“The Ghost Birds”
by Karen Russell
from the October 11, 2021 issue of The New Yorker
I have loved so many of Karen Russell’s stories in the past that I’m ecstatic to see her return to the pages of The New Yorker. And it’s the perfect season to sit down and read one of her strange, often creepy and unsettling stories! And the first line of the first paragraph have me excited.
I led the way through the woods because I didn’t want my daughter to have her first encounter with the ghost flock alone. We were trespassing, but it seemed highly unlikely we’d be caught—the school had been abandoned since the previous century, when ash from the Great Western Fires made most of the region unlivable. My daughter had never set foot inside an old-fashioned brick-and-mortar school, and seemed more intrigued by the idea of seeing a chalkboard than by the birds. The school was on the outskirts of a Red Zone in our family’s ancestral breeding grounds—“Oregon” on the older maps, the ones from my boyhood. An evocative name, a name I loved and mispronounced with reverence at age eleven. I grew up in a town called Eugene, in the shadow of mountains that were unreachable by my third birthday. Ore-gone.
I will say that the rest of that paragraph has me a bit wary, though. Russell’s stories have a tendency to start with a strong image and then move quickly to tell the reader what’s going on. I think that’s going on here. The first sentence is evocative and interesting, and then we spend another several sentences just setting the mundane scene of a post-climate disaster world. And not without a clever zinger that might have been better cut out. Those are some of the hallmarks of her work for me, but I have been trying to do better to recognize that what I like in fiction, what I prioritize, is not “best.” I want to roll with it more often. I think I can do that with this story. I hope so!
How about you? Do you like Russell’s work? Did you like “The Ghost Birds”? Please let me know below!
Please consider purchasing through Bookshop.org
I always enjoy it when writers write in the persona of a different gender. If I remember rightly, the story mentions that the spouse is female before revealing the narrator’s gender. So I was thinking that either a same-sex relationship is described or the author is writing in the persona of a man. I made the (wrong) same-sex relationship guess. The theme of the story is incredibly original, too. But I don’t really get the point of the piece so it wasn’t an enjoyable experience for me. But I won’t be a bit surprised if someone much more literate than me here sees all the parallels and clever symbolism so clearly and raves about it. Lots of obscure words here that sent me to google. Who here knows the word “pediment” without googling for example? A major vocab builder.
Paul Epstein
Wow! This was my first Karen Russell story, but it definitely won’t be my last.
Perhaps because I grew-up on my family’s centuries-old-farm, I have always felt a strong connection to nature. This connection has only deepened as the years have passed and as I have become increasingly concerned about the world that we are creating for our children.
This disturbing story quickly pulled me in and my anxiety about Karen Russell’s world which includes a stifling and deadly sky, constant surveillance, declining connections to reality, and the mysterious ghost birds that few can see soon became overwhelming. Eventually, I found it necessary to end my tasks for the night so I could learn more about a future without even the chimney swifts that have been members of our extended family for over a decade.
In an ironic twist, we have already begun to experience brief glimpses into Karen Russell’s terrifying world— The Ivory Billed Woodpecker has recently joined the Carolina Parakeet and the Passenger Pigeon, as another one of the lost ghost birds.
Very fine. Perhaps the first Karen Russell short story that I have liked. And I liked it a lot. Her evocative metaphor of ghost birds to epitomize the climate crisis is creative. And, although it’s weird, she handles it well. Most important, she doesn’t try to create a scientific or pseudo-rational or magical explanation.
Good invented words:
Humming Jet
flame-go
Paranormal Birding Society = PBS
Yesinia (his wife) = Yersinia Pestis, the bacterium that causes plague
At some point it becomes a father-daughter story outside of ghost manifestations:
‘”Because I don’t want you to be crazy, Dad. I’d rather be wrong.”’
Great ending: From “Then came the lacerating light” to the end. Real? Hallucination? Don’t know, don’t care. Sometimes a writer just has to let go and take a risk.
Did he die? Again, don’t know and doesn’t matter.
Great hopeful last line – “So much remains to be seen.”
Handled less skillfully, this whole thing could have been a disaster. But in this piece she has a sure touch.
I found it really depressing and disturbing. It made me feel so helpless in the face of inevitable climate collapse, and all it made me motivated to do is try to focus on earning money since that is the only thing that might possibly save a few people.
I’m sure that was not the intended message of the story, but I didn’t see any hope in the story, just delusion and desperation in the main character, depression in his wife, and loss so huge she can’t even see it for the daughter. How quickly we can become a dystopia. Very well done, but too bleak for me. Perhaps as bleak as our future.
Interesting contrast between Shira’s response and Chris’s. And mine.
Of course the future or nature is dark, but that wasn’t the primary aspect of Russell’s story that grabbed me. I’ve pretty much accepted that future, though it will occur after I’m gone. I’m doubtful whether humans are capable of doing what’s necessary to avoid it.
I was struck by how well the story was written. and how Russell draws hopeful characters.
I’ve been a reader of science fiction at times during my life. SF is basically where the future sucks and humans escape. Russell’s story is where the future sucks and humans don’t escape. You choose which is more realistic.
Chris, money is not going to save anyone. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are offering short rocket rides for millions of dollars. It’s a long way from there to self-contained ships.
I’m amused by pleas to “Save the planet.” The planet doesn’t need saving. It will survive in some form, as well as many forms of biological life. Our sadness for specific animals is our own egotistical nostalgia for certain fuzzy species that we’re familiar with. I haven’t seen many pleas to “Save the rats” or “Save the banana slugs”. Ecologists would be more accurate, and perhaps more successful, if they mounted campaigns to “Save our species.”
In the end, I liked this story for the relationship between the dad and his daughter, for the ecological themes and also the ambiguity–does anyone “really” see these ghost birds. But…I’m surprised no one pointed out the data dump of the first two pages, something criticized before in these “pages,” where we have to process a ton of information about this setting and its rules and what has led to it etc. plus new vocabularies. I found it off-putting and almost stopped reading. Maybe this could be seasoned in a little more gradually or perhaps not in such detail–we’d get the basic drift with less world-building. Once I had “acclimated” though I found this quite moving and suspenseful, especially the tour-de-force of the last paragraphs from the protagonists potentially unreliable viewpoint.
Ken —
I agree about the amount of adaptation we need to do to a new world in the first page or two. My solution to this kind of situation, where I am interested enough to keep reading, which I was in this case, is to read the opening description, then go away. Then come back and start over. It’s not so demanding the second time.
William, I have done that before and it is a good solution but I didn’t this time.
This story deeply shook me, I do care if they died at the end and can’t find relief in any of the discussion boards anywhere :-(