This novel might have been named A Hundred Years of Solitude…With Fairies, Elves and Gnomes as Companions . But these wee folk prove to be elusive companions, doing little to disturb the solitude. Crowley's novel somehow manages to convey a sense that strange personages and magical happenings are forever lingering just outside the purview of the reader. John Keats may have felt that "unheard melodies" were sweeter than those made by actual people; apparently John Crowley feels the same way about unseen characters and unwitnessed events.
Little, Big has much in common with those sweeping modern multi-generational family novels, such as Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks , Philip Roth's American Pastoral , Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , and Gabriel Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude . Like the latter saga, this novel even comes equipped with a family tree for frequent reference, especially useful given the repeating or similar names. It's hard enough to keep Lily, Lilac and Lucy straight—but there might be three different Lilacs in Crowley's tale, or else just one, depending how you interpret the text.
And interpretation of events is a constant source of consternation in these pages. Almost everyone in the Drinkwater family has a premonition of strange matters afoot, but without much clarity on the particulars. Some of the characters are granted elusive glimpses of different realms—where animals can talk, and fairy tale creatures populate the earth. Others simply buy into the quasi-Wiccan belief system on the basis of faith.
Women are more attuned to the magical realm than men, and young girls are even more privileged, living in an enchanted atmosphere where the dividing line between natural and supernatural blurs and sometimes disappears. Even after they grow up and lose this special insight, the ladies of the clan retain a conviction that they are all part of a grand Tale—with a capital T—and that their fates are inextricably intertwined with this hidden universe.
No, this is not a postmodern device. You are perhaps familiar with experimental works of fiction in which the characters are dimly aware that an author is dictating their every move and thought. Gilbert Sorrentino has even delivered a novel in which characters are so irritated at their authors that they run away from their books and move into a refugee camp for dislocated fictional personages. Crowley is aiming at something larger and less well-defined in Little, Big . His characters share a anguished conviction that their individual and familial destinies are intertwined with a quasi-mythic narrative. They fret about their roles, and worry whether the conclusion of the Tale is tantamount to their own demise, or merely the beginning of another, perhaps even grander narrative. In place of the familiar postmodern concerns, Crowley wrestles with the more venerable issues of faith, fate and free will.
Yet the strangest aspect of Crowley's book is the awkward stance of the reader, who is neither invited to witness the magic, nor wholly excluded from it. Little, Big thus conveys a unusual, quasi-scriptural tone, in which a more magnificent story seems hidden between the lines, never really articulated, yet all the more provoking for this very ambiguity.
The Tale begins with architect John Drinkwater's courtship and marriage to Violet Bramble, a young lady with visions of another world enclosed in this one: "The further you go in, the bigger it gets. Each perimeter of this series of concentricities encloses a larger world within, until, at the center point, it is infinite….Our every movement is accompanied by these beings, but we fail to perceive them not because they are intangible but because, out here, they are too small to be seen."
Drinkwater constructs a large, rambling mansion— something akin to the famous Winchester House— with every side presenting a different front façade in a different architectural style. Over the next several generations, his descendants remain faithful to John and Violet's mystical vision, relying on a host of unconventional means to stay in touch with the little people. Violet's son Auberon is unable to see the elves and fairies but becomes convinced that he might be able to capture their image with his camera. Others in the family rely on an unusual set of cards, akin to a Tarot deck, for information on the Tale. A few of the men in the family have no communication with the beyond but, surrounded by so many true believer, they too become adherents of the faith and come to comprehend their lives as shaped by the unfolding Tale.
As Little, Big proceeds, Crowley's grand ambitions become increasingly clear, not just in the novel's expanding mythological and Shakespearian allusions but even more in the author's bold Hegelian vision of a dialectic that embraces all possibilities and eventualities. The fate of an eccentric family gradually expands into a wild predestined fulfillment of world history, with everything from the Holy Roman Empire to modern American democracy finding its constitutive role in the story. At points, this novel seems on the brink of morphing into one of those feverish books filled with conspiracy theories. I wouldn't have been surprised if the Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar and the Masons had found their way into a plot that seemingly wants to tie together everything, no matter how disparate, into a unified, interconnected narrative.
"I wanted to write novels with the breadth and depth of the greatest realistic fiction,” Crowley has explained. "My models were Dickens and Flaubert and Nabokov—yet with an element of the non- mimetic, or irreal, or preternatural, whatever the best word might be." The shadow of these towering literary figures can be felt again and again in these pages, but I am even more struck by the constant reminders of an even older breed of European literature—as represented by fairy tales, myths, legends and folklore.
The very breadth of Crowley's ambitions may ultimately have limited his readership. Little, Big was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards and won the World Fantasy Award—genre honorifics that may have dissuaded haughty connoisseurs of literary fiction from taking this sprawling novel seriously. But aficionados of fantasy and sci-fi would hardly find much excitement in a densely-written book in which the fantastic creatures and magical doings remain stubbornly offstage. Yet if this novel had been set in South America, I could see fans of the aforementioned Gabriel Garcia Márquez embracing it as an exemplar of magical realism.
Crowley's novel found its most enthusiastic advocate in literary maven Harold Bloom, who has called it "the best book of its kind since Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass ." "I have read and reread Little, Big at least a dozen times," Bloom writes, "and always am startled and refreshed… So perpetually fresh is this book, changing each time I reread it, that I find it virtually impossible to describe, and scarcely can summarize it. I pick it up again at odd moments, sometimes when I wake up at night and can't fall asleep again."
That’s high praise from the esteemed Yale professor, and especially so when one considers how brazenly Crowley abandons the tenets of realist fiction, the dominant paradigm at the time this novel was first published. John Updike won the Pulitzer Prize (for Rabbit is Rich ) when Little, Big came out, and the trailer park realism of Raymond Carver was in the ascendancy. Gritty, minimalist writing was the rage, and misty, amorphous literary fantasies such as Little, Big could have hardly been less aligned with the literary zeitgeist. But more than three decades have now passed, and the blurring of the boundaries between fantasy and highbrow fiction has become as influential in our own time as Updike and Carver were in the Carter-Reagan years.
From Little, Big we can trace a path all the way to the current-day urban mysticism of China Miéville and Neil Gaiman , or the 'little people' of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 . A whole sub-genre of "magical city" novels has gradually emerged on the center stage in the world of highbrow fiction, from Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale (published just two years after Crowley’s book) to Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City . Today the hybrid of fantasy and urban realism that seemed so peculiar when Little, Big was written, can stand proudly alongside the historical or psychological novel without need for shame or excuses. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that Crowley's novel, a work that was almost uncategorizable when initially released, actually set us on a path that many creative storytellers are still exploring in our own time. Or, rather, it was just a path when Crowley cleared it; today, it's more like a well-traveled literary highway—and one that still draws us on with the wildest and least predictable scenery.