Despite a minimal drawing style, a mostly anecdotal, plot-free set of scenarios (one hesitates to call them “stories” — more on that in a moment), and the flat, affectless dialogue spoken by her all-too-familiar, everyday characters, Megan Kelso manages to pack a tremendous amount of meaning, weight, poetry, detail, whatever you want to call it, into this slim volume of short works. Any one of these panels, not to mention the spaces between each and each, can explode with heartbreaking possibilities — but often only after you’ve looked at the thing for the ninth or tenth or twentieth time.

The only way to love this book, in other words, is to read it closely, or repeatedly.

The difference between art and entertainment is that art abrogates to itself the right to kick your ass, to make you work hard for the privilege of approaching it. Not every artist exercises this right every time pen touches paper (it’s a right, after all, not an obligation). Kelso does. Which is not to say that the book is “difficult,” in the same way that, say Ulysses is difficult, or even Jimbo in Purgatory is difficult. You won’t be confused or frustrated at any point along the way, if you choose not to be. You can read The Squirrel Mother and Other Stories as a standard coming-of-age kind of a joint, the author looking back on her childhood with nostalgia, a Lynda Barry comic without quite so much of the spazzy hurting. But then you’ll miss out on Kelso’s real and fine (in every sense of the word) accomplishment.

Like the short works of Raymond Carver or Grace Paley, the best of Kelso’s pieces don’t contain within themselves stories — sequences of moments, actions, and characters with easily-divined intentions, in conflict but moving toward resolution, all neatly wrapped up inside an explanatory theme — so much as they highlight random, minimal incidents from which a thousand stories could be imagined. The author refuses to be so indiscreet as to try to push you toward any final “take-away point.” They are nothing more and nothing less than the beginnings of stories, fraught with implication, but without the kinds of answers, or even the kinds of easily-expressible questions, that a more typical story in a more typical manner might provide.

To summarize the appeal of these works, then, is to write a bunch of open-ended essay questions, because it’s the act of extrapolating beyond what’s actually printed on the paper in front of you that provides the real pleasure here. My extrapolations, as well as my questions, will be different from yours.

To wit:

Why is the house in “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” for sale, and do the family politics and circumstances behind that fact inform the mother’s dreamy mood, especially in the last panel? If so, do they add lightness, or weight, to that mood and that panel? If not, why not?

In the title story, does the defacement of the daughter’s new dress, the one her mother has been working on all day, precipitate the life-changing decision the mother will be making after the story has ended — or is it one of those crazy childhood sins, irrelevant in truth, that will nevertheless haunt the imagination of the daughter for ten, twenty, thirty years, until she gets old enough and crabby enough to forgive herself and her mother, and the rest of the world, for that matter, for the things that happened to her when she was a child? Who is speaking in the rounded-off captions on that last page? The mother, the daughter, the chipper, capable aunt, Kelso herself, or some unnameable narrator? Also, if the squirrel mother has many children, why does the human mother have only one? Are there others, or is the mother the narrator after all, assuaging her guilt by exaggerating her circumstances?

When the vacation slide-show is over, and the father turns to his family, why can’t we see the rest of the family in that panel? And why, in the following panel, when the lights have come up, and we see the family, can’t we see the father? How do the snapshots from the previous pages add significance to, or defuse, this juxtaposition of images at the end?

Is the little girl who lynches her teddy bear a future serial killer in the making, a victim of child abuse (her dad did look awfully unhappy, paying the bills in the first few panels), or just a normal kid performing arbitrary, meaningless violence on something that she knows can’t really feel any pain anyway? That last possibility, of course, would be the most likely in the real world, per Occam’s razor, but stories don’t always act like the real world — stories always don’t act like the real world — and the hanging of the teddy bear, despite the fact that real-world kids do this kind of thing all the time, is the equivalent of a Chekhovian loaded gun when presented in the context of story. Which is fine. Which is fine.

Does Mrs. Winston really need her cigs, or is she just pining for attention? How does the narrator know that Mrs. Winston doesn’t like Neil Diamond, anyway? What have we not been told? Are those cigarettes in the candy bowl that Mr. Winston is offering to the trick-or-treaters? They look like cigarettes. That last name, come to think of it, is mighty suspicious.

Often, the impact of any story depends on, to use creative writing workshop jargon, “whose story it turns out to be.” If you read the wife as the protagonist of “The Pickle Fork,” for example, which you’re tempted to do at first, it’s a very different thing than if you read the housemaid, or the museum curator, or even the administrative assistant as the protagonist. I picked that piece on purpose to make my point easy — the structure of the narrative forces us into a surprising direction in that regard at the end — but it could apply to almost any of these stories.

Speaking of “The Pickle Fork,” anyway: whose circumstances do the items of honeymooning flatware on the cruise ship represent, and what does that metaphor actually say about the “real-life” story?

Um. And aside from all that, there’s also Alexander Hamilton/James Madison slashfic to be found here. Need I say more?

Loving this book is worth the effort it takes to do so. But it does take effort. And there will, if you are diligent, be love.

Highly recommended.

(The images in this post are details from The Squirrel Mother and Other Stories, copyright (c) 2007 Megan Kelso)

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