Russell on Target Again

A WRITER'S WIT
Revision has its own peculiar pleasures and its own peculiar frustrations. The ground rules are already established; the characters already exist. You don't have to bring the characters to life, but you do have to make them more convincing.
Vikram Seth
Born June 20, 1952

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Luke Pearson

June 20, 2016, Karen Russell, “The Bog Girl”: Cillian Eddowis, fifteen-year-old inhabitant of “this green island off the coast of northern Europe,” discovers a young woman his age buried in the bog where he works liberating peat from its natural environment. ¶ That he takes the Bog Girl, this 2,000-year-old body preserved by its acidic past, home with him is bizarre enough, but with the following sentence one is once again in the midst of a Karen Russell story:

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“In the living room, roars of studio laughter erupted from the television; Cillian and the Bog Girl were watching a sitcom about a Canadian trailer park” (61).

One has suddenly left every earthly story one knows and landed in Russellville—a place where almost everything seems normal about the love affair between a fifteen-year-old and a perfectly preserved (for all one knows) fifteen-year-old who has been preserved for 2,000 years. Nearly everything is normal about their budding relationship, except that Bog Girl never speaks. When she finally does, uttering a language that is no longer spoken anywhere on earth, Cillian is frightened back into reality, and their relationship ends like many adolescent relationships do:

“He was not who she’d expected to find when she opened her eyes, either. Now neither teen-ager needed to tell the other that it was over. It simply was—and, without another sound, the Bog Girl let go of Cillian and slipped backward into the bog water” (69).

Russell has prepared the reader for this ending. One finally apprehends the overarching metaphor one might have missed for the forest. Every adolescent has experienced this realization about one’s first lover. It’s over. It simply is. Russell’s most popular book may be Swamplandia! I know it’s one of my favorites.
Illustration by Luke Pearson.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
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"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
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