The American novelist Michael Cunningham has long been interested in the retelling of stories. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1998, The Hours, he reimagined the narrative of Virginia Woolf's modernist masterpiece, Mrs Dalloway (1925). More recently, The Snow Queen (2014) was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale of the same name.
This interest in revisiting existing works of literature comes from a sense of dissatisfaction and curiosity: Cunningham is magnetised by what stories leave out, unsettled by the nature of their endings. What, he asks, are we not being told? And what if there is life beyond what we think of as a story’s final page?
It is these questions that animate Cunningham's latest work (and first collection of short stories), A Wild Swan and Other Tales. This slender volume – beautifully illustrated by the Japanese artist, Yuko Shimizu – is composed of 11 short fictions, most of them based on, or inspired by, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. "Her Hair", for example, is a version of Rapunzel; "Beasts", a version of Beauty and the Beast; "Jacked" of Jack and the Beanstalk; "Little Man" of Rumpelstiltskin.
As is suggested by their wised-up, slightly trendy titles, these tales carry more than a trace of modernity. Accordingly, the imagery and motifs we associate most readily with fairytales – remote cottages, dark forests, strange spells, sudden metamorphoses, imperilled damsels, wicked stepmothers, strange trials – sit alongside graphic depictions of sex and violence. In “Jacked”, Cunningham’s take on ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’for example, we are furnished with descriptions of a giant and his wife “each holding aloft one of Jack’s testicles on a toothpick before popping them into their mouths”.
These embellishments can prove effective in the context of stories whose subject matter is already so dark and unsettling. But Cunningham’s sense of literary decorum is limited. The presence of more specific elements of modern life – pension plans, health insurance, investments, adoption agencies – robs his imagined worlds of potency, as does his tendency to have his characters slip into registers of speech (“This is awkward, isn’t it?”) that are at odds with the atmosphere of the stories they inhabit. Cunningham does not need such heavy-handedness to lend his fictions contemporary resonance.
Nor does he need to try as hard as he does to encourage the reader to reflect upon the discomfiting moral questions that these stories raise. It is not that he breaks the supposedly sacrosanct rule of fiction writing by telling when he should be showing. It is that he adopts the clumsier tactic of addressing questions to the reader directly. “Were you relieved”, he asks us, the addressees of “Crazy Old Lady”, “when they lifted you up (you weighed almost nothing by then) and shoved you into the oven?” And at the opening of “Dis. Enchant.”: “Please ask yourself. If you could cast a spell on the ludicrously handsome athlete and the lingerie model he loves … would you?”
In the best of these stories such questions do at least go unanswered; in the worst they result in pieties that carry almost nothing of the moral radicalism of the original tales on which they are based. “Little Man”, for example, concludes with the boring suggestion that lives together can be improved when lived in a spirit of compromise and cooperation. And the protagonists of “Beasts” – numbingly well-adjusted examples of the modern couple who talk as if they have emerged from a decade-long course of therapy – are used to offer a parable about the possibility that true monstrosity might lurk not in the form of the beast, but in us.
There is nothing wrong with these kinds of messages, but the way in which Cunningham delivers them leaves you longing for something more uncertain, more stimulating, more dangerous. Something more like the stories we all know, and love, already.
Matthew Adams is a London-based reviewer who writes for the TLS, the Spectator and the Literary Review.