Slowly reading No Love Lost, a buffet of novellas by Ingalls. I came to this book having read Mrs. Caliban and Binstead's Safari, both of which I love, so I'm backing up before I get to the first two novellas in No Love Lost. One trick of talking about Ingalls' work is not ruining the thrill that makes her work so satisfying, that sensation of discovery alongside her characters.
Mrs. Caliban: a short novel about a housewife, Dorothy, and her affair with a sea monster, Larry. I always refer to Larry as a fish-man or frog-man and in my mind he's always different, but always an aquatic lover, emerged and escaped from the waves of a scientific research institute tank, the threat of him gracing radio airwaves, his physical form manifesting in Dorothy's kitchen. They talk. They fuck. They eat avocados. The daily and mundane meets the extraordinary and stays mundane with something wild. It's not an obliteration of Dorothy's whole daily life, but something weird infusing her days and casting her life in a new light. It's beautiful, bittersweet, and its bite-sized length is a marvel in and of itself for the emotional landscape this book presents.
Binstead's Safari: a woman, Millie, joins her self-important academic husband on a journey, first to London—where she gets a life-changing makeover—and then on a safari, where she thrives. So another story of a transformer woman, this time outside home and homeland. (Part of Ingalls' appeal for me is that seismic change happens to her characters whose setting remains unchanged and those who travel far distances. You can wake up a new person in a Rachel Ingalls story, no matter whether you're at home or further than you've ever traveled.) But Binstead! Lion folklore. Quaint landscape paintings. Hot air balloon sexscapades. A lion god. I'll stop there; the thrill should be yours. But coming to this one a year-ish after first reading Mrs. Caliban, I was delighted to spend longer with Ingalls' mind and witness her work across a longer novel.
The novellas (thus far!):
Blessed Art Thou: a monk makes it with the angel Gabriel. The result is a pregnancy that jostles the monastery. Gender swapping. Medical tension, specifically related to pregnancy. Reckonings with faith. This one called to mind the short fiction of George Saunders, some Wells Tower. Short, swift, yet expansive.
In the Act: people vs. people; people vs. machines. No relationship feels sacred in this one. A woman discovers the product of her husband's secret hobby and holds it for a rebellious ransom. Desire, engineered lust, human relationships—to each other, to themselves, to technology. More Caliban than Binstead, which is to say this story has us home instead of wandering (geographically).
There's a note in my planner reading: Ingalls’ writing is sex and death and life and work. Something I jotted down fast on a lunch break. Not a comprehensive assessment of what inhabits her books. And maybe it’s something you could say for many writers—perhaps all writers whose work endures—but the journeys she takes us on were totally her own, peerless, beautifully weird.
