New Yorker Fiction Review #151: "The Bog Girl" by Karen Russell
My loyal readers (if there are still any, which I doubt) will know I'm usually not a fan of Magical Realism, which, as you may also know, is Karen Russell's stock in trade. That said, there's nothing I love more than having my antipathy for magical realism shattered by an awesome story like "The Bog Girl."
Briefly, an Irish teenager discovers the body of a young woman who as been buried in a bog for over 2,000 years and begins to date her. What more do you need, right? If I'd read that one-line description somewhere else, and wasn't on a mission to review every New Yorker short story, I doubt I'd have read "The Bog Girl." But maybe I should start doing a George Costanza and do the opposite of everything I think I should do.
Where Russell succeeds here is in two main areas: 1.) Making us really love Cillian, the teenager who falls in love with the bog girl, and 2.) pulling the unbelievable trick making the characters and the story so realistic that we catch ourselves wondering, even within the story, is this really happening? It's a bit difficult to articulate what I mean, but suffice it to say: the characters within the story take Cillian and his "girlfriend" seriously, so we, the readers, are forced to as well.
Contemporary literature geeks will recognize Russell as the author of Swamplandia! (2011), which got Russell into the final round of voting for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, at the ripe old age of 30.
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