| Randy
Money
Further Diversity From
J. K. Rowling and Poppy Z. Brite last time, to Rachel Ingalls' Mrs.
Caliban and Kathe Koja's Extremities in this column. The
choice of subject matter between Ingalls and Koja is not so different
as between Rowling and Brite, but their approaches and styles differ
significantly. (As usual, if you have not read these, you may find the
following discussion tells more than you want to know, particularly
the discussion of Ingalls' novel.) Our Own Private Caliban Rachel Ingalls' Mrs. Caliban consists of lies and fantasy, desire and deception, duplicity and love and betrayal. And somehow what Ingalls produces from this, though melancholy, is almost airy. Mrs. Caliban centers around Dorothy. She is married to Fred, and their marriage is nearing collapse. After the death of their son Scott, they lost interest in each other. Dorothy knows Fred has had an affair with a co-worker and suspects he has had others, yet she does not rouse herself to do anything about it and, as the novel begins, seems to be adrift. Dorothy's best friend is Estelle, a divorced mother of two teenagers: Joey, who hangs out with a tough gang and may be using drugs, and Sandra, 16, who is having an affair with, we learn near the novel's end, one of her mother's former lovers, Fred. Without Estelle's friendship and support, Dorothy is sure she would have had a nervous breakdown after Scott's death. In turn Dorothy tries to support her as Estelle's son dies and her daughter becomes more and more hostile to her. The novel is written in third person, with a tight focus on Dorothy's point of view. But Dorothy may not be a reliable witness to her own life. For instance, she hears things on the radio that no one else does. One day an announcer says, "Don't worry, Dorothy, you'll have another baby all right. All you need to do is relax and stop worrying about it. It's guaranteed." The announcer then resumes his commercial and Dorothy shrugs off the oddness of such a message, assuming her thoughts were imposing themselves on her hearing. Another day an announcer warns of the escape of a creature from a local lab. He says the creature has killed two of its captors, is considered highly dangerous, and listeners should be on the look out for the huge amphibian. Dorothy does not take the bulletin too seriously; neither does she consider it the product of her creative hearing since the message did not have the usual dreamy tone. She keeps preparing dinner for Fred and his guest, a client, and is surprised when she turns to find a six-foot, seven-inch, greenish-brown skinned, man-shaped creature with a face something like a toad's has entered her kitchen. She holds out celery, he accepts it and thanks her, and so their relationship begins. Larry, as Dorothy comes to call the creature, stays with Dorothy in a room she had appropriated for her exercise. Fred never enters that part of the house; it was supposed to be a playroom for their children. Late in the novel, Dorothy muses on how convenient it was that Larry came to her, since not every woman has a room her husband never visits. That thought serves two purposes: first, it represents Dorothy's and Fred's marriage in the wake of their son's death; they share little, each pushing the other into one small compartment of their daily lives. Second, it reminds the reader that all events in the story have been convenient and we are only getting Dorothy's perspective. Ingalls' title derives from Shakespeare's The Tempest. In The Tempest Caliban is Prospero's servant. Son of a witch, Caliban resents Prospero's attempts to civilize him, abhors the language Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, have taught him, and has tried to rape Miranda. Shakespeare seems to see Caliban as unchangeable, barbaric, an example of a nature too strong for nurture to alter. How is the reader to reconcile the title, Mrs. Caliban, with Dorothy's life? Who is Caliban here? Certainly, there is some of Caliban in Fred. He appears self-centered, oblivious to Dorothy and callous toward her feelings; at least, at first. As the novel continues some doubts arise; it's possible that Fred is floundering emotionally just as Dorothy is and his apparent disinterest in her stems from that. There are also indications in Dorothy's conversations with him and Estelle that both are afraid Dorothy is delicate and will breakdown completely if faced with further bad news. If, however, we assume Larry is Caliban, then Ingalls views him differently than Shakespeare viewed his Caliban. Dorothy is appalled that he was dragged from his underwater home against his will, experimented on and tortured; she sympathizes with his feelings of loss and homelessness, perhaps because they reflect her feelings since the Scott's death. Larry is a well-delineated character, intelligent, tender, gentle and inquisitive. His story is a little reminiscent of that of the Creature from the Black Lagoon and, by extension, Frankenstein's monster; his role is a little bit the Demon Lover, and a little bit the toad that becomes a prince: when Dorothy and Larry make love, it is the first time in a long time that she enjoys it, that it