Imagine, if you can, a Kafka with a robust and forgiving sympathy for the absurdity of human relationships and a lighthearted appreciation for the female body; a Bruno Schulz who leaves his Polish town to find romance and adventure in Australia and Machu Picchu; a Calvino who chooses his characters for their likeness to Hollywood B-movie stars; a Beckett with a soft spot for the tenderness between mothers and sons; a Borges with a fondness for childish jokes.
It is impossible to envision these literary masters altered in ways that would have made them unrecognizable to us and to themselves. Impossible, that is, unless we read the remarkable stories in Mr. and Mrs. Baby, stories that allow us to hear distant echoes of these writers—the dark comedy of Kafka and Beckett, the lyrical imagination of Calvino and Schulz, Borges’s attraction to the cerebral, insoluble puzzle—filtered through the utterly original and unique sensibility of Mark Strand.
In Strand’s stories we find the beauties of style and the complexities of subject matter that we have come to associate with his poems. Death and the melancholy that accompanies loss—and even the premature anticipation of loss—hover lightly (or not so lightly) over these fictions. For much of its length, “The Tiny Baby” evokes those cheesy horror films whose protagonists, shrunk to the size of mice, cower in terror from the rampages of the family cat. Until, at the story’s conclusion, we meet the tiny baby grown into “a smallish woman.” And the delicate irony of the final sentences changes our understanding of what we have been reading, which now seems not merely comedic but metaphysical:
Her thin legs crossed, the tips of her shoes hardly reaching the ground, she suddenly, in barely audible tones, sings a song about rain falling and a man on a bicycle, hurrying home. The man’s wife leans from a window, watching him, but is distracted by the noisy appearance of sea gulls. The smallish woman gets up. The train has left. The day keeps echoing around her. Everything is priceless, she thinks. Death will not have me. That is the story of the tiny baby.
Among the lures that seems to have drawn the poet Mark Strand to the narrative is its potential for depicting unlikely transformations. In “More Life,” the narrator’s father returns first as a fly, then as a horse. Finally his spirit inhabits his fiancée, Helen—alarming to her if not to our hero, who is not only astonished but thrilled to meet his father speaking to him in the voice of a terrified woman. Retired from the wars, the hero of “The General” turns into an elderly child, playing with toy soldiers, imagining the clamor of battle, and reliving historic victories.
The title story is characteristic of how beautifully written—how sad, how funny, how unsettling—the fictions in this collection can be. In this portrait of a marriage, the ennui, the disappointments, the isolation and loneliness that are an inescapable part of being human govern the ebb and flow of affection between Mr. and Mrs. Baby. On their way to a party, “the urgency of promised adventure was so palpable that the neighborhood seemed to murmur with pleasure. And when they walked to the party, they were almost overcome with the magical intimacy of leaves saturating the air with the odor of green, the sweet seasoning of summer.” But, perhaps predictably, reality turns out to be something of a letdown: “Nothing was happening. The Babys stayed only as long as they had to and then walked home.”
I suppose it could be argued that, to a certain extent, every poem is about poetry. But in these fictions, Strand meditates at once more openly and more ironically on the poetic impulse and the nature of poetry than is his custom in his poems—excepting, of course, such masterpieces as “Eating Poetry.” In “The President’s Resignation,” the leader of the country reveals himself to be attentive to, perhaps even obsessed by, changes in the weather—in other words, a character who may remind us of the poet Mark Strand.
Who can forget my proposals, petitions uttered on behalf of those who labored in the great cause of weather—measuring wind, predicting rain, giving themselves to whole generations of days—whose attention was ever riveted to the invisible wheel that turns the stars and to the stars themselves? How like poetry, said my enemies. They were right. . . . I have always spoken for what does not change, for what resists action, for the stillness at the center of man.
Moved by a sudden moment of illumination, Bob Baby discovers poetry:
Brought outside by a restlessness whose source was obscure, he was likewise brought out of himself by a spacious aura of epiphanous light, into an openness of being that took him by surprise. With a knowledge almost too deep for tears, he saw all things ablaze with the glory of their own mortality. He lingered until the world around him suddenly resumed its normal aspect, then he went inside and began to pace on the green living-room rug. He wondered why he was here and not there, why he had chosen the life he had instead of the life he hadn’t, why he felt as he did and, sometimes, as he didn’t. Thus it was that Bob Baby wrote his first poem and decided to say nothing about it to Babe.
And in “The Killer Poet,” a man about to be executed for murdering his parents reflects on the origins of his literary career: “Though my meditations were filled with the self-regarding pomp of adolescence, something important was taking hold of me—the privileged and ponderous assessment, for the first time, of my own mortality. The beauty and mystery of death beckoned, and I began to write. My anguished humming into the empty corridors of the future, my plangent dialogues with absence, were all that sustained me.”
What’s hardest to describe, but what I hope has come through in the passages I’ve quoted above, is what makes these stories at once so touching—and so funny. The plot of “True Loves” derives its comedy from a series of repetitions with variations—the structure of a sort of morose shaggy-dog joke. A married man keeps falling in love, under the most impossible and often risible circumstances, with strangers, women who not only fail to return his passion but who excite an unrealizable longing that only succeeds in torpedoing each of his five marriages.
Much of the humor that runs through the collection results from Strand’s ability to use language—the most elegant, the simplest yet most brilliantly metaphorical language—like the air with which the narrator is blowing up a balloon, the dirigible of a story. And then something goes too far, crosses over the edge, the membrane of the narrative reaches its limits—and explodes. Consequently, the delight that these fictions generate in the reader is the joy of a child watching the explosion take place—an at once amusing and melancholy reminder of the eternal and the transient, the absurd and the incisive, the silly and the profound. Those contradictions are what make these stories so rewarding to read—and so satisfying to return to, to reread, knowing that each rereading will yield more pleasure, more amusement, more meaning. More life.