Published in October 2016, Joel Hans’s “The Boomslang Coup” stitches together not only its central creatures, but a setting, a sense of pace, and a small cast of characters that seem to lead the reader by the hand through a dream—or a nightmare. But like anything else, this atmosphere is a product of intentional craft decisions. This piece where mundanity and unreality meet is fertile ground for the work of analyzing what works, and why, and how.
I Want to Believe!
Certain words get thrown around relatively often regarding the quality of fiction whose most defining characteristic seems to be a lack of definition. I’m talking words like “relatability,” for instance, or “believability.” “I don’t think this is believable,” a reader might offer in response to a character doing something that could be read as out-there, or even, “I just don’t buy it,” about some potentially off-the-wall story element. The sticking point here being obviously that every decision is at the author’s discretion; the only actual factor that determines whether including some specific detail, or having some character say anything at all, is “believable,” is that the author decided to include it in the first place. It can’t be about realism, because the believability question could just as reasonably apply to works of fantasy of science fiction or, as in the case of “The Boomslang Coup,” some version of fabulism/surrealism/absurdism/magical realism—whichever of these fundamentally malleable labels you want to stick to it.
Is the world of “The Boomslang Coup” believable? It’s the story of a girl (Beech) charged with the care of Frankenstein-like animal hybrid “siblings”—with whom she can ostensibly, subliminally converse—at the behest of her absent dad, whose presence is referenced and felt but never really seen. So from a literal standpoint, not a chance. But then neither is there anything believable about Steven Millhauser, Karen Russell, or Hannah Pass, or someone like Ben Marcus who stretches the believability of language itself. I’d argue that when we talk about believability what we’re really talking about is internal consistency, the idea that every craft decision a writer makes when constructing a work of fiction feels of a piece with every other decision, that every detail/action adds up to a singular whole. That all the puzzle pieces fit together to form a clear image. Achieving that kind of consistency, however, is easier said than done, especially when you’re trafficking in Joel Hans’s brand of fabulism.
There are differing schools of thought when it comes to how to introduce an “unbelievable” element into a fictional word in a way that feels consistent. Gabriel García Márquez’s method, famously, was to treat these elements as though they were already inherently believable. His very old man with enormous wings, for instance, isn’t introduced as an angel, as something other-than—he’s just an old man who happens to have great big vulture wings. Millhauser does this, too, often well into the runtime of a story. Borges’s strategy in a piece like “The Aleph” was to treat the fantastical element as inherently unbelievable from the POV of our narrator—until it actually appears before his eyes.
(All this, by the way, can be just as useful in the realm of realist fiction. Details that might otherwise be branded “out of character/place” can by definition only read that way in context, in relation to the details a writer employs to set things up. Drawing a line between the original context and its outcome is often about creating additional context—e.g. how other characters react—or removing context that sets up unwanted expectations. Per Jonathan Culler: “Everything is context-bound, but context is boundless.”)
Hans, by contrast (though he isn’t the first to veer this way), dunks us right in: “My brothers and sisters are always falling apart. They peel at their seams, are always needing more of my love, which keeps them alive.” Right from the get-go, we have no choice but to take this at face value. There’s not enough context yet for a reader to do otherwise. Only when a future detail contradicts what we’ve been presented with would we have a chance to go, “Hang on, that doesn’t track.” Instead, we get this to round out our opening paragraph: “Once, my father said my kisses are made of magic—that they hold the sutures together—but I don’t know what to believe any more. I loop sutures through my siblings’ seams, silence the openings. I deploy a thousand kisses a day, just to be sure.” There’s a lot of weight placed on the phrases “my father said,” and “I don’t know what to believe”—already we’re asked to call into question what we’ve only just accepted as the piece’s reality, but that reality was so bizarre that blurring any sense of objectivity here is actually serving to strengthen its sense of consistency. We even get this a few paragraphs down: “Percy speaks to me not in words but her own catlike mumbles and purrs. My father once said he made my ears different so that I could understand those I’m supposed to care for.” Here, we’re able to see the narrator’s direct, first-person POV experience right alongside that sense of doubt. There’s no way Beech can understand (again from a literal perspective), yet she does, or believes she does. Backed up by the fact that, for unexplained reasons, she can’t understand Boomer, he father’s newest creation, the titular boomslang/donkey hybrid. Our POV, our expository details—all these are as stitched together as Beech’s “siblings,” consistent chiefly in their purposeful raggedness, a mirror of the creatures’ peeling seams.
The Right Details
If you read any of the above quotes and thought, “Boy, that’s sort of hard to picture,” you wouldn’t be out of line. What does it mean, after all, to “silence the openings” of a shoddy suture? How does Beech’s love physically keep a creature alive? There’s something a little Ben Marcus-y about this style, about employing language in such a way that it doesn’t really mean what it means. (How’s that for a trip?) Yet there are enough concrete, physical details here, even in the opening, that we remain grounded in a tangible world of the story. Take the second paragraph: “One day or another my sister Percy needs her eagle’s talons clipped, so I pin her down on the roughed-up hardwood and start in with the garden shears. Her housecat body worms underneath me.” Or this one, later on: “When I step up alongside him and touch his flank he whips around and roars in my direction. Some of his spit gets in my mouth.” These are sensory, visceral. Descriptions like these prioritize physicality and clarity in the same way that others prioritize lyricism.
