The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (2 page)

Reed’s association with editors and writers such as Moorcock, Knight, and Disch, along with stories that ranged from her similarly dark comic take on weight-loss farms in “The Food Farm” (in Knight’s
Orbit
) to an absurdist fable about a poetry-generating pink colt (“Piggy”) to a literary jape on Kafka (“Sisohpromatem”). The latter appeared in the British
New Worlds
, and led to her occasional association with science fiction’s “New Wave” of the 1960s, a movement spearheaded by Moorcock whose basic purpose, notwithstanding various barricade-storming manifestos and editorials, was simply to expand the scope of what could be done in science fiction. Reed had been doing this quite on her own before the New Wave had taken shape, of course, and would continue to do so long after, but it’s not an unreasonable association, and Reed remains one of a handful of still-practicing American writers associated with this influential movement (and one of an even smaller handful of American
women; the only others who quickly come to mind are Carol Emshwiller and Pamela Zoline). Both her first collection,
Mr. Da V. and Other Stories
(1967) and her first science fiction novel,
Armed Camps
(1969), with its grim view of a decaying near-future America, appeared when the movement was in full flood, and seemed fully in keeping with its dual interests in literary experimentation and (mostly pessimistic) social consciousness.

As the New Wave either receded or was assimilated—depending on whose view of literary history you accept—the feminist movement in science fiction, at least as an identifiable movement, came close on its heels. But here again Reed both does and doesn’t quite fit. Clearly a feminist who often focused on questions of self-image and constructions of gender identity, she wrote about body images not only in that beauty pageant story “In Behalf of the Product,” but in “The Food Farm,” with its simultaneous satiric takes on fat farms and the cult of celebrity (which she later revisited in stories like “Special” and “Grand Opening”). She could powerfully depict the alienation and sense of entrapment of a suburban housewife in “The Bride of Bigfoot” (which has something in common with James Tiptree, Jr.’s famous story “The Women Men Don’t See,” with its protagonist making a radical choice in the end). The lonely elderly sisters in “Winter,” worried about surviving another harsh winter in their isolated home, may both moon over the promise of lost youth offered by a young deserter who stumbles across their cabin, but in the end a far more practical decision prevails. But Reed’s feminism is seldom overtly political and never doctrinaire, and she is as apt to take women to task for their own passivity as men for their insensitive cluelessness. The men are offstage entirely in “Pilots of the Purple Twilight,” in which a group of women of different generations endlessly wait in a kind of limbo near the Miramar Naval Air Station for their husbands to return from various wars, until the oldest realizes, “
It was all used up by waiting
.” Probably Reed’s most famous treatment of gender alienation is the much-anthologized and controversial “Songs of War,” in which the women simply decamp to the hills and set up their own society. While the overreaction of the distraught husbands more than borders on the ridiculous, and the situation escalates into a national crisis, Reed won’t entirely let her women characters off the hook, either; internal squabbles break out between different groups (stay-at-home moms at odds with those who put their kids in day care, for example), and eventually most of the women drift away and return to their homes. What emerges from the story is a satirical voice so complexly ambiguous that while many readers view the story as a satire of the extent to which a military-happy male society might go to keep women in their place, at least one feminist critic found herself, because of its ending, unable to view
the story as anything other than an
anti
-feminist parable, with the women’s revolution simply dissipating at the end.

If Reed can so unsettle proponents of both sides of a debate at once, she might be doing something right.

Perhaps partly because of her own childhood experiences as a self-described “military kid”—her father was a submarine commander who died in World War II—her attitude toward militarism is equally ambivalent, neither uncritical nor unsympathetic. The title character in “The Singing Marine,” haunted by an ill-fated military exercise that left most of his platoon drowned or mired in a marsh, finds himself compulsively singing a song from a Grimm’s fairy tale, trying to come to terms with his own possible court-martial and his sense of having been “born in blood and reborn in violence.” A similar event—or possibly the same one—haunts the memory of an aging veteran trying to come to terms with his wife’s mental deterioration in “Voyager,” one of Reed’s most moving explorations of loss. “In the
Squalus
” describes how that actual submarine disaster in 1939 shaped and shadowed the entire subsequent life of a survivor, while the apparently demented old veteran in a nursing home in “Old Soldiers” is actually coming to grips with a horrific experience that has kept him psychically trapped for decades. And we’ve already seen her take on the fates of military wives in “Pilots of the Purple Twilight.”

The eclecticism of Reed’s themes and preoccupations is such that at times they can seem prescient. A trending topic in literary scholarship over the past few years has been animal studies—broadly concerning the role of animals and their relations with humans in literature—but Reed has notably returned to animals and animal imagery in her fiction for many years, from the pink, poetry-producing pony in “Piggy” (whose poems are mashups of everyone from Longfellow to Dickinson) and the robot tiger that gives its owner self-confidence in “Automatic Tiger” to the bug that finds itself made human in “Sisohpromatem” and the pet monkey that writes best sellers in “Monkey Do.” Reed revisits the child-raised-by-wolves motif in “What Wolves Know,” a story whose title may give us a clue to what Reed finds appealing in animals (the boy’s father, determined to make a media sensation out of him, clearly does not know what wolves know, but finds out). A werewolf mother shows up in “The Weremother,” Bigfoot shows up in “The Bride of Bigfoot,” and in “The Song of the Black Dog” the title animal has the unusual talent of being able to sniff out those about to die, or most in need of attention, during major disasters. All these seem to suggest a world of hermetic knowledge we can access only through our contacts with animals, if we can access it at all. But easily the most bizarre of Reed’s animals-as-conduits is the huge alligator that is the
title figure in “Perpetua,” inside whom the narrator and her family ride out an unspecified disaster in their city with all the comforts of a private yacht, until the narrator makes her own accommodation with Perpetua.

