The Sea-Rabbit; Or, the Artist of Life

Wendy Walker, The Sea-Rabbit, or, The Artist of Life (Sun and Moon, 1988)Wendy Walker is one of America's finest living prose stylists. 1988's The Sea-Rabbit, her first release, is a bit less polished then her 1992 novel The Secret Service, but is no less a joy to read for it. This collection of nine fairy tales is sure to captivate any reader who appreciates language for the sake of language from beginning to end.The stories herein are based on the usual fairy tales, though the reader will probably have to look pretty hard to find some of the more obscure originals (e.g. Grimm's "Hans the Hedgehog," the basis for the central story, "The Contract with the Beast"). Walker takes these skeletons and makes them her own with the addition of sumptuous detail. Anyone who's read The Secret Service will know what I mean by that; those unfamiliar with Walker's prose style may take that statement too lightly. It's hard to explain what differs about Walker's particular eye for detail (as opposed to, say, Clive Barker's or Robert Lowell's), but in reading a Walker tale there's always a sense that the details are just the slightest bit off. Even though you're in the land of the fairy tale, and so things should be somewhat out of kilter, there's that added layer. It's like constructing a science fiction world with physics laws that resemble our own in no way, and then breaking them so subtly that only the most astute physicists would notice, but lay readers will get the feeling that something's not exactly right.Once you've got your head wrapped around that idea, pull out to the next layer, the conscious distortion of time and narration that keeps the reader's head spinning. For example, in "The Contract with the Beast"'s opening pages, the existence of Jack My Hedgehog (Hans, in the Grimm tale) is presented to us as a wild flight of fantasy by Jack's alleged father; a few pages on, Jack takes on a life of his own. A few pages later, the father enters back into play, telling the reader about his dream of the night before. And so on. One can never be sure whether he's stuck in fantasy within fantasy, or whether Jack's world is real within the story. And if it's not, who's doing the dreaming, Jack or his father? Much in the same way as first encountering Cormac McCarthy's distinctive prose style, the reader is forced to adapt to Walker's wheels within wheels; once you've figured out that "figuring it out" is a hopeless exercise best left to dissertation writers, it's a lot easier to go along for the ride and see where it takes us.Walker should be one of America's best-loved and top-selling writers. As it stands, she's America's best-kept secret, and unjustly so. She deserves a much, much wider audience. **** ½