{"id":13015,"date":"2014-06-02T14:36:45","date_gmt":"2014-06-02T18:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=13015"},"modified":"2014-06-03T12:39:14","modified_gmt":"2014-06-03T16:39:14","slug":"karen-russell-the-bad-graft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2014\/06\/02\/karen-russell-the-bad-graft\/","title":{"rendered":"Karen Russell: “The Bad Graft”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here<\/a> to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker<\/em> webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Karen Russell’s “The Bad Graft” was originally published in the Jun 9 & 16, 2014 issue of The New Yorker<\/em>. This is the Summer Fiction edition, so you can click here<\/a> to see the other stories in this issue.<\/p>\n

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Click for a larger image.<\/p><\/div>\n

Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Bad Graft,\u201d by Karen Russell, functions like a myth. That is, a fantastic story is told — with transformations and metamorphoses — and the listener is spell-bound by the story\u2019s adventure. For a myth to last, however, it must reflect some basic conflict in human life.<\/p>\n

Odysseus, for instance, has a wife and former life that call him to return, but his adventures are so interesting to him that he is necessarily caught up in them. It is almost as if he cannot return to wife and home until he has had these adventures. This is the situation, a situation familiar to every family man, in one way, or another. The myth is not just any old story, however. It has immense size, mystery, magic, and transformations. Not only does Odysseus change from a young man to a grizzled veteran of foreign wars, he also witnesses change after change, transformation after transformation. The sailors are turned into swine; they eat the drug that causes them to forget home; they face being lured onto the rocks by sirens; Odysseus himself visits the land of the dead. The immensity of the myth seems right to us — it reflects the immensity of our own experience.<\/p>\n

I mention Odysseus in relation to \u201cThe Bad Graft\u201d because both stories are about commitment and marriage.<\/p>\n

A young couple is driving cross-country on a \u201ckind of honeymoon.\u201d They are truly in love; they repeatedly think tenderly of each other; they several times hope to feel closer; they think of their trip as an elopement. \u201cEach wanted the other to have the illusion that they might pause, anywhere, sat any moment, and make love.\u201d It was love at first sight: \u201cOn their first date, they had decided to run away together.\u201d<\/p>\n

After several days of travel, they are in the Mojave Desert, and they have stopped at the Joshua Tree National Park. They are awed by the park\u2019s immensity, and they are equally awed by their own daring. \u201cEver unfixed\u201d is the motto the boy has proposed to the girl to be their own. And so they\u2019ve run off — almost in secret.<\/p>\n

But Russell\u2019s mythic story is that a Joshua tree somehow sends its spirit into the girl and changes her, thus threatening her whole life, and threatening her \u201cmarriage\u201d to this boy to the core.<\/p>\n

What is so great about this story is that while Russell spins her yarn, at the same time the reader is watching how the yarn reflects real life. Some women are homebodies at heart. Some women want nothing more than to nest and make that nest homey and beautiful, and the thought of being ever on the road is unsettling at the least and frightening at the most. Some men yearn to be a rolling stone, some women yearn to have children, and all the nesting that would require.<\/p>\n

So as the Joshua tree takes possession of the girl, she turns away from the boy\u2019s dream that they would always be on the run. She changes and the boy feels it. They both want her to change back, but the Joshua tree will not let her: it needs to get back to its own land.<\/p>\n

On how many honeymoons have people wakened up and thought, What have I done?<\/em> This guy wants to spend his life racing sailboats! This girl wants to be a dress designer! I really enjoyed the many little twists of this story: how alien the boy and girl suddenly feel to each other, how intensely together they feel when they dance, how murderous this sweet girl can feel toward the boy who thinks of her with affection and respect.<\/p>\n

I enjoyed \u201cThe Bad Graft\u201d a great deal. I like myth, and although this is my first Karen Russell story, I realized right away she was writing an American myth, and I enjoyed her ambition, and I enjoyed the story itself.<\/p>\n

Her interview with Willing Davidson is one of the most interesting author interviews that Page Turner has run. She talks about the process of imagining the story in such a way that the interview is a companion story to the real story. I loved her discussion of Ovid.<\/p>\n

