Reading Note: Titania
In “A Tiny Feast,” Chris Adrian’s story in this week’s New Yorker, Titania and Oberon are obliged to spend a great deal of time in the pediatric cancer ward of a San Francisco hospital when their latest changeling, whom they call, simply, “Boy,” develops leukemia. Or perhaps it’s something worse. In order to fit in, the fairies assume the mortal guises of Trudy, a hairdresser, and Bob, a plantsman.
“But you’ve made the room just lovely,” the woman said. Her name was Alice or Alexandra or Antonia. Titania had a hard time keeping trace of all the mortal names, except for Beadle and Blork, but those were distinctive names, and actually rather faerielike. Alice gestured expansively around the room, not seeing what was actually there. She saw paper stars hanging from the ceiling, and cards and posters on the wall, and a homey bedspread upon the mattress, but faeries had come to carpet the room with grass, to pave the walls with stone and set them with jewels, and to blow a cover of clouds to hide the horrible suspended ceiling. And the bedspread was no ordinary blanket but the boy’s own dear Beastie, a flat headless creature of soft fur that loved him like a dog and tried to follow him whenever they took him away for some new test or procedure.
To say that the grief of losing a child to cancer has deluded a hairdresser named Trudy into thinking that she is the lead fairy out of Midsummer Night’s Dream would be crushingly heavy-handed. “What’s really going on here?” is not the question that Mr Adrian, also a Fellow in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at UC San Francisco, wants us to be asking. I don’t believe that he wants us to be asking any questions. He has told us: a mother’s child is dying. And he tells us with all the grace of his story’s conceit.
There is one question that itches with fictions that rest on a kind of madness: is the story a puzzle, or is it a fantasia? Can it be deconstructed and “solved”? Is it, in other words, an allegory? Or has the author tracked his imagination through the underbrush of possibility? My approach is a muddle: if I like something well enough, I simply re-read it from time to time, on the understanding that the story will become more clearly itself, whatever that might be.