association-list

“Tiny Feast” by Chris Adrian.

I missed the first week and some spir­ited dis­cus­sion of a fairly weak story, so it may be that this story, weak in another way, might spur some sim­i­larly inter­est­ing discussion.

I thought that this one was well writ­ten, but oth­er­wise failed on most other levels. I have to admit some bias, in that I have essen­tially no inter­est in fan­tasy specif­i­cally fea­tur­ing fairies. It’s a trope at this point that has been so bru­tally overused that it’s hard to imag­ine it having any sort of res­o­nance with anyone at this point. I real­ize that my point of view clearly isn’t shared, so I’ll try to put it aside. The story imag­ines one of the changelings taken by the fairy court, Oberon and Tita­nia and the whole lot, get­ting leukemia and going into treat­ment. In terms of play­ing the con­flict in a humor­ously dead­pan way and depict­ing the process in an accu­rate way, the author gets high marks, but as a story it never really gets any­where, or says any­thing, or really has any char­ac­ters. Any one of those could be fine, of course, but at some point the story just falls down, when you decline to pro­vide your read­ers with any reason to care.

If we’re to read this straight, Oberon and Tita­nia are fairies and so at least some­what alien and dis­tanced from human con­cerns. It’s never clear why either of them should care about this par­tic­u­lar changeling over any other, other than he’s sick. The author never both­ers to make them human char­ac­ters, nor does he manage to make them con­vinc­ingly alien. They speak on one hand from a desire for the story to move for­ward, and on the other from a desire by the author to make the story humorous.

Over the course of the sto­ries, inter­ac­tions are detailed, scenes are set, jokes are con­structed and deliv­ered. The boy sick­ens, recov­ers, sick­ens more, and dies. Noth­ing else actu­ally hap­pens. No point is deliv­ered, nor is one pos­si­ble to infer, given the half-​​assed inhu­man­ity of the characters.

It strikes me that the author had a neat idea for a story, then didn’t real­ize that his con­ceit didn’t have legs enough to stand alone at such length. Maybe he had some inkling, hence the jok­i­ness, the places where it’s over­writ­ten. Halfway to Rem­brandt Comic Book ter­ri­tory, more or less. Still, in the end, it stacks up to more or less noth­ing inter­est­ing, and the author, while clever and skilled, simply isn’t writ­ing at the level where you’ll stick around to listen to him talk­ing about any­thing, just because the prose is so good.

And so we reach the end with­out me having said much inter­est­ing or clever, but I feel that the con­ceit here doesn’t stand up to crit­i­cism any better than it stands up to read­ing; that it is, in fact, a con­ceit and only pro­vides the critic with his thinnest gruel, styl­is­tic analy­sis. I am hoping that I’m miss­ing some­thing, and that some of the other com­menters will pro­vide a view of the story that illu­mi­nates a more inter­est­ing angle from which to view the story.