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The Magic Storyteller
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19039 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1991 |
1,731 Words |
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Linda Osborne
Linda Osborne has taught contemporary literature at the
Smithsonian Institution and frequently reviews fiction. |
RED WOLF, RED WOLF
W.P. Kinsella
Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1990
192 pp., $17.50 (cloth)
"Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coint out of your ear," the character J.D. Salinger tells the protagonist of Shoeless Joe, W.P. Kinsella's imaginative and touching novel, which became the movie Field of Dreams.
A sense of magic touches many of the tales in Red Wolf, Red Wolf, Kinsella's fine new collection of thirteen stories, which share the lyricism and inventiveness of his other work. "Invention is what fiction writing is all about," Kinsella wrote in his introduction to an earlier collection of stories, The Thrill of the Grass. "It is about making the unusual believable...I like to keep attempting the impossible. I like to do audacious things. I like to weave fact and fantasy. I like to alter history."
In Red Wolf, Red Wolf, Kinsella renders the improbable plausible because, even when fantastic things happen to his characters, they embody emotions and longings common to us all. He conveys the mythical and the unlikely with such sincerity and convincing detail that he creates an almost seamless line between possibility and illusion. Maybe Billy the Kid really did play shortstop, as in the story "Billy in Trinidad." Maybe millions of butterflies really do gild the foliage every winter on a hill in Latin America, as in "Butterfly Winter." Maybe, as in "Red Wolf, Red Wolf," one of Flannery O'Connor's characters really did knock at O'Connor's own back door.
Like Shoeless Joe, these stories twine together ordinary people and historical figures, reality and metaphor, losses and dreams. They are full of surprises, both felicitous and sinister, and hold out the potential for change and wildness in the most routine lives. The stories in Red Wolf, Red Wolf remind the reader of the protagonist's words in Shoeless Joe: "We are mixing a cocktail of memories, and history, and love, and imagination. Now we must wait and see what effect it will have on us."
Memories of love and wildness
It is certainly a surprise, for example, when Enoch Emery, the hero of O'Connor's novel Wise Blood,
...
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