joy in the world! When she recommends something, I do try my hardest to add it to the tippy top of my TBR list, although the rec for The Overstory did make me involuntarily yawn even as she described it.
SO in any case, that bit of context aside: each of these stories is wonderful in its own way, a little slice of life that tries to get at a fundamental truth through a lens that could be argued as absurdist, except what even is the world these days? Perhaps easiest to just talk through some of my favorites, the ones that I found easier to read:
“The Tornado Auction” : in the 70s (?) people used to farm and grow tornados for sale, for example to demolish buildings or enter into rodeo-like award shows. Our main character, Robert, bemoans those days as people have mostly downgraded to only farming small weather patterns, even as he finds himself unable to stay away from the regular auctions of ‘tiny twister’ that could be grown to giant, Category X storms. He eventually does buy a small weather feature, mortgaging all that’s left of his savings on One Final Storm and raising it while reminiscing about how the same mania led him to be estranged from his family. I don’t know that I find the overall arc of the story as satisfying as the delicate balance that Russell does between character developing and world building–not always successful (oftentimes the thing that makes me DNF books) but here very well done.
“Bog Girl” is about a young man who finds a preserved corpse in the bogs near his northern European town (Scotland? Ireland? something bog-y), the titular Bog Girl. Like Lars and the Real Girl (I assume, I have never seen this film) he takes her as his girlfriend over many years(?), to increasingly ludicrous and hilarious ends–e.g., his mother has to contend with being sex positive when Cill and the Bog Girl are in his room with the door closed, but also there is no sex happening. This story, more situational, has a more obvious message to counterbalance the absurdity–Cill might genuinely and very sweetly love the Bog Girl, but he of course does not know her at all despite professing to understand her needs. The ultimate “man who never asks you a question thinks you’re like no woman he’s ever met before,” if you will.
“Orange World” at first Julia and I agreed that we found this story on the lesser compelling side of the book, but on reflection I might promote it to the first tier–there’s something very personal (maybe? Does Russell have children? even if she doesn’t, I expect she has friends who have started or gone through the process) (update she does, two) about fully corporealizing the secret, dark fears of modern day mothers, who are told that they need to have it all and find that by the time they’re stable enough in late-stage capitalism to have children they’re “geriatric” and not the best vessels for incubating the children that they definitely should have had earlier. Rae, older, makes a literal deal with the devil to ensure that her child is born healthy, and payment comes due when she must feed the devil every morning at 4:44am. Except, as she learns in her Mothers Who Have Made Demonic Deals support group, she didn’t make a deal with THE devil but A devil, and probably a weak one at that, and she’s got to just cut it off. It has no power over her, no ability to keep her daughter safe nor harm her–all it really has is the power of her anxieties, working against her.
Even as I write it out, I’m stuck anew by the layers therein–fears of keeping your children safe, the cavalier way that experienced parents tell new parents that ‘everything will be fine’ as if that advice worked for them during their initial stints, the way that people with multiple kids who started earlier seem enviable but also unreachable, how we make our own worst enemies and need no others…in one sense, nothing new, the same tornado of worries that color everyone’s experiences. But the best literary works make the old seem fresh, and Russell does that with aplomb.
