Seek and Ye Shall Find

It is kind of a shame that Stacey Levine’s stories have to be
published in the form of a book. It’s not that they should
appear
in e-books or anything so mundane as that. Rather, I wish it were
somehow possible to hire elfin booksellers to sneak into your home and
hide Levine’s stories in odd places—inside a cereal box, tucked
into a pair of swimming trunks, taped to the back of the oven—so
that you could discover them at random and, perhaps, inopportune times.
Levine’s stories are rare and mysterious things, and confronting them
in a book makes them feel less wondrous somehow.

They all begin compellingly: “Hallo. I’m a fool. I married Mike
Sump.” “Imagine being a bean: a pale supplicant, rimy dot, a
belly-wrinkled pip, lying enervated on the kitchen chair, trying too
hard all the time.” “Oh, to be Bill Miller, the unreachable one with
the invulnerable eyes, the 35-speed bike, the sixty years more of life
and a future as good as real.” Some of the stories are plain as day;
others are willfully obtuse, as though jealously guarding a secret. You
can’t just read fiction by Levine the way you’d appreciatively read a
short story by, say, Alice Munro. You have to pry the words apart like
a poem and trust the language to reveal something of value.

Sometimes the stories seem to be about nothing but language.
“Sausage,” set in a sausage factory powered by 90 upside-down

bicycles, is prickly with em dashes. Every page has at least a
handful of the slicing lines, and whole paragraphs end with an em dash
that connects to nothing except a fresh paragraph (“All was fine, I
reassured myself, combing my hair, rearranging my smock, forking, when
no one was looking, steaming heaps of meat into my mouth—”) like
a tiny blackout and a struggle to regain consciousness.

When you buy a book, you are buying a slice of time as clearly as if
you were buying a ticket for a movie. That fat genre novel will require
at least a day’s attention from you, spread over a few weeks. The
skinny celebrity biography will pass just a few guilty weekend hours
when you should be cleaning your house. Reading the stories that make
up The Girl with Brown Fur in rapid succession, one after
another in the order in which they’re presented, is not recommended.
They lose their uniqueness that way.

Which is not to say that they’re random bits lashed together like a
semifunctional life raft. Levine’s fiction focuses and builds on the
same themes that old fairy tales do, like weddings and family disputes
and food and creatures that behave strangely and the wonder of flying
(the collection is subtitled Tales & Stories, and the
entries are not labeled as to which is which; maybe each entry is both
a tale and a story?).

Some of the talestories feel as though they should have morals. “Lax
Forb,” about a businessman enduring a metaphysical and cor-
poreal
breakdown in Ohio, could either be positing Twenty Important Things
About Life and Love all at once, or it could be about nothing at all
but the sheer pleasure of starting with one sentence and moving forward
in a confident and stylish way until you reach the only logical end.
Another story, called “Parthenogenetic Grandmother,” is as full of
terror and wonder and confusion as an old Polish folk tale.

Reading quickly and at a staccato pace, a reader can get too swept
up into pummeling the stories with his eyes, trying to discern some
kind of universal truth from them. And, sadly, no matter the fee,
booksellers will not come to your house and hide stories in it. So here
is what you should do: Open The Girl with Brown Fur. Read one of
Levine’s stories. (Slowly!) When you’re done, find a child, preferably
one with wise eyes, and pay the child 50 cents or a dollar to hide the
book somewhere in your home. When you happen across it again, read a
story, track down the wise-eyed child, and repeat the process over and
over again, 25 more times until there are no more new stories left to
discover. And then you can start over.