touches her more than physically. Further, since Larry's feelings are closer to the surface than Fred's, she can tell what he feels and how he thinks. For the first time in a while, she is needed and wanted, his need demonstrated by his acceptance of food and shelter from her, and by his constant questions about the human world: Without her Larry would be unable to negotiate our world, quickly captured and probably killed. In essence, Dorothy finds in him a substitute for Fred as a lover and companion, but also a substitute for Scott, someone to protect and teach. But is there a real Larry? Throughout Mrs. Caliban none of the main characters sees Larry except Dorothy. Near the end, when Fred and Estelle's daughter should see him, there is no indication that they do. As the novel closes, Larry's existence is in question. It is possible that Ingalls did not name her viewpoint character "Dorothy" without purpose: Ingalls' Dorothy may, like L. Frank Baum's Dorothy, through trauma, have entered a fantasy-land. In The Tempest, Prospero plays a "godgame": using magic, imagination and ingenuity, he manipulates a group of people into doing what he wishes. As Mrs. Caliban ends one is left wondering if Dorothy has manipulated the others. She has already hallucinated messages from the radio, and, when Fred dies, Larry disappears. Yet Ingalls is not content to assign all blame to Dorothy. If Dorothy is delusional, then Fred and Estelle's affair, Fred's other philandering, and their possibly exaggerated concern for Dorothy's psychological state may have contributed to her need for a loving, companionable fantasy-male. Mrs. Caliban, though
short, is a complex work, written in sharp, clear prose that yet has
a flatness of tone. That flatness seems to work on two levels: 1) not
telling us how to feel; 2) reflecting Dorothy's own emotional distance
and disconnection from her life. The death of Fred and Sandra, and the
loss of Estelle's friendship has little affect on Dorothy. At the end
she still looks for Larry to return, though he never does. How Does Your Garden Grow? From Rowling, to Brite, to Ingalls, to Kathe Koja; from spritely, to languorously poetic, to spare, to fiercely, feverishly lyrical; from friendship and loyalty, to desperate need for love and connection, to the weariness of relationships soured, to questioning the essence, if not the existence of Romantic love and exploring the consequences of our desire for it. Kathe Koja started as a genre writer, her early short stories first published in fantasy and horror venues. Her first novel, The Cipher, like Poppy Z. Brite's first novel was published by the Dell Abyss line. Over the past few years, with novels like Kink, Koja's audience has expanded to include more mainstream readers interested in her brand of surrealism. Extremities is a collection of stories by Koja most of which map the deserts and glaciers of love. The characters in these stories may yearn for the devoted, passionate love found in books, movies and television, but it is not within their grasp and, as a driving desire, Koja judges it glorious but also treacherous and even dangerous. In "The Neglected Garden," a spurned woman ties herself to the man's back fence and slowly becomes a garden. In his self-interest, he missed her abundance, the potential she had for growth. As she develops, he becomes scared of her and resentful that she is still part of his life. There is no ambiguity as to who will win when, in the final paragraphs, he takes action to eliminate her from his life. In "Angels in Love," a single woman, Lurleen, hears, night after night, the love-making of the couple next door. She meets the woman, Anne, and the woman looks exhausted, even anemic. But still the love-making goes on, and as Lurleen listens her desire for the kind of passion that Anne enjoys becomes ever more fervid. Lurleen builds fantasies of what it must be like to have such passion, and she begins nightly to masturbate to the sound of the love-making next door. Finally, she sneaks into their apartment one night and finds Anne in the arms of someone who isn't quite a man, seemingly enraptured by an embrace that looks torturous. And still she wants to join them: there is an element of masochism in some of our desires for love, maybe even an element of martyrdom, and Koja repeatedly foregrounds these elements. All of Koja's stories proceed in rhythmic prose, sensual and erotic and lush, yet not verbose: they are concise and compacted, displaying her characters' emotions with a texture and density that makes reading more than a couple at a time draining. Even the non-fantastic stories -- "Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard," "Lady Lazarus"; arguably the strongest of the non-fantastic tales -- have the same emotional intensity, the same narrative drive and momentum, making them compulsive reading, even when you are not sure you are enjoying them. But the least of these stories still engages, and most of them leave you questioning our concept of love and disturbed at the range of extreme behavior possible in the name of love and the need for connection.
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