Some questions that this raises for me: What’s the right balance? How many/what kinds of details are necessary to create a sense of grounding, even in a story that is intentionally unreal? How many lyrical, hyperbolic, or flat-out fanciful turns of phrase can you get away with without the text feeling muddled?
The short, unsatisfying answer is: Well, it depends. In most cases it’s exactly a question of balance. Readers are remarkably good at excusing linguistic gymnastics as long as they fundamentally know what’s going on. As pretty much any writer will tell you, no matter their style, it’s not about including every detail, it’s about including the right details. In most situations, this can mean details that are characterizing, or give you substantive information about the broader setting, or even that are relevant to plot machinations. But of course all this really boils down to details that help the reader grasp what’s going on more generally—sometimes this can mean blocking, what characters look like, etc. But “The Boomslang Coup” isn’t really interested in all that. What it’s interested in, fundamentally, is the emotional reality of this girl who has been left alone by someone who claims to love her more than anything, searching for affection anywhere she can possibly get it, whether it’s from the UPS driver who delivers her father’s creations or the creations themselves. All of which further begs the question, if the kind of clarity a text is interested in is an emotional clarity, how do you bring the reader along for the ride?
Hans does some of this with conventional grounding details. The UPS driver comes down the driveway, we’re watching through the vantage of casement windows, he unloads a comically huge crate, Beech goes outside, where he’s staring at Boomer. We more or less know where everybody is, physically speaking. Which orients us just in time for Boomer’s legs “blurring,” or a blown kiss getting polluted by a truck’s exhaust. Readers’ mileage is always going to very somewhat for details like this, but with a sufficient framework in place (i.e. some sense of grounding), such intangible imagery can serve the piece rather than detract from it. But some of that reader buy-in could also come from language that, while it might obscure physical detail, doesn’t obscure emotion. We’re told that Beech’s mother, for instance, “fell apart long ago because I forgot to love her.” Toward the close, just before Beech and the UPS man sleep together, just before he dies from a dose of boomslang venom, we get this: “All I have is the language of this one person.” These admissions are achingly earnest, and therein is their power. For all the detail the story obscures or ornaments, its heart is right there, floating at the surface for you to see.
Wandering Through a Dream
Despite the purposeful ways Hans keeps us grounded (or doesn’t) the places where I found myself most struck by “The Boomslang Coup” are those that skew the most dreamlike. There’s a constant sense that, despite the POV, we’re floating above the action, only for us to be left by the end with a nebulous impression that something has been irreparably lost, or was never there in the first place. Which is all well and good, but how?
A lot of this perception has to do with how the story handles its clock. For one thing, it’s tough to tell how much time this story takes up, all told. Days? Weeks? Months? There are some clues (multiple deliveries might reasonably take some time) but ultimately no way to be sure. The time jumps we do get come without page breaks, the conventional signifier that we’re moving in either space or time. We go from “All the responsibility he’s leveraged on me aside, I miss the sound of his smiling” to “I go to high school one day a week” the next day without any formal break. Or take the climactic moment with the UPS guy toward the end: “Before he never left that day, he died. Before that, he peeled away my dress and we searched each other for things we didn’t have dictionaries for. When he died, he was seizing from a dose of boomslang venom.” There’s so much time covered here, so many details basically glossed over. But instead of a feeling of confusion, this language creates a feeling of cohesion.
In some ways this brings us back to the question of believability, of internal consistency. By smoothing out the clock, Hans leans away from scraps of context that might cause readers to ask unanswerable questions, essentially the literary equivalent of a montage. “Too much causality, too much plot, will stretch a reader’s credulity,” writes Samuel Ligon in his essay “Punching the Clock.” What he’s talking about are coincidences, but I’d argue coincidences are just another form of handing the reader too much information, setting us up with expectations that can’t reasonably be met. One of the most elegant ways of avoiding that problem is to do exactly what Hans does here: give only just enough detail, and the right details, to leave the reader with the information and impressions you want them to have. No more, no less.
But of course the ultimate benefit of employing these techniques—consistent and thematically resonant unbelievability, careful balance of grounding and lyrical detail, control of time that stitches each moment together, so to speak—to build a dreamlike atmosphere is that you don’t then have to answer every question that could be asked. Will Boomer, in fact, prevent Beech from healing her “siblings”? Will the UPS man’s death have any actual ramifications? Will Beech get a hold of her father? In some ways, none of these questions matter, because the story doesn’t argue that they matter. If we’re wandering through a dream, what matters is not what happens but these: images of animals stitches together and falling apart, the incompleteness of human love, Beech’s utter loneliness, the sound of what might be her father, never able to really connect with her in any meaningful way, breathing on the other end of the line like an animal. The fading impressions we’re left with when we finally wake up.
by Benjamin Van Voorhis