“You know the world is different now from the way it was. This is a story everyone knows, and so it is not the story I will tell. Who I was before, that, too, is a small story, so small I could fit it into a box that would fit into another box, that box still small enough to carry inside the smallest pocket. Were I to take it out of its box, I do not know that I could ever fit it back inside again.” – from “The White Road” in White Cat, Black Dog
Continuing my recent foray into fantasy, I picked up my first Kelly Link book this week, White Cat, Black Dog, intrigued by this note in the acknowledgements of GennaRose Nethercott’s Thistlefoot: “And forever and ever to Kelly Link—whose stories have always felt like permission. Like a homecoming. Like getting onto a carnival ride where the theme is, somehow, the inside of my own brain.”
I read the first story aloud to my husband, neither of us knowing what to expect, and we were both enchanted by its blend of contemporary experience—with life coaches and pot farming and the challenges of airport security—with fairytale elements like talking cats and a dog small enough to fit in a macadamia shell.
The collection features seven stories, each a contemporary retelling of an existing fairytale. I was not familiar enough with the source texts to judge the relationship between the originals and the retellings, so for “Skinder’s Veil,” one of my favorites, I decided to read the tale it was inspired by: a Grimm story called “Snow-White and Rose-Red.” Link’s version focuses on Andy, a PhD student who agrees to take over a friend’s unusual housesitting gig in rural Vermont while he struggles to finish his dissertation; as you can imagine, this is, on its surface, quite a different set-up from the Grimm version, which involves two young sisters living in a cottage in the woods with their mother. What I learned from reading both was that Link has thoroughly reinvented the story with a modern setting and mostly new characters but repurposed key images, characters, and motifs from the original. The kinship between the stories is more like the resemblance between a grandchild and grandparent—there are notable echoes in features but each have their own distinct personality.
Each story has the added bonus of a beautiful grayscale illustration by Shaun Tan, which hints at the tale to come without revealing its secrets. I especially enjoyed looking back at the illustrations after finishing each story. The writing is also consistently excellent in an understated way.
What impressed me most, however, is Link’s mastery of suspension of disbelief. Often, it’s characters’ own expressions of skepticism that make a given story more believable. Other times, it’s the unexpected intrusion of the mundane, as we find when the middle-aged lover in “Prince Hat Underground” gropes his way through caves with the help of a sentient grub and then falls through a subterranean lake in search of his beloved only to end up in a version of hell that strongly (and to him, disappointingly) resembles suburbia. These stories often best speak to our present moment precisely when they incorporate the strangest elements.
I found the stories satisfying even as some of the answers for which I longed remained out of reach, not unlike the mysterious and dangerous white road of one story: “Turn your head in one direction, and there, through the trees, is the road. Turn your head away from where you last saw it, though, and there it is again…But it was never as near as you thought.” In my view, this is not a criticism but rather key to the book’s success; I appreciated discovering that part of the work of interpretation was left for me to provide. All in all, a gorgeous book.