Actually Pretty Good: Evil Flowers
Gunnhild Øyehaug taps into the tradition of tricky, very short story writers
A train derailing and causing an environmental disaster in the same small Ohio town where a movie about a train derailing and causing an environmental disaster had just finished filming (the film itself based off a forty year old novel about a train derailing and causing an environmental disaster in a small Ohio town); AI programs touted as sophisticated learning machines spitting out refined cliche copypasta before having faux-sentient existential breakdowns or just becoming fully racist (based on the nervy anxieties / racist screeds that people express on the internet already); a hobbyist’s balloon is shot down with extreme prejudice by a mulit-million dollar military jet. While the world itself gets more postmodern every day – more mediated, more nervy, more self-conscious, and more absurd – postmodern literature has mostly receded into the background over the last couple decades. Not that experimental literature has ever been a guaranteed bestseller, but there was a time some thirty years ago that big, gnarly postmodern books like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, and Don DeLillo’s Underworld ruled the literary world.1 I’ll make it tidy and mark the end for the boom po-mo period with Foster Wallace’s turn away from some of his more baroque narrative formulations and towards conventional sentimentality, a move that – theoretical as it was – spurred Jonathan Franzen to finally ditch some of the more formally tricky stuff from his novels and become a realist writer who could be on the cover of Time, which in turn brought on a wave of middlebrow imitators writing multigenerational family epics. Formal and structural experimentation2 has mostly fallen by the wayside in favor of character, for better or for worse; Lydia Davis and Diane Williams have certainly kept up the good fight, and George Saunders has managed to somehow become the most popular short story writer in America by welding the formal tricks of postmodern writers to a streak of New Sincerity that more often that not tips over into the mawkish, but for the most part writing workshops across the country are pumping out finely tuned characters-reaching-epiphany studies in the classic naturalist tradition. To put it simply, more Munro, barely any Barthelme.
For those looking for a little more po-mo in their lives, Gunnhild Øyehaug’s latest book of short stories, Evil Flowers, translated into English by Kari Dickson and released this year by FSG3, certainly fits the bill. Øyehaug’s stories follow in the tradition set by tricksters like Donald Barthelme, Georges Perec, Daniil Kharms, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Machado de Assis, Miguel de Cervantes and even as far back as Scheherazade, for whom the occasion of a story is the chance to explore a concept or idea more than it is a place to sketch a character in crisis. The stories in Evil Flowers are like electrons bouncing off one another, orbiting and changing the tenor of the collection as they make new configurations. A story might end and then immediately be “protested” by the next story for having such “an unhappy ending. Unhappy endings drive us nuts”, while another protest to a sad story will point out that because in fiction “every possibility is available… [o]ne does not have to let an old woman lie alone, confused and half dreaming, longing for her daughter in Denmark…” These are stories that interrogate the very act of writing fiction and what exactly is going on when you read or write a story, stories that easily slip between the guises of narrator and writer. In the title story, a whole narrative is set up about a bus driver and an annoying passenger, before the writer stops the story to arrive “at a clearing: the truth”, which is that the narrator is not a bus driver at all, the passenger is a constructed character analogous to an annoying guy at her gym, and then the story, completely reoriented, sets off again in a new direction. Where the reader ends up is never quite where they expected, though that is not to say they are denied a sense of closure or a clarifying realization at the end of a story, as you might see in more astringent postmodernists. It’s more like watching someone use the incorrect method to solve a math problem, but ending up with the correct solution - the traditional path to epiphany is simply not followed, but the stories still land.
Meta-playfulness can get tiresome, but the inventiveness of Øyehaug’s concepts and ideas, along with her sensitivity to her characters, as constructed as they may be, keep the stories from becoming mere intellectual exercises. In the opening story, “Birds”, a woman loses a part of her brain while menstruating; everything seems fine, except for the fact that she’s an ornithologist and no longer has any conception of what birds are, just three weeks away from defending her thesis on “rheumatism in the snipe family.” Øyehaug at first wrings a sublime sort of humor from the situation – the ornithologist’s husband catches her looking at google results for the word “bird” and can only laugh and remark, “Back to basics, I see” – before switching over to the strange sensation of losing something that’s still there, an echo of the strange dislocation featured in her last novel, 2022’s Present Tense Machine.
The museum director of “The Mational Nuseum” awakes from the unsettling dream of her brand new national Norwegian museum all wrong, the signage bearing the titular typo, the Munchs all hanging upside down, and the building itself sinking into the ground, before waking up and walking over to it to find just that. Her feeling of panic subsides into a “productive euphoria” that speaks to the malleability of nationality and its artistic representation. “A Visit to Monk’s House” twists the initial humor of one person’s obsession with a Tripadvisor query of whether Virginia Woolf’s house has multiple public bathrooms into an exploration of online ‘friends’, messages never answered, and the “unsubstantial territory” that any group creates in their interaction.
Woolf is just one of many writers mentioned throughout the book; there is a strong intertextual current running underneath the stories, with appearances from and references to Matthew Arnold, Inger Christensen, Charles Baudelaire, Richard Brautigan, Franz Kafka, and Henrik Ibsen (looming like a rising Norwegian sun) peppering the stories. Images and strange objective correlatives (titmice, slime eels) recur throughout the collection, creating unforeseen collection-wide connections, and “By The Shack” makes all of these inter and intratextual connections themselves into a story, stranding a group of writers after a plane crash and making them survive in the midst of their own fictional motifs appearing in the ‘real’ world, as if they were forced to live in the test tube of Eliot’s Tradition and make their own Individual Talent.
Øyehaug moves through her concepts with a fearsome intelligence and quickness, eschewing the baggy excess that makes up the worst of showy postmodernism. There’s a lively directness to the prose, which crystallizes and synthesizes complex ideas with ease and humor. The collection altogether has a sort of vertiginous unstable quality to it as it accrues references, wrongfooting swerves, and unlikely clarifications; it feels impossible that it will stand up over the course of the stories, and yet somehow remains intact in the end. It’s a house of cards that one could move into, artifice layered on artifice until it’s made solid.
Short story collections continue to be the best field for experimentation for writers, even if and precisely because they don’t have market expectations. Alongside contemporaries such as Catherine Lacey, Mary South, Robin McLean, and J. Robert Lennon,4 Øyehaug keeps up the tradition of good and strange collections that enliven our ever stranger lives while never pretending to make any sense of them. It ain’t much, but it’s honest work.
Bolano’s 2666 may have been the last big bang of that era.
Like footnotes! Remember all those books with footnotes and endnotes? Have you seen that since 2007’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao? I suppose The Pale King had some, but chalk it up as one of those things fiction has mostly left behind.
FSG is creeping up behind, if not equaling, New Directions in terms of putting out great contemporary literature. The Doloriad, Book Of Goose, the last couple Øyehaug books, Rachel Cusk’s oeuvre, You Will Never Be Forgotten, Nevada - all good stuff!
And many more!!
I would read it for the titmice alone!