Review by New York Times Review
MY HIGH-MINDED PARENTS discouraged the Saturday morning ritual of watching cartoons. There were bikes to be ridden, lawns to be mowed! They made an exception for "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show," a popular television series during the 1960s, and especially the segment called "Fractured Fairy Tales," in which the familiar bedtime stories were updated in surprising ways. Rumpelstiltskin morphed into a fast-talking P.R. operative offering fame in exchange for a newborn child. The Seven Dwarfs ran health clubs and diet frauds, promising gullible clients they would be as beautiful as Snow White. Even kids averse to reading - and I was one - could get a kick out of the obvious parody in such twice-told tales. The novelist Michael Cunningham's reimagined fairy tales in "A Wild Swan," beautifully illustrated by Yuko Shimizu in a style that recalls Aubrey Beardsley with a touch of Maurice Sendak, are fractured in more ways than one. Cunningham has toyed with familiar stories before, subjecting Virginia Woolf's mental illness and her novel "Mrs. Dalloway" to brilliant theme-and-variation pyrotechnics in "The Hours." In his recent novel, "The Snow Queen," Cunningham drew obliquely on the same Hans Christian Andersen story that inspired the Disney film "Frozen," while immersing himself in the rich corpus of classic fairy tales, the inspiration for his new book. "I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters," Woolf wrote in the diary entry Cunningham used as an epigraph to "The Hours." "I think that gives exactly what I want: humanity, humor, depth." Cunningham has performed a similar operation on the 10 tales he has selected for transformation. Andersen and the Brothers Grimm were notably sparing in character motivation. For the stories in "A Wild Swan," Cunningham has dug out caves of humanity, humor and depth behind some well-known characters. Why, for example, did Rumpelstiltskin want a child in the first place? Well, it's not unusual for single men to consider adoption, even if wary agencies might look askance at "a 200-year-old gnome" looking to be a first-time father. "If you had a child, your job would be more than getting through the various holiday rushes," Cunningham suggests in "Little Man," adopting the intimate second-person address he often employs in this book. "It'd be about procuring tiny shoes and pull-toys and dental checkups; it'd be about paying into a college fund." And why exactly did that "crazy old lady" build that weird house in the woods out of candy and gingerbread? Maybe because, after a "career of harshly jovial sluttishness," she had "expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form." At least these two "sexy" kids, "pierced and tattooed," with their "starved and foxy faces," showed her some attention. This aging, ostracized witch has clearly reached the end of the road. "Were you relieved, maybe just a little," Cunningham asks, "when they lifted you up ... and shoved you into the oven?" "Beauty is a simple passion," as the poet Anne Sexton wrote in her own fractured version of "Snow White," "but, oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes." If Cunningham's fairy tales are narratively fractured, his characters are often literally so. The decline of the crazy old lady was due in part to an "accident (the backfiring car, the horse)" that left her with a "gimp leg." "Steadfast; Tin" recasts in a contemporary setting Andersen's romance of a one-legged tin soldier and the paper ballerina he mistakenly thought had only one leg too. "You always say 'different' when there's something wrong with somebody," Cunningham's man with a prosthetic leg is informed by his young daughter. The hero of the terrific title story is the hapless youngest brother who has a wing instead of a right arm. A wicked stepmother's curse turned all 12 brothers into swans, a curse partially undone by their little sister, who learned the antidote - a coat made of nettles harvested from a graveyard. But she was discovered just before she could finish the 12th coat, still missing a sleeve. "A Wild Swan" is another fable of human isolation and disfigurement, played both for comedy ("The wing was awkward on the subway, impossible in cabs") and for pathos ("Every now and then a woman grew interested, but it always turned out that she was briefly drawn to some Leda fantasy"). The winged man haunts the bars on the outskirts of the city, "the ones that cater to people who were only partly cured of their curses, or not cured at all." People, you might say, like the rest of us. Among the darkest tales in "A Wild Swan" is a retelling of "The Monkey's Paw," that classic ghost story of unintended consequences by W. W. Jacobs, in which an English couple is granted three wishes from a severed monkey's paw acquired in India. Cunningham leaves the story relatively unfractured. The couple wish, sensibly, for £200. The next day, they're informed that there has been an accident at the factory where their son works; he has been "snatched up by his machine, as if he were the raw material for some product made of manglement." The company offers a sum of money (guess how much) in partial compensation. "Bring him back," the mother begs, grasping the paw. Cunningham's major alteration is the decision of the parents to forgo a third wish and live instead with their son's disfigurement. Cunningham's take on "The Monkey's Paw" isn't really a fairy tale, but its main thrust - that society can find ways to accommodate human imperfection - has always been one of his preoccupations. The Jacobs tale also seems a likely source for the ghost story "In the Machine" that makes up a third of Cunningham's novel "Specimen Days," in which Lucas, the protagonist, is another disfigured survivor, "the changeling child, goblin-faced, with frail heart and mismatched eyes." Lucas is doubly haunted - by his dead brother, gobbled up by the sweatshop machine to which he was enslaved, and by Walt Whitman's poetry, which he can't help spouting on all occasions, opportune or not. Not all ugly ducklings turn out to be swans. Not all frogs are enchanted princes. And perhaps it's best that way, as Cunningham notes in "Dis. Enchant," his humane and rueful prologue: "If certain manifestations of perfection can be disgraced, or disfigured, or sent to walk the earth in iron shoes, the rest of us will find ourselves living in a less arduous world; a world of more reasonable expectations; a world in which the appellations 'beauty' and 'potency' can be conferred upon a larger cohort of women and men." Who needs three wishes anyway? "Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings." Not all ugly ducklings turn out to be swans. Not all frogs are enchanted princes. CHRISTOPHER BENFEY teaches literature at Mount Holyoke and is the author of four books on the American Gilded Age.