Briardene Books

The question I feel that I should be able to answer about Kelly Link’s first novel is how I would feel about it if it had some other name on the cover. I don’t mean that I only want to treat it as an independent artefact, divorced from career context, because there are ways in which it is very much a continuation of approaches and ideas from Link’s earlier work; but I do think it is a failure that even now, months after the event, it feels to me a little strange to be living in the timeline where Kelly Link has published a novel. Link is a great writer of strange, supple, sly short stories, a formative writer in my reading history; I might almost say, self-mockingly, that there is to me something ineluctably short story-ish about Link’s work, the matching of concept to length and form, the daring shifts and twists that keep the reader off balance. So part of me, on hearing about The Book of Love, was excited precisely because the concept of a Kelly Link novel seemed improbable; part of me, I think, went into a pre-emptive defensive crouch against the possibility that someone might suggest that all of those miraculous stories have only been a warm-up. And that combination, I am certain, leads me to judge The Book of Love differently than I would if it had been presented to me as the work of a writer I had never heard of. But we are where we are. Kelly Link’s first novel exists. What is it like?

Link’s publisher, at least in the UK, clearly thinks the book can be accessed by both young and adult readers, and seeks that breadth of audience by foregrounding YA signals without specifically naming it as such. (You can blame John Clute’s recent jeremiad The Book Blinders, about the importance of dust jackets to the framing of books, for this digression into the gauche topic of marketing, which of course is not generally considered part of the reviewer’s remit. But since I’ve already admitted that I can’t separate this book from my personal expectations version of it, I’m going to keep digging.) The most prominent endorsements on The Book of Love are from writers best known for YA work – Holly Black, Leigh Bardugo, Cassandra Clare – and the blurb promises a straightforward plot hook, introducing three teenagers who have been resurrected from the dead and have to “discover what happened to them”, but do not yet realise that “their return has upset a delicate balance.” This is in contrast to Link’s most recent collection (from the same publisher) White Cat, Black Dog (2023), for which an endorsement describes Link as “the Alice Munro of the fantastic”, and the blurb mentions that she has been a Pulitzer finalist and promises “a fresh take on the stories that you thought you knew.” The Book of Love could have been sold as the long-awaited first novel by an acclaimed short story writer, but it is not; it is instead sold on the nature of the story. This is a perfectly defensible marketing approach, aiming to present the book to its widest potential readership. It also happens to be a broadly accurate piece of expectation management.

My one issue with the marketing, in fact, is the release date. The Book of Love came out in February, and given the title you can see why, but it is set over the course of a few days in New England in December 2014, it is about endings and renewals, and there is a lot of snow on the ground: this should have been a November release for the Christmas market. Our three resurrectees are Laura, aspiring rock star, full of plans and vigour; Daniel, big and kind, family-oriented, and in an on-off again relationship with Laura’s older sister Susannah (who did not die, and has spent the year feeling lost and depressed); and Mo, introverted and tentative, who lives with his grandmother, a successful romance novelist. They are greeted by their music teacher, Mr Anabin, who explains that they died at the start of the year; that they are now part of a contest between Anabin and another man, Bogomil, who guards the realm they were trapped in; and that everyone they know has had their memories adjusted to believe that they have returned from studying in Ireland rather than from being dead. They are now creatures of magic, and they have to learn what that means: which is to say, they have to grow up and find their places in the world.

Blurb and endorsements notwithstanding, this is more of a shift in emphasis than a wholly new direction for Link’s writing. Plenty of teenagers have faced similar challenges in Kelly Link stories, from “The Girl Detective” (1998), who searched for her mother in the underworld, to the TV-obsessed friend group of “Magic for Beginners” (2005), to the summer camp adventurers of “Monster” (2005). I can’t remember many of their names, and some of them don’t even have names, and that was as it should be for the roles they played in those stories; but one of the marks in The Book of Love‘s favour – one of the moments of relief, when reading it – is that its characters are novelistic, they have presence and depth and can surprise you without surprising you at all. Which is a good thing, because we spend a lot of time in their company. At over six hundred pages, The Book of Love is long, and given its compressed timeframe, that means it is also granular. It is not quite the case that it takes as long to read as it takes the events on the page to play out, but it does have a little of that happening-in-real-time feel to it. The chapters are short, and we cycle through the perspectives of Laura, Daniel, Mo and Susannah, and of some other characters, in a playful manner, broadly chronological but sometimes skipping forward or back a little, or showing what was going on elsewhere at the same time. It may be a short story writer’s solution to the challenge of novelistic structure, but it works. The Book of Love is a book to hang out with: big, loose, indulgent (complimentary), comfortable in its evocation of small-town America, painful within expected parameters. (I say again to the marketing team: this is a Boxing Day book.) And let us not leave this chronicle of praise without acknowledging the almost unfailing pleasure of the sentences, whether that is in finding ways to unsettle (“Human faces didn’t really look like that, did they? Like a box accidentally closed up with something alive inside it”), or to amuse (“Susannah’s attitude toward clothes was mostly indifference, but on the subject of pajamas she was an abolitionist”) or to capture a feeling or or experience in just the right terms (“The way the audience [at the gig] caught the sound and increased it with their attention”). And eventually, it ends well.