Despite its unusual setting, “Perpetua” also is a kind of family drama, with a father taking drastic steps to protect his family from the outside world, and this brings us to what is perhaps the most consistently recurring theme in Reed’s short fiction, which is simply families, and in particular families under stress. This is a concern that Reed has explored through widely different angles, from the essentially realistic fiction of “How It Works” (in which a skeptical daughter must deal with her mother’s new fiancé as well as his own mother issues) and “Denny” (in which parents are concerned about their rebellious son turning violent) to the marginally speculative (a son tries to come to terms with his survivalist father in Nebraska in “Journey to the Center of the Earth”) to the vaguely macabre (“The Wait,” in which a daughter is trapped in a strange town’s rituals because of her mother’s possible illness) to a kind of horror (as when the exploitative father gets a comeuppance in “What Wolves Know”) to science fiction (an overprotective mother during a virulent plague leads her family to tragedy in “Precautions”) to pure absurdity (“The Attack of the Giant Baby,” in which a baby eats something from its father’s lab floor and rapidly grows to the size of architecture).

In a few of these tales Reed employs a favorite technique of using multiple points of view, sometimes to give us contradictory views of a situation, sometimes to avoid privileging a single character, and sometimes (I strongly suspect) because she just likes doing different voices. In “Denny,” the effect is particularly chilling, as we shift between the viewpoints of each of the parents and Denny himself, watching an entirely avoidable tragedy of miscommunication unfold toward a bitterly ironic ending. Sometimes the multiple viewpoints may be used for comic effect, as in “Wherein We Enter the Museum,” in which we visit the pretentious “Museum of Great American Writers” from the viewpoints of a focus group of ambitious young writing students, a docent who is also an embittered failed novelist, the committee charged with determining the exhibits, and the wealthy philistine donor, who just wants to honor his favorite writers from childhood, like Longfellow, and is outraged when the committee insists that George Eliot was not only not American, but a woman. (Writers and readers come in for Reed’s satiric treatment with some regularity, as in “The Outside Event,” in which a writers’ workshop retreat turns into a kind of reality
TV
à la
Survivor
). A voice not too far removed from that museum donor, but with a decidedly darker edge, is that of the venal wealthy tourist taking his wife on an ill-fated exclusive tour bus to a remote mountain
observatory in “The Legend of Troop 13.” Supposedly a Girl Scout troop disappeared into the wilderness near the observatory some years earlier, and the tourist has concocted a fantasy of nailing what he imagines are now nubile young wood nymphs. But as the expedition spirals toward disaster, we also see him from the viewpoints of the resentful bus driver and several of the Girl Scouts themselves, who have formed a kind of self-sustaining society that is at least as functional as that of the rebellious wives in “Songs of War.”

It’s appropriate that an observatory should be the setting of the penultimate story in this collection, because in a very real sense that’s exactly what this book is. Reed may take us into the minds of some decidedly unpleasant or demented characters, she may show us wars, catastrophes, dysfunctional families, were-wolves, monsters, feral children, plagues, dystopias, cannibals, zombies, and weird small towns, but always with the cool yet sympathetic intelligence of an observer both outraged and wryly amused by the labyrinths we make for ourselves. Her fiction may, collectively, seem rather dark, but it may also be that by showing us the ways into these labyrinths, she’s giving us hints of the ways out as well. Reed has called this attitude “protective pessimism,” and it’s as good a phrase as any for describing the characteristic tone of her best fiction. “Dealing in worst-case scenarios doesn’t depress me,” wrote Reed in the introduction to her earlier story collection
Dogs of Truth
. “It makes me hopeful and resilient. Expect the worst and you’re always prepared. You scoped the exits when you came in, just in case something comes up. Something comes up and you know the quickest way out. Given a chronic imagination of disaster, I always have a Plan B.

“This is the way lives—and stories—get built.”

Combing through more stories than I’d care to admit for this project, I got interested not in chronology, but in the fact that they organized themselves around certain of my—well, preoccupations is a politer word for what drives me than obsessions. Interesting to me to see what shows up in my work, with what kind of frequency. I’ve arranged the stories accordingly, with notes on where and when they first appeared in print, from back in the day up through this year, including some new and previously uncollected ones.

KR

The Story Until Now

Denny

We are worried about Denny. We have reason to believe he may go all Columbine on us.

Experts warn parents to watch out for signs, and it hurts to say, but we’ve seen plenty. Day and night our son is like an
LCD
banner, signaling something we can’t read. If he implodes and comes out shooting, the first thing to show up in the crosshairs will be us.

He was cute when he was little but now he’s heavily encoded: black everything, hanging off him in tatters—Matrix coat in mid-August, T-shirt, jeans, bits of peeled sunburn and cuticle gnawed to shreds. Black lipstick and blue bruises around the eyes. That glare. Shake him and dirt flies out—grot and nail clippings, crushed rolling papers, inexplicable knots of hair. Stacks of secret writing that Denny covers as you come into the room and no friends except that creepy kid who won’t look you in the eye.

Shrinks list things to watch out for, and it isn’t just to protect the innocent, sitting in class when the armed fury comes in and lays waste. They’re warning us! Some lout killed his parents with a baseball bat not far from here, they were dead before the sleeping neighborhood rolled over and shut off the clock. In addition to knifings and ax murders, I read about deaths by assault weapon or repeating rifle, people executed by their own children on their way out of the house to massacre their peers.