Brittle, Beautiful
by Jason Helms
Neil Gaiman doesn’t write literature. Neil writes stories. In the introduction to Fragile Things, his latest collection of short-stories, he wrote, “I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It’s as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get” (xxii).
Neil writes stories that thrill and chill. Neil writes stories that make you check and re-check the deadbolt on your front door. Neil writes stories that make you laugh aloud in places where laughing aloud is unacceptable — like coffee shops where your guffaw swiftly turns heads and muffles itself into a wheezing chuckle somewhere between a cough and a hiccough. Neil writes stories.
I first encountered Neil Gaiman when I was twelve. I was at my local comic shop and saw his name plastered across one of those “Vertigo” comics that I wasn’t supposed to read. When I did read it (two years later — I, of course, refused to heed the warning label that begged me to wait until the wizened age of eighteen) I was depressed that I had waited so long. Literally depressed. I immediately read any and every Neil Gaiman work I could get my hands on.
As I began to love Neil, so did others. He garnered various awards and even was a New York Times Bestseller twice. But one thing he never did was write literature. Never. Which is quite possibly why he is so beloved.
Perhaps I could tell you a story to help you understand what I mean — after all, it’s what Neil would do. Very well then. Fragile Things includes a doozie entitled “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire” (I told you he was good).
It is the story of a writer and plays on the ambiguity of that genitive: both the story about a writer and the story the writer is writing, interdigitated into one neat package. The story within the story is an elaborate gothic piece filled to the brim with clichés and then punctuated lightly with banality. At each of these punctuations, the writer sighs and remarks that he has once again ruined his story. He had longed to write something true, something that held a mirror up to life, something literary. Yet each time he ends up ruining it. Little by little we realize that the writer’s actual life is anything but normal. His butler whispers threats to a young maid. He listens to his aunt scream from the attic and sends his butler to feed her. At one point his writing is interrupted by his long lost brother whom he battles to the death, finally hearing the secrets of the family’s terrible past. Holding a mirror up to his reality really would comprise nothing more than gothic cliché. After many frustrations, he decides to write ‘fantasy.’ He writes what is to him an unbelievable escapist tale: a bittersweet look at a crumbling, suburban marriage and its unwitting members’ near misses with love and loss — basically, what we would consider realistic literature. For Gaiman this inversion of fantasy and realism makes a larger point about genres in general.
What is so amazing about this story — and I assure you I am not doing it justice — is the sheer quantity (not to mention quality) of stories within this single, twelve-page farce. There are vampires, goblins, slaves, woodsmen, contracts written in blood, ghouls, an orphan whose father died tragically in a maelstrom trying to save his wife, the half-crazed aunt locked in the attic, demon brides, talking ravens, moors, a butler with deadly secrets, a maid who is not a maid, familial curses, redemption, and the dissolution of a marriage writ in toast. Dozens of stories, of which we get only gossamer shadows dissolving in our hands. The worst part is I have no doubt that Neil has fleshed out each and every one of these stories in his mind. That is the kind of rapacious storyteller Neil Gaiman is — a dam overflowing with tales and songs, old ones, new ones, and some for whom the medium has not yet been invented. Yet he can also tell each perfectly, as it demands to be told, with both economy and lush grandeur.
Those who’ve read Neil’s first short story collection, Smoke and Mirrors, may be disappointed to find that Fragile Things is something very different. I’m sure you’ve been told not to judge a book by its cover, but let’s throw caution to the wind, shall we? The cover of Fragile Things bears an anatomical drawing of a heart, broken butterfly wings, and two identical snowflakes. All this brittleness is, in turn, wrapped in a translucent overlay of rice-paper. The cover itself embodies the layered frailty of each of its stories and their jarring juxtaposition.
Smoke and Mirrors was a book of wonderfully crafted illusions — each one immersive and perfect in its own way. Moreover, the tales complemented each other, creating a single, cohesive work. Fragile Things, on the other hand, is a collection of stories that, for one reason or another, really don’t achieve perfect illusion. They are each fundamentally flawed, fragile. Yet, that fragility is a kind of beauty. The tales in Fragile Things are fragmented, internally and externally. It is often very difficult to leave one story and go to the next, not only because there is no overall cohesion, but because they are really very fine stories. I found myself re-reading individual tales the moment I finished them. (The only other works I’ve done this with are Gaiman’s Sandman comics.) Most are in one way or another quite metatextual — i.e. more about the act of writing and their own fate of being texts than about their supposed content. As in the ‘Forbidden Brides’ story, Gaiman often wants to talk about storytelling itself while telling a story.
The stories don’t play well together, but each is a treasure with very few misses. This new collection may not be as strong as its predecessor, but it certainly is more beautiful. Gaiman finds the limits of stories, and pushes against them ever so gently. They are after all, very fragile things.
Fragile Things
Publisher: William Morrow
Date: September 26, 2006
Available at: All major book sellers
Price: Hardback: $26.95 (available) Paperback: $14.95 (coming October 1, 2007)