I enjoyed almost every one of the very many minutes I spent reading The Book of Love, and that is enough, you would think. Really, it should be. For the new readers the marketing team are seeking, I hope that it will be. If it weren’t for Kelly Link’s name on the cover, it might be for me, too. But as it is, I can’t shake the feeling that The Book of Love should add up to a little more than it does. Take the title – more expectation-shaping – which sensitises you to every mention of love throughout the story, and suggests that an argument will be made. Love does appear in many forms: love for friends, love for partners (neatly separated from sex, about which the novel is beautifully non-judgemental), love for work, love for life; the town in which the story is set is called Lovesend. Love is a reference point: there is a suggestion that lucky people find the work they are meant to do, and unlucky people find love; a timeless moment is like “having a conversation with someone who loved the same things you loved”; a message is left that “love is as strong as death”. Mo’s grandmother, the romance novelist, turns out to have died during his year away, but remains a presence throughout the novel, and turns out to have used her financial success to improve Lovesend, funding facilities but also funding a great many statues of notable Black women. And in the last chapter, in a moment that comes much closer to a concluding moral than most Kelly Link stories ever get, we are exhorted to imagine that “every love, though there may be ups and downs to keep our interest, is true and living.” It is no doubt a novel in which love plays an important role. But note what isn’t in this list: anything to do with the central mystery of the resurrections. A friend suggested the title may be a reference the song of the same name by The Magnetic Fields, which I hadn’t heard, and having looked up the lyrics I can see it, both as self-deprecation (The book of love is long and boring / no one can lift the damn thing) and perhaps a hoped-for reader response (I love it when you sing to me / and you / you can sing me anything). For myself, I have decided that the novel can be taken as an argument that while all of life’s decisions can be seen through the prism of love, not all of them should be; but I can’t shake the feeling that is me imposing a pattern, rather than recognising one.

In many ways it seems to me that The Book of Magic would have made a better title, with love being one type of magic explored. Anabin initially frames the resurrection as part of a contest, and more than in many other Link stories you do get the sense of a system with parameters that can be learned and manipulated, but it’s a cloudy sense that never comes into focus. Instead, much of the magic is shaped through dreams, or feels dreamlike in its implementation. There are both magical beings and other realms, but there are not spells as such, rather magic seems to be a matter of will, and if you have the right will, you can effect almost any transformation you can imagine. There is a backstory of magical conflict, but Link seems to go out of her way to construct an original lineage – some of the characters have fairy-like qualities, but there is not a “faerie” in the way that you might recognise from a British or Irish or any other major folkloric tradition. It’s an ambitious approach, one that Link has pursued at short story length occasionally, but for the novel I’m not quite sure that she pulls it off: for the trick to work I think Anabin, Bogomil and their associates would need to feel more iconic than they do, with a greater depth of history than they have, and perhaps Lovesend would also have to feel more real and specific, to provide a grounding contrast; I kept expecting to start visualising myself walking down its streets, understanding the town’s geography, but it never happened. At the same time as all of this, there seem to me to be clear dialogues with other fantasy stories: one character has an amnesia-generating splinter in her foot, an impediment which has a very classically fairytale feel to it, at other points the overarching story felt strongly in dialogue with elements of the later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and as Link is more widely read in both YA and romance than I am, I suspect there are intertexts to be found on those fronts as well. Here I am more confident that the argument adds up to something: here I think The Book of Love like many fantasies, like many YA novels, perhaps like many romances, is a novel about how we come into or reject power, about how we make choices that will shape our lives.

Perhaps that’s why the novel is set in 2014, a date which struck me when it was mentioned early on, and kept rattling around in my head throughout the novel’s proceedings. Some of the comforting pleasure of The Book of Love comes, I think, from nostalgia: that we are being transported back to a version of America that, for all its peril and dream-logic, had not yet slipped into the chaos of Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic, worsening indications of climate change, and all the psychological consequences of those shifts, including a sense that our individual choices matter much less than we might have previously believed. I think it would be hard to set the book in 2024 without it ringing false. Indeed to go again to the last chapter, one character, who has come into power in an appropriately compelling, even scary way, looks at the world and thinks it is a terrible place and getting worse, but that they might try to fix things, if they can figure out the way. I don’t think this suggests a sequel, if anyone is worried about that: I think it is an attempt to acknowledge the gap between the world of the book and the world of the reader. Perhaps the size of that gap is another reason why I find it hard to judge The Book of Love simply for what it is, rather than what I want it to be. Perhaps I’ve been waiting too long. Perhaps what I really want is for Kelly Link’s first novel to have actually been published in 2014, rather than trying to take me back there now.