In a 2016 interview, the novelist Leone Ross confessed her love for magical realism. After falling for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a kid, she explained, she was primed to be seduced by the mature version of it. “It took time for me to give myself permission to write weird crap,” she said. “It took Toni Morrison and Gabriel Marquez at university for me to think, ‘Oh my God, the adult version of weird crap, that’s so cool!’”
It’s a peculiar and refreshing statement, because there’s probably no genre tag that novelists and critics are more careful to dance around than “magical realism.” A stray flurry of butterflies does not a One Hundred Years of Solitude make, we’re often reminded; a touch of telekenisis in a fantasy novel doesn’t equate to the kind of world-building the genre demands. Is it a Latin American or global genre? A subset of science fiction or an island unto itself? No matter: In Popisho, her fourth novel, Ross is deeply, unabashedly committed to the form, transporting it to the Caribbean in the same way Salman Rushdie brought it to India and Toni Morrison brought it to Michigan. It’s a lush novel — overgrown, really. But its overreach is a function of a maximalist instinct to create a world that’s weird, funny, erotic — and just enough like ours to say something about it.
Popisho is an archipelago whose residents — a commingling of natives and freed slaves who arrived in the 1800s — possess certain powers, or “cors.” For Xavier, one of the novel’s protagonists, it’s the ability to control flavors with his hands, making him the “macaenus,” or champion chef for the islands. His long-lost love, Anise, can detect illness in others: “Hypertension felt like the strike of a heavy peasant drum; syphilis made the earlobes squelchy; toes smelled of cornmeal before a heart attack; squints developed late in life made a screeching sound, like mice in a field.”
There are other cors: One girl can detect the age when someone will die, another can detect lies. In whatever form, cors literally turn the world inside out — they take our internal maladies, senses, and trajectories and put them out into the world, make them visible and provocatively public. Ross, a British writer who grew up in Jamaica, is keenly attuned to what’s possible and what’s imperiled in that kind of dynamic. As the novel opens, Xavier is moodily pondering the suicide of his wife a year earlier when he’s recruited to put together a feast for the wedding of Sonteine, the daughter of Popisho’s hot-blooded and oppressive governor. Xavier is an introvert and populist — serving elites isn’t for him. So the story is as much about class as it is magic.
The trajectory of the novel is focused on how Xavier and Anise ultimately connect with each other, evoking Orpheus and Eurydice. In the process, Ross enchants the territory — moths, for instance, are a heroin-grade intoxicant. But it’s also an earthbound narrative — graffiti is cropping up throughout Popisho demanding political change, and pressure is increasing on the governor about the exploitative nature of the toy factory that is the territory’s main industry. What’s hidden — a cloaked affection, a scammy business, a selfish motivation — will soon be thrust into the spotlight.
Ross’ most audacious visualization of this occurs close to midway through the novel when the vulva of every Popisho woman disconnects. Anise observes: “Her entire pum-pum had come loose: like a heavy battery falling out when the tiny locking device is retracted. Compact, self-contained. No blood, no mess. Just a chunk of her, lying there, rocking slowly.” The moment is played as high comedy, not danger or horror. A truth come to light, power source revealed. (Notably, Ross likens the vulva to a battery in a story that also has shades of Lysistrata.) This weird feat of magic stokes some real-world-feeling neuroses: The governor institutes a ban on sex, and the local prostitutes are pitted against wealthy, presumptuous johns. (The vulvas easily reattach, with a click, but a few are misplaced, setting another plotline in motion.)
The cors in Popisho expose the contradictions and hypocrisies among the people. They reveal the archipelago’s misogyny and injustice. But they’re not quite magical enough to solve them — that’s still a human business. “The earth vexes,” Ross writes, and that’s true whether there’s magic in it or not. But as in any novel that uses magical realism well — Solitude, Midnight’s Children, Song of Solomon — the magic puts the reality into sharp relief. In one potent scene, Xavier visits the home of one of his early lovers and mentors. It is, as Ross puts it, a “bandy house.” Its walls “were adaptive, they moved like animals, learning your ways. Two rooms could become six in a trice then expand again as guests arrived; as quick as it took to walk in and out of a room thinking, now where is my clean underwear or where is my walking stick, the items appeared.” It’s Xavier’s craving for domesticity painted in day-glo colors, made garish all the better to see it.
So the fact that the novel concludes with an approaching hurricane doesn’t feel like overkill so much as the natural endpoint for a novel that’s fecund with sensory detail. In the acknowledgments, Ross writes that she “carve[d] this novel out of a mountain,” from a manuscript that was 230,000 words at one point. It could have been cut further — its byways and pile-ons of characters make the narrative feel humid and miasmic at times. But I’m also not sure where exactly to cut, because heedless passion is the novel’s thematic heartbeat; its density of its description is one of its lead assets. It thrives on audacity and humor, as in a scene where Ross describes boys showing off their cors:
“Red, black, all shades of brown, making miniature thunderstorms between their fingertips, blowing themselves into huge and circular shapes, speaking so loud they could be heard in the next island, speaking so softly the insects understood them, and in the case of one very dark-skinned boy, removing dripping red organs for his friends’ amusement, including his oesophagus then, with particularly slithery aplomb, his entire backbone, which loope-de-looped through the earth like some bony snake before he seized it and swallowed it back into place.”
If you’ve created a world where you can yank out your spine for kicks, why wouldn’t you spend a lot of time there? Why wouldn’t you try to imagine everything possible in it? As Ross writes when Xavier observes a guide walking on water who then encourages him to do the same, “Now for impossibilities.” As many as possible, as many as make sense.
[Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on April 20, 2021, 480 pages, $28.00 hardcover]