The Leap by Louise Erdrich, 1990
The magic trick:
Describing extraordinary events with the realistic detail usually reserved for the mundane
“The Leap” does something interesting. It describes in great detail two acts so extraordinary that you would have to assume that they are imagined. There’s no way the author has this much real-life knowledge of lightning and fire and trapeze acrobatics, right? Yet, here they are; scenes described with the kind of detail you’d get in a hyper-realistic Updike story. Remarkable.
And that’s quite a trick on Erdrich’s part.
The selection:
That afternoon, as the anticipation increased, as Mr. and Mrs. Avalon tied sparkling strips of cloth onto each other’s face and as they puckered their lips in mock kisses, lips destined “never again to meet,” as one long breathless article put it, the wind rose, miles off, wrapped itself into a cone, and howled. There came a rumble of electrical energy, drowned out by the sudden roll of drums. One detail not mentioned by the press, perhaps unknown—Anna was pregnant at the time, seven months and hardly showing, her stomach muscles were that strong. It seems incredible that she would work high above the ground when any fall could be so dangerous, but the explanation—I know from watching her go blind—is that my mother lives comfortably in extreme elements. She is one with the constant dark now, just as the air was her home, familiar to her, safe, before the storm that afternoon.
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