Feminist Forms: Leaving Realism Behind in New Fiction by Women

"All your working life," asks an exasperated wife, "you've studied these stories. Why?"

She means the stuff of folklore, her husband's academic field, in which most narratives take a turn to the surreal. The man replies that such stories present "a true picture of the world," better than "what we see around us." Ordinary reality, he argues, "isn't any place for heroes." This vexes his wife further. "There are always going to be heroes," she declares. "As long as there are challenges or dangers or injustices." Really, isn't that the whole point of storytelling: the heroes?

The answer proves complicated in Binstead's Safari, an unsettling, splendid novel from the gifted Rachel Ingalls. The wife achieves a magical transcendence—she proves a legendary hero—and happily, her story's now available in the US. The book appeared first in 1983, in England, where the US-born author has lived since the mid-1960s. Yet the novel feels up to the minute. Insofar as the wife pulls off a supernatural escape, overwhelming the limits set by her husband, she fits in neatly with more contemporary protagonists in literary fiction by women. Lately, narratives of self-assertion, in which women throw of old notions of family and romance, have relied more and more on the stuff of folklore.

Ingalls herself, with this latest reissue, falls in with recent American works. Back in 1982, a year before Binstead's Safari, she published the strange and delectable Mrs. Caliban. The novella, a small-press book in the States, drew a rave from John Updike but otherwise suffered neglect. Over time, however, readers were won over by the unlikely romance: neglected housewife meets amphibian monster. The love affair results in fresh freedoms, for the woman, and upon reissue in 2017, the book prompted comparisons with Guillermo del Toro's Shape of Water. Marlon James gushed that it "out-weirds anything written today."

James, however, goes too far. A good many women are weirding neck and neck with Mrs. Caliban. Kelly Link and Amelia Gray, to name just two, work up similar fictions, compelling and enjoyable if hard to define. They gleefully interpolate magical realism with science fiction—or are they combining fantasy with an Orwellian dystopia? The labels slapped on imaginative work never fit especially well, a problem Ingalls herself has acknowledged, noting wryly that, "for a while I was put in the Gothic slot." Nonetheless, Gothic elements such as the madwoman in the attic feature both in her work and that of her younger "weird sisters," likewise muddying genre as they brew up new models of emancipated women.

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New fictions from both Aurelie Sheehan and Sarah Moss, in particular, deserve consideration alongside Binstead's Safari. Neither woman has been around as long as Ingalls, now seventy-eight, but neither is just starting out. Moss's novel Ghost Wall is her fifth to date, and Sheehan's collection of stories is her sixth work. Neither author confines herself to psychological realism, but neither allows the surreal to yield easy solutions either, even as they set their women protagonists free.

Once Into the Night is the latest winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2, with a rousing introduction by Laird Hunt. It collects some fifty-nine short pieces in fewer than 150 pages, and the brevity alone stamps the fiction as unconventional. Yet Sheehan began her career with a couple of relatively ordinary novels, socially acerbic treatments of coming of age. Plainly she's chosen to alter her sensibility this way, producing fiction more in line with Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the New Millennium. The two opening memos, on "Lightness" and "Quickness," could've cited pieces from Once Into the Night. The most extreme case would be "Query...