Link, Kelly. The Book of Love. Random House New York, 2024. F; 5/24.

I’ve put off writing about Kelly Link’s first novel because it’s big: long and packed with a lot of fascinating stuff, but it’s I guess you could say difficult, and for me in the end obscure. The short stories of Link’s I’ve read seemed – I don’t know – a bit disorganized. But intriguing and impressive in their way too. This is a supernatural fantasy built around the idea that “The distinction between real and unreal is more slippery than you think it is…” as one of the characters tells us. But an author who takes on a project involving superhumans has to get past childish foolishness if they want to achieve something with the stature of old fairytales. But at the same time to try to do what great fiction authors do: build and hold dramatic interest through to a wonderfully rich finale. Good on Kelly Link for trying even though for me in the end I don’t think she quite manages that very difficult task.

Three teenage musical kids in a fictional American town have mysteriously died, but now they’ve returned to find everyone who knew them has had their memories changed so the kids appear to have gone to Ireland to study music at the time they died, and now just come back. They (Laura, Daniel, and Mo) know they died and are bewildered especially when they find out that a complicated and motivationally tangled crowd of supernatural characters are working out their relationships, which fully involve the three of them and everybody else in the town.

The uber-deity is a female called Malo Mogge who has made what turns out to be the mistake of entering the “real” human world, where she can perform whatever physical miracles she likes and is worshipped, but which world contains a reality called death. There is a door through which she arrived which is guarded by a couple of her underlings Bogomil and Mr Anabin (are these names anagrams? – the second is a music teacher at the kids’ school). Along for the ride is another magical guy called Thomas whose brother was murdered 300 years ago by Avelot, a girl of doubtful character who is now also around in the town in various forms, mostly a boy Bowie, and who Thomas is looking to kill as revenge.

Some of Ms. Link’s credibility problem is softened by her ironic deadpan rendering of ordinary goings-on in the town (“…Laura could see that the two people sitting at the table were at that stage of drunkenness where you didn’t really have bones anymore.”) and of the three quite different and believable kids’ trying to work out how they died, and how come there are all these supernatural characters who’ve been alive for many centuries apparently in control. Narrator Link’s orientation feels credible, like come on, all this is pretty ridiculous, but it is actually happening right here in this perfectly normal town. At the same time as I struggled a bit to pull the real and magical moral and relationship plots into some form of sense, I liked the writing enough to keep going.

Laura and her sister Susanna’s mum Ruth is a babies’ intensive care nurse whose estranged husband has reappeared and is trying to make up, but he turns out to be imaginary, put in Laura’s mind although he’s still as real as anyone else to all the humans in town. Mr. Anabin is a kindly paternalistic teacher living in a rundown motel who has to walk a worrisome tightrope to direct the kids to deal with Malo in the least dangerous way. And Malo is flamboyant, dismissive of human issues, powerful, and definitely dangerous. Susanna has a romantic relationship with Daniel and although she wasn’t one of the three who “went away to Ireland” and was part of the rock group the other three were involved in, she is trying her best to figure out why everything seems increasingly strange. Malo at a critical moment carelessly kills poor Ruth the mum by mistake, and trying to help Thomas finish his vendetta against Avelot says,

“Do you hesitate? Then I will do it.” She raised her hand, flicked her finger as Ruth pushed Bowie behind her. “Don’t!” Laura said. Ruth’s mouth opened as if she were going to say something. Instead she fell onto the white couch and her head struck the soundboard of (a guitar) with a crack. Bowie was no longer behind her. A gray cat shot between Laura’s feet and through the open door. Laura bent over Ruth. “Mom?” she said. “Susannah, help!” No pulse. She kept her finger on Ruth’s warm wrist, felt nothing. Ruth was dead.

(… the cat was Avelot/Bowie escaping.)

I’ll leave the large amount of plot and character complexity for anyone who wants to take this story on. One critic mentioned Kelly Link had a problem with “pace”, and holding the emotional voltage of her story together seems a task she delegated to her readers a bit. I think the complexity of the plot forced her to lose momentum by continually having to explain. Could just be me. But I got intrigued enough by what was going on that I wanted to hear how the many dissonances roaring around might somehow resolve into a coherent piece of music, so I kept trying to name the numerous tunes:

There was of course the straightforward story of supernaturals messing with our mundane world. Sure, who knows whether polytheists like the ancient Greeks could have been onto something we’ve just lost? Not many people over the aesthetic age of twelve seem even allowed to wonder about such things, unless invited by increasingly artificially-intelligent science fiction movies.

Without revealing the ending, what happens when powerful forces thoughtless about human realities including mortality get loose in our world? I had to wonder whether all we have to do is look around us to see that.

As my nine-year-old granddaughter speculated awhile ago, we may wonder Is there such a thing as magic? For an academic it could be a metaphor for the imagination. Others might once in a while sense something extraordinary in somebody unusual, on a walk in the woods, seeing a great movie or having an art gallery epiphany, but because such inklings aren’t real somebody just carries on driving to work, turns over in bed or looks forward to the weekend. Nothing happens, even if they later wonder whether some sort of opportunity was missed.

Literary-fan friends of mine might have a similar experience to mine appreciating Kelly Link’s undeniable great writing. And there’s a lot of it. In places I was reminded of Lucy Ives’s short story Cosmogony which woke me up to how deadpan ordinary-life events really do coexist with something quite different. We have stories within a story, imaginary finely-made characters and all sorts of events, along with the author’s even having of a bit of a dear heart:

Ruth (after she dies, talking to Bogomil) said, “Even if there were a lot of other things I wanted you to tell them and you remembered all of it correctly, it could still turn out something was the wrong thing for me to say. That’s the problem with being someone’s mother. You try to be helpful but it may turn out you were saying the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong time, most of the time. I don’t want to make it harder. This is going to be so hard on them.

Notwithstanding things like that, I’m mildly bewildered by the title. It makes me wonder if I’ve missed something. The chapters are all “Book of…” and then a name of one of the characters which seems a bit biblical. Somehow Love isn’t chanting like a Greek chorus all through this story, nor is the “tone” particularly lovey. It’s ironic and a bit philosophical and aesthetic. Straight and gay couples have sex and people including the spiritual beings like one another and are kind as well as nasty. But was there convincing romantic, friendly, spiritual, sexy cosmic joyful love coming at me? Not really.

Who or what on a Coles Notes plot level were these deities and what happens in the end? Although like an Agatha Christie whodunit somebody could probably figure it out, the truth is I had just ran out of aesthetic appetite by the end.

Anyway let’s see what Kelly Link does next. I’d give it a try, and lots of people could really like this one too.

8.6/9.1 if I have to put numbers on it.