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 11, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Fairy tales exert a gravitational force on many fiction writers, and some are moved to try their hand at updating them. The results can be wickedly delectable, as in Jean Thompson's The Witch and Other Tales Retold (2014) and, now, this boldly interpreted and transporting offering by Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner winner Cunningham (The Snow Queen, 2014). His touch is sure, light, and eviscerating as he neatly infuses these indelible old stories of kings and queens, princes and princesses, spells, greed, and loss with contemporary language (off the grid), settings (bars, a convenience store), and frank inquiries into the complexities of sexuality. Cunningham presents a graceful, haunting play on The Twelve Dancing Princesses; a sly twist on Hansel and Gretel, and a commanding variation on Jack and the Beanstalk in which he parses marriage and the bond between a loyal mother and a rapacious son. It's startling just how psychologically sophisticated and affecting Cunningham's pitch-perfect recastings of Rumpelstiltskin and Beauty and the Beast are as stories of the perversity of desire. The original tales are timeless for good reasons, and by approaching them from a fresh and astute perspective with humor and compassion, Cunningham revitalizes their profound resonance. Imaginatively illustrated by Yuko Shimizu, this is a dazzling twenty-first-century fairy-tale collection of creative verve and keen enchantment. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Cunningham's high stature and the book's irresistible premise will attract lively media attention and reader curiosity.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Taylor and Hough dramatize these newfangled tales with youthful charm and subtle savagery, easily swinging from the author's gentle humor into darker recesses. Cunningham meshes ancient tales with modern interpretations, offering psychological background for each of our bedtime familiars. He creates post fairy-tale scenarios and seeks answers to questions never asked: Why is Rumpelstiltskin so obsessed with the queen's baby? What happens to Rumpelstiltskin after she names him? What is life like for the 11 swans revived as men? How does the 12th, the one-armed, one-winged ex-swan, handle his disability? Why is the wicked witch relieved to be shoved in the oven? Cunningham has created a new and wonderful way of bending our minds around the myths that loomed large in our childhoods, and Taylor and Hough do him justice. A Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Bruno Bettelheim's classic The Uses of Enchantment posited that fairy tales could help children understand their darkest fears, and Cunningham's (The Hours) re-envisioned Other Tales charges adults to challenge perspectives. Ten stories are turned every-which-way by the author, who deftly subverts with both droll charm and sardonic bite-from the last swan brother who couldn't go back to being fully human and the witch who gets shoved in the oven by young psychopaths after they eat her candy house, to the giant who gets "jacked" and the little man who splits in two when his name is called. -VERDICT While listeners will miss out on Japanese artist Yuko Shimizu's gorgeously detailed black-and-white illustrations, they'll hear original music by -actor/songwriter Billy Hough, who alternates narrating the stories with Lili Taylor; Taylor presents the more nuanced performance. Audiences in search of alternate tales à la Angela Carter and Gregory Maguire should listen in! ["A treat for adult readers": LJ 10/15/15 review of the Farrar hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, -Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An assortment of fairy tales revised and thrust into the present day. Cunningham (The Hours, 1998; By Nightfall, 2010, etc.) lightly touched on folklore for allegorical purposes in his 2014 novel, The Snow Queen, but here he approaches the genre head-on: these stories are each inspired by a particular tale, usually updated to add a dose of grown-up realism to its relationships. "Poisoned," for instance, turns "Snow White" into a piece of flash fiction about pillow-talk role-playing, while "Steadfast; Tin" is a rewrite of "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" that opens at a frat party. Cunningham clearly admires these stories for their flexibility, the way they can, with a twist or two, make room for mature observations about love and sex: his take on "Hansel and Gretel," "Crazy Old Lady," reimagines the witch as a much-married woman exiled for her sexual appetites, "a goddessof carnal knowingness." And in "Beasts," he considers whether it isn't so much the inner prince but outer animal that Beauty admires: "She wondered to herself why so many men seemed to think meekness was what won women's hearts." To that end, Cunningham embraces dark and sometimes-bloody characteristics of these stories as rendered most famously in the Grimm Brothers, but he also writes more open-heartedly about them, as in "A Monkey's Paw," which extends the original story (which ends with a couple wishing their zombified resurrected son to disappear) to a somber but compassionate conclusion. These rewrites are all elegantly told and nicely supplemented by illustrations by Shimizu, who gives each story a one-panel image that evokes Aubrey Beardsley in its detail and surrealistic splendor. But between the stories' brevity and borrowed plots, this collection also feels like a busman's holiday for Cunningham, who thrives in more expansive settings. A likable and occasionally provocative set of variations on kid-lit themes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
