Customer Reviews

Skin (Flyover Fiction)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Kellie Wells has a flowing style underscored by her twisting wordplay and startling juxtapositions. For those who say "Midwestern" as if it were a bad word, Skin might make you change your tune. The novel is a witty and poignant construction of life in the Kansas town of What Cheer, where the strange isn't so out-of-the-ordinary and it's amazing what you might suddenly find under your skin.

Kellie Wells' fiction stands out from most fiction being published today as exceptionally erudite, original, and provocative. She is a writer worth reading and attending to. Wells challenges us to reconsider "the heartland" as a place that is not predictable, mundane, nor worthy of being ignored. Wells also challenges readers to consider (or reconsider) the human condition, to experience (or re-experience) the potential of language, and to think (or re-think) narrative and how it reflects and represents reality. In fact her readers are enticed to contemplate the nature of what we consider reality. By switching point of view regularly, Wells builds a more comprehensive, intriguing view of her community (What Cheer, KS) than a single narrator would allow for. I admit that I wanted the story to stick with Ivy at first (a very compelling character). But by using multiple voices Wells helps round out the story and the community in an effective fashion reminiscent of the style of Louise Erdrich. Wells' command of the English language shines throughout, in a style that is compact and yet effervescent - as when she describes the bats in the first chapter. Her characters are moving without being maudlin or overdrawn. Wells' wry humor permeates the prose (reminiscent of Joy Williams), showing her fine ability to handle the complexity of her characters, whose lives and stories might otherwise overwhelm. Wells' prose exemplifies what the best prose provokes in readers - thoughtfulness, originality, and joy in language and storytelling.

I read this book in 45 ninutes, for it is the kind of story that keeps you reading anxiously from one page to the next. Kellie Wells has a naturalist's gift for describing human and animal behavior as though we were all of us plants, with the natural behavior cycle of the flora kingdom. She knows how to create suspense with a simple twist of phrase, and all of her characters, no matter how eccentric, speak from the heart, no matter if they are elderly or quite young. Most of all I enjoyed the plot in which a teenage boy has moped scars running up and down his legs, and he coinsults his best friend, Ivy, about if the scars are growing or not. Yes, literally growing like ivy. It seems to her that Duncan's scars are on the move and he resolves that he won't die without having sex with her. This delights and confounds her no end for, if truth be told, she has always been a little in love with neighjbor Duncan, referring to him as "boy poetry," with skin white as Elmer's Glue and gray green eyes you could drown in. It's a cute plot, fairly reminiscent at times of something Carson McCullers might have written.

I also liked Zero, the hairdresser with a fondness for movies with Merle Oberon and Dorothy McGuire, movies he thinks are "safe." Then there is Rachel, with a collection of 70s 45s including the Archies, Melanie, Cher and "Little Willy." No matter how fantastic Wells' storylines get, and they are pretty strange, Wells is able to keep her book "grounded" by the simple trick of using brand names, a la Stephen King. You can see in the example of the Elmers Glue above. Elsewhere a third grade savant, Ruby Tuesday Loomis, applies Bugs Bunny Band Aids, a neighbor pops Tums like Sweet Tarts, and in fact on every page you can see something of the sort. It's not just product placement either, it's Kellie Wells' incredible knowledge of just what needs buttressing in her fantastic fiction and what she can leave alone, knowing her readers will find their own way through her James Purdy like tales of What Cheer (the name of the tiny town they all live in, deep in the Midwest of Magic Realism.) Thank goodness for canny Nancy Zafris, the perdurable editor of Kenyon Review who suggested to Ms. Wells that she might as well expand an exquisite short story into a sort of novel.

"Skin" is a good name for it! Like Ayelet Waldman, Wells seems to know all about the difficulties of mother and daughter communication (Rachel and Ruby) and how to keep your faith together in a time of agnostic belief. Like Waldman, she shields her simple parables in the clothes of the contemporary, but never losing sight of the imagination nor its pull, like a dragonfly, towards moonlight. She even makes use of the resonance of her own name, dropping it like a stone, casually, into one of her beautiful sentences: "[Rachel's] eyes appeared dark in the diminishing light of the room, as though they were all pupil, sinking into her head, eyes dropped down dark wells, out of reach." Not every writer could do that--not even some of the best, like Nancy Zafris or Ayelet Waldman. Their names wouldn't pose as nouns.