One of the interesting things that she says about writing such a story is that \u201cTone is everything.\u201d What she means is this: If you are going to write a story that is magical or mythical or embodied with transformations and metamorphoses, you have to strike a tone that will lead the reader into the mix of myth and reality. So just what is the tone that she used?<\/p>\n

The story\u2019s first sentence opens this way: \u201cThe land looked flattened, as if by a rolling pin.\u201d But as the boy and girl are driving into the desert via Highway 62, these words spill forth: \u201cvisions . . . castles . . . fantasies . . . mirage.\u201d They are driving a Charger. They see \u201cevaporated civilizations.\u201d Russell ends the paragraph this way: there was \u201ca flume of dream attached to real rock.\u201d The first paragraph blends the ordinary (rolling pins and rocks) with the extraordinary (visions and fantasies). The narrator has insisted on this blend from the very beginning. The boy and girl think that their trip has \u201cunfolded like a fairy tale,\u201d this, despite the fact they run out of money.<\/p>\n

She doesn\u2019t give the couple names at first, something that gives the story a mythic tone. In addition, she calls them boy and girl, something that reminds this reader that for many people, it is marriage that transforms us into men and women. When she names them, they are Andy and Angie, so alike they are two sides of a coin.<\/p>\n

The narrator insists on the immensity of the story: she tells of the \u201cblue-gold Mojave,\u201d and the \u201cenormous sun,\u201d and she says that the day there was a \u201cday so huge, in fact, that its real scale would always elude them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russell uses time and history to elevate the story-telling. Mormons named the trees; numerous people have been recorded losing their minds in the Mojave; and \u201cAeons ago, the world\u2019s first hourglass spilled its contents here.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the setting sets the tone: the Joshua tree desert is strange and magnificent, and it is in the middle of a \u201ctremendous blossoming.\u201d The setting is made all the more grand by the fact that the Joshua Trees cannot survive without the Yucca moth, nor can the moth survive without this specific tree, something that echoes the story\u2019s concern with both commitment and what it calls the \u201cobligate relationship\u201d; i.e.<\/em>, a relationship in which the neither can survive without the other.\u00a0The grandeur is heightened all the more with a reference to Charles Darwin and how he had considered the relationship between the tree and the moth \u201cthe most remarkable pollination system in nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

The immensity of the setting is intensified by a phrase that the ranger uses to describe what is happening. The ranger calls the blossoming of the Joshua trees a \u201cpulse event.\u201d The Mojave Desert was once the site of atom bomb testing. In nuclear bomb language, a \u201cpulse event\u201d is when a very strong electromagnetic pulse occurs shortly after the explosion, although an EMP can also be triggered by a car ignition or by lightning. The pulse can cause sparks and explosions. Thus the ranger\u2019s language lays the ground for the spark that causes the spirit of the Joshua tree to Leap into Angie.\u00a0Thus the ranger\u2019s language intensifies the meaning of the situation — the boy\u2019s and the girl\u2019s situation — their marriage.<\/p>\n

And a pulse event is also an event of the heart.<\/p>\n

The story is unique, rich, coherent, spell-binding and true. I am amazed at it. Time for me to read everything Karen Russell has written. The reason is:\u00a0I loved the gentleness with which she treated her people. They are caught up in ordinary life, and they are not bad people. It is not hard to see yourself in them. I found myself thinking of my good, sweet, ambitious husband as I read. What a footloose academic he was for so long (we must have moved ten times). I found myself thinking of myself as I read this story: how I said, yes! I want to go with you to Japan and England and back to Cambridge and then to Amherst and Washington (twice) and California\u00a0. . . and yet the very last time, I said no, I can\u2019t go to New York with you, just for the year. I can\u2019t do it. I just can\u2019t do it. Kids and all. Reading Russell\u2019s \u201cThe Bad Graft,\u201d I feel the yearning and intensity and danger that lay just beneath my own story.<\/p>\n

I liked the way the boy really liked the girl, and I liked the way she really wanted to please him, but was overwhelmed. So like life.\u00a0And I liked the immense scope Russell used to talk about marriage. Or commitment. The scope feels right. For each of us, our worlds are immense and mythic. So it feels like she has it right. The tone.<\/p>\n

These are the Russell titles I have added to my list:<\/p>\n