The Art of the Steal: Fiction by Ceridwen Dovey and Valeria Luiselli

Upon the loss of the great writer E. L. Doctorow, the majority of obituaries examined his many literary masterpieces, from The Book of Daniel to his last novel, Andrew’s Brain. Considerably less was written about Doctorow’s decades as a gifted and generous teacher. At New York University’s graduate creative-writing program, I was fortunate to have a chance to study with him, taking his legendary course “The Craft of Fiction.” During this class, Doctorow urged us to read in earnest, explaining that deep readerly engagement was part of the writer’s job, and that the acts of reading and writing were of equal importance. As we discussed some of his favorite authors—from Heinrich von Kleist and Virginia Woolf to Jack Kerouac and Jayne Anne Phillips—he asked: “What can you steal from these writers?” Offering himself up as an example, Doctorow told us that his best-selling Ragtime was an appropriation of and homage to Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas, explaining how he had borrowed the work’s plot and transported several other of the story’s elements to fin de siècle New York City. He encouraged us to be ambitious, to move past our personal borders of experience, time, and place, and to explore the possibilities of literary ventriloquism—to reach far into other people’s lives to construct memorable stories.

This fall, it’s exciting to discover two young female authors, Ceridwen Dovey and Valeria Luiselli, doing just this with their inventive works of fiction, Only the Animals: Stories and The Story of My Teeth, respectively. Both writers demonstrate an impressive range via their protagonists’ distinctive voices: in Dovey’s case, those of ten different animal narrators and, in Luiselli’s, that of an aging auctioneer obsessed with the changing origin stories of his teeth. Previously published works by established and lesser-known writers also influence and, to some degree, shape both narratives. Dovey and Luiselli each take bold, creative risks and succeed in portraying the true nature of empathy in whimsical and melancholy ways.

Beyond their natural storytelling talents, the two writers share literary achievement and a cosmopolitan perspective: Both were named among the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” (Dovey in 2009, and Luiselli more recently, in 2014). Both have life experiences that extend across national boundaries. Dovey was born in South Africa and raised between there and Australia before studying at Harvard and New York University. She now lives in Sydney. Luiselli was born in Mexico City but grew up in many countries (including Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa, and India, among others) and currently makes her home in Harlem, New York.

The stories of Only the Animals, Dovey’s thought-provoking collection, together span more than a century—from 1892 to 2006—and move through a series of significant human conflicts, from the frontier wars of Australia to the Israel–Hezbollah War. Each story is told from the perspective of a different animal that has died during the violence. The book follows her highly praised 2007 novel Blood Kin, a parable-like narrative told largely in the voices of three men employed by a dictator in an unspecified time and place. (It was published in fifteen languages.) Similar to her first book, Dovey’s short stories embrace an allegorical spirit. Given the animal chroniclers, the new work may sound like the literary offspring of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but the impressive collection is something else altogether. Story by story, Dovey pays homage to one author after another—from Colette to Franz Kafka—and, in some cases, seamlessly integrates the intonations and words of respected writers. (For the curious reader, the author provides a comprehensive list of her sources on her website.)

As was true for Doctorow and Ragtime, Dovey isn’t merely borrowing from her literary predecessors. The collection opens with “The Bones...