Someone ought to write a history of literary misdirection—the story of the stories that avoid telling stories, the tales that set out towards a goal and never quite get there. We think of this as a postmodern conceit, but its roots can be traced in Tristam Shandy , Don Quixote , perhaps even back to Apuleius's The Golden Ass . At an extreme, such narratives end right where they begins— Finnegans Wake is the classic example —and remind me of those long distance runners who circle round and round on the same route, never going anywhere except back to the starting line. Readers often gripe at these roundabout stories, yet even a closed loop can offer an enticing journey if the landmarks and milestones are sufficiently compelling.
Kelly Link has made her reputation on precisely this kind of narrative. She knows an endless number of ways to prevent her stories from reaching a destination. In "Lull," the final tale in her 2006 collection, Magic for Beginners , she interrupts the narrative with a story within a story —then a few pages later, starts up another story within that story. One might think that these would serve as sufficient obstacles to achieving narrative closure—but Link, emulating the famous aviator Wrong Way Corrigan, goes a step further, presenting the chronology of the central story in reverse (akin to Martin Amis's Time's Arrow ), an approach that ensures that readers can only end up back at the beginning.
Close to half of the stories in Magic for Beginners deal, in some degree, with zombies. What cats are for Murakami and bullfights are for Hemingway, the undead are for Ms. Link. To find another author so obsessed with the life after death, you would need to go the eschatology section of a theological library. Even when the undead don't actually appear on the scene—as in the story "Some Zombie Contingency Plans"—the characters talk and think about them endlessly. At first, I puzzled over this recurring obsession, but then I figured it out: the zombie, caught in the perpetual now of an existence that is neither true life or true death, is the perfect character for a writer who avoids linear narrative. The state of Zombiehood (allow me to coin a word) represents a kind of ideal of stasis, an existence that Pastor Rick Warren might call The Purposeless-Driven Live .
Yes, zombies lack goals—a premise that is central to my favorite story in this book, "The Hortlak." (The title—I learned with a little bit of web sleuthing—is a Turkish word for a ghost or phantom.) Eric, the manager at the All-Night Convenience, has a plan for a new retail concept: attracting dead people as customers. Talk about potential market expansion! But there’s a slight problem—zombies don’t have any money, and it’s not clear whether they need any of the products sold at All Night Convenience, which is (conveniently) located near a hangout for the undead. Undaunted, Eric concocts plans for barter transactions, and tries to enlist the help of his skeptical colleague Batu with promises of a future retail empire serving the deceased.
Where other authors offer up plots, Link—what an appropriate name for this writer!—pushes ahead more on the basis of free associations. Here is a typical paragraph, which summons up the aesthetic musings of a character named Soap:
"Modern art is a waste of time. When zombies show up, you can’t worry about art. Art is for people who aren't worried about zombies. Besides zombies and icebergs, there are other things Soap has been thinking about. Tsunamis, earthquakes, Nazi dentists, killer bees, army ants, black plague, old people, divorce lawyers, sorority girls, Jimmy Carter, giant squids, rabid foxes, strange dogs, news anchors, child actors, fascists, narcissists, psychologists, ax murderers, unrequited loved….. contact lenses, ninjas, performance artists, mummies, spontaneous combustion. Soap has been afraid of all these things at one time or another. Ever since he went to prison, he’s realized that he doesn't have to be afraid. All he has to do is come up with a plan. Be prepared. It's just like the Boy Scouts, except you have to be even more prepared. You have to prepare for everything that the Boy Scouts didn't prepare you for, which is pretty much everything."
We start with modern art and end up with the Boy Scouts, along a path that one could hardly retrace, but with lots of strange scenery in-between. Yogi Berra once warned against just this kind of journey: "You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going," advised the oracle of the Yankees, "because you might not get there." But Kelly Link must be following a different Yogi, and has staked out her career as the tour guide over this ever-shifting terrain, which has become her distinctive home turf.
I see Link as emblematic of the post-millennial fever of our times, an era in which the whole culture has renounced what Frank Kermode called "the sense of an ending." Stand-up comedians, I am told, now avoid punchlines to their jokes—having learned that today’s audiences laugh more when the big wisecrack is excised. Television producers have taken a similar route, embracing reality concepts in which the contrived and calculated closing crescendos once essential to a 30-minute or 60- minute show are replaced with the banality of the ongoing and everyday. In an age in which songs climb the charts without hooks and the angst of the teenager's diary is replaced by the vapid tweet and text message, Kelly Link has found the narrative structure to match our fickle temperament. Follow her on the roundabout path, and when you've finished the book, you just might start it all over again.
Ted Gioia writes on music, books and popular culture. His most recent book is The Birth (and Death) of the Cool .