In her third collection of short stories, I Hold A Wolf By The Ears, Laura van den Berg establishes an atmosphere of post-realist uncertainty that keeps the reader both attentive and a bit off balance. You never know if a narrative set-up will deliver a conventional ending or swerve into something else — a different story or maybe a philosophical interlude. Even more likely, an early premise may seem to disappear only to re-emerge as a metaphor in another context.
In “Cult of Mary,” for instance, a progressive young tourist guide in Arezzo explains the church’s historic conflation of all the Bible’s Marys in its effort to quash Marian cults. The guide then lectures her group about Mussolini’s tax breaks for sheep owners, intended to prettify the countryside:
“She told us that evil rarely looked like evil when it first arrived. It could look like innovation and progress and prosperity, courage even, but more than anything it looked, to some, like a solution — a solution to the secret problem they believed had gone too long unaddressed. They felt as though they had been speaking a hidden language among themselves, and then a man or a woman in a suit stood on a stage and addressed cheering masses in that very same language, hidden no longer.”
The reader may also feel lectured, and that impression is not dispelled when two of the tourists start muttering about the guide’s politics. In the end, however, the most annoying group member, who had earlier disappeared, shows up disheveled and barefoot. He has been knocked down in the woods by some prostitutes who rejected him because he could name only two Marys. Together, the tourists and their guide watch the man wash his muddy feet in a fountain: “‘Where’s Mary Magdalene when you need her?’ someone said, but they were shushed by the rest of the group. We all knew we were witnessing a holy scene.” Theory and metaphor resolve – or dissolve — into the individual experiences of the characters.
These stories take place in a variety of places — several in Florida where the author grew up, and also New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Mexico, Iceland, Italy, and in one case, an unnamed American “city of medium size.” Locations often function as a metaphor, as in “Volcano House” which pivots between flashbacks, then to the narrator’s tour of Iceland with her twin, and then life after the twin is shot by a mass murderer. Tourism reflects the dislocation the narrator feels after the injury, with Icelandic volcanoes standing in for her relationship with her comatose twin. Van den Berg is a master of such devices: metaphors, flashbacks, meta-commentaries, and shifts from apparent realism into surrealism. At one point in “Last Night,” just after furnishing details about two of her characters, the narrator turns back to the task at hand, remarking, “I am telling a story now.” This works so well in context that it reads like just another conventional transition — “later,” “after they had gone to bed” — but it’s not one of those. It’s an intrusion, and only its perfect placement prevents it from feeling like one. In “The Pitch,” a character climbs up a tree and disappears forever. Van den Berg’s skill is such that this plot twist seems both extraordinary and inevitable.
The narrators of these stories — often first-person — are white women, smart and lucky in many ways, but also oppressed and even abused. One is drunkenly raped by a man who mistakes her for her sister. Another is kept drugged by a husband who buys doctored seltzer for this purpose from another husband in their apartment complex. In “Your Second Wife,” a woman employed by bereaved men to impersonate their recently dead wives reveals some background:
“I never meant to get into this line of work, though I cannot deny that I have always enjoyed being other people. In college, I interviewed to be a wealthy woman’s personal assistant. Over lunch, she asked me if I knew the difference between ‘tortuous’ and ‘torturous,’ between ‘adverse’ and ‘averse.’ Once it was apparent that I did not, she told me that the ability to make these fine distinctions was a critical skill in a personal assistant and that I should not bother ordering dessert. It was late fall and the wealthy woman arrived wearing a magnificent fur coat, three-quarter length and dyed lavender. When the woman went to the bathroom, she left her coat slung over the back of her chair and I walked out with it. I wore the lavender fur all through the winter and was transformed from a student who slept in the backs of lecture halls to one who made the dean’s list. Every time I took a test, I imagined being a young woman of great means, waking each morning to find my future rolled out before me, free of obstacle and horizon.”
Van den Berg’s characteristic concerns are on display here: identity, hallucination (or is it magic realism?), and narrative momentum. Telling a college student she can’t have a job because she doesn’t know the difference between “adverse” and “averse” is abusive in an improbable and literary way. A reader, especially one who does know the difference, feels the insult and the rough justice of stealing the wealthy woman’s coat. The subtle surprise of that move — and that sentence — shows the writer knows exactly when to speed up her narrative and where to take it next. The stolen coat changes the student’s life for the better, and that also feels just.
Often van den Berg’s post-realist characters and plots keep us at arm’s length. When the impersonator in “Your Second Wife” is bound and gagged by one of her clients, she bounces along in the trunk of his car musing about how the gig economy has brought on a decline in “civilized behavior.” The almost-comic tone of scenes like this distances the reader from traditional identification with both narrator and events. We are thrown back to the philosophical and psychological underpinnings of the stories. This works when you care about the philosophy, and it doesn’t when you don’t. For me, it works in “Cult of Mary,” with its historical reach and its theory of evildoers who think they are discovering solutions to problems only they can see. But it doesn’t work in “Your Second Wife.” I don’t care much about the impersonator’s thoughts on identity and role-playing because in the end I don’t care much about her. Joyce Carol Oates would have made me feel the terror being kidnapped and stuffed in the trunk of a car, but Van den Berg makes me feel it doesn’t really matter. The narrator escapes from the trunk and jogs to Helen’s Kitchen, an all-night diner that turns out to be staffed by two women with identical “Helen” name-tags and uniforms, right down to their twin pink cat-eye glasses. Terror and kitsch: almost interchangeable.
Maybe van den Berg is making fun of realists like Oates. Maybe she thinks those conventions are used up. She certainly knows as much as anyone about how such narratives work, especially at the level of the sentence. In the title story, Margot argues about taking the law into one’s own hands with her more intellectual — and condescending — sister:
“’Vigilante justice is rarely as satisfying as people think. Auribus teneo lupum and all that.’
Louise paused and then added, ‘The last bit was Latin.’
‘I gathered,’ Margot said, and then told her sister that she needed to go.”
Again, we feel the pedantic haughtiness of the insult and its connection to the themes of the story. When Margot looks up the Latin motto, she discovers the story’s (and the book’s) title, I hold a wolf by the ears — no easy way out. Nevertheless, she takes revenge on her sister by stealing her identity, and on the man who casually rapes her by punching him in the nose. This is satisfying in its way, even if Margot does end up more confused than ever about who she is. “Revenge is a kind of wild justice,” wrote Francis Bacon, who came down against it, but vigilante justice often works well enough for van den Berg’s characters, whose crimes tend to be punished by one another rather than by the law.
[Published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux on July 28, 2020, 201 pages, $26.00 hardcover]