Magic for Beginners

From Some Other Place

Kelly Link is the future of American short fiction. Once you've read her stories you'll know why it is so easy to make such a strong claim for her talent. Her debut, Stranger Things Happen, garnered praise from all quarters of contemporary literature, from science fiction and fantasy writers, to horror writers and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists. In her latest, Magic for Beginners, Link continues to challenge the often arbitrary boundaries between genres. What makes her stories so captivating? How does she appeal to such a wide audience? Magic for Beginners is an apt title for this collection, because it casts a spell on us as we read, so captivating are her turns of phrase, her attention to details, and -- perhaps most of all -- her characters.

No matter how fantastic the situations, settings, or details, Link's characters are distinctly human. Even the animals and inanimate objects seem human. They remind us of ourselves -- usually the most vulnerable or misunderstood parts of ourselves -- endearing themselves to us despite their strangeness. Take the zombies in "The Hortlak," who live in the Grand Canyon-like Ausible Chasm near the Canadian border: they make nightly trips out of the chasm to the All-Night, a convenience store perched on the chasm's rim.

The zombies were like Canadians, in that they looked enough like real people at first, to fool you. But when you looked closer, you saw that they were from some other place, where things were different: where even the same things, the things that went on everywhere, were just a little bit different.

The zombies didn't talk at all, or they said things that didn't make sense. "Wooden hat," one zombie said to Eric, "Glass leg. Drove around all day in my wife. Did you ever hear me on the radio?"

Convenience stores, like the All-Night, are the kind of place people go when there's nowhere else to go -- when we're on the edge of something (a chasm, the Canadian border), or when we're between states of existence (between home and some other place, between life and death). Comparing Canadians and zombies -- and by implication, Americans and the living -- is a humorous but not entirely ridiculous conceit. Who doesn't feel like a zombie sometimes? Who hasn't wished they could dispense with logic and say whatever comes to mind, like some kind of constant free-association exercise? Canadians and zombies are enviable here, because both know what it is like on "the other side," while the readers, the living, the Americans, are stuck in the All-Night, with the case of rotating weenies and the dusty boxes of tampons. The living characters don't help the feeling of indeterminacy: the All-Night manager, Batu, never sleeps, but wears pajamas all day; the young man who works the counter, Eric, lives in the store-room where he sleeps and bathes; and their only regular customer (other than zombies), Charley, is a night-shift vet at the animal shelter who, every night, takes dogs for rides in her truck, letting them stick their heads out the window to feel the wind, before taking them back to the shelter to be euthanized. As a reader, you even envy the dogs, because they, too, make it to "the other side," while Eric, Batu, and Charley continue with their increasingly suffocating, nightmarish existence.

In other stories, it is the living we identify with -- especially children and adolescents; Link has a gift for evoking the essence of the strange, in-between stages of life. In "The Faery Handbag," the speaker, Genevieve, goes to thrift stores with her friends, finding t-shirts that belonged to them as children, and making a game of closing their eyes to try to guess the color of the clothes by touch alone. The teenagers in Link's stories are not the teenagers of most fiction, or even most young adult fiction. These teenagers are wise, aware, imaginative, and gifted, and they are often more sensitive to changes in the world than the adults around them. But they're also -- like most teenagers -- confused, morally ambivalent, and eager to be done with childhood.

In the title story, "Magic for Beginners," a group of teenagers becomes friends over their obsession with a pirate (as in pirate radio, not Blackbeard) television show called "The Library." The show comes on randomly, on any station, and the only way to know when it is on is by flipping through the channels or surfing the online community blogs and websites. The central character of "Magic for Beginners," Jeremy, is caught in the middle of the strained marriage of his kleptomaniac, horror-novel author father, and his distinctly normal librarian mother. He is also caught up in the usual teenage sexual awakenings, as he begins to realize that his two best female friends are also potential mates. His great aunt has just died, bequeathing him a phone booth in the desert outside of Las Vegas, and leaving his mother a horror-movie themed wedding chapel called "Hells Bells." Link loads on the quirky details, but don't be fooled -- it's not just fanciful decoration. At her best, Link's details react chemically with one another, creating a complex motif that is both enchanting and profound. In "Magic for Beginners," the primary symbol is the television show -- a narrative that demands audience interaction: to know when it's on, to know what happens, viewers have to connect with each other, creating a network of watchers who participate in the narrative's progression. The smaller details all feed into the larger picture: the librarian mother inherits Hell's Bells, a physical space in which her marriage to the inscrutable horror-writer husband makes sense; and Jeremy inherits the phone booth, a small physical space, in a disorienting sort of no-man's land (adolescence), from which he can reach out to the world.

At times, in Magic For Beginners, one wonders whether Link knows what she's doing: the whimsy seems to get the better of her. But then, a moment of pure emotional poignancy will sprout in the text, giving ghosts, zombies, witches, cats, rabbits, and even icebergs, a lovely sort of pathos. It is moments like these that transform the reading experience, convincing readers that something deeply important (and possibly magical) has just occurred, and that they may never read stories the same way again.

• Read more about this book