A Tiny Feast by Chris Adrian, 2009
The magic trick:
Very consciously putting some distance between the reader and the harrowing subject matter – at least at first
Chris Adrian is a medical doctor, with a specialty in pediatrics, so he’s just about the perfect person to write such a story as this – the tale of a young boy battling leukemia.
As you can imagine, it’s a tough read. But Adrian does something interesting on that front. He makes the sick boy’s parents fairies. Like literally they are fairies. And they’re funny. They are argumentative and easily annoyed. There is a lot of comedy there.
As a result, the reader gets some distance from the harrowing subject matter. We can ease our way into this world without being overwhelmed by sadness. Eventually, of course, those defense mechanisms fall away, and the story becomes what I can only imagine is a surprisingly accurate representation of a family’s cancer journey. But at least there are fairies.
And that’s quite a trick on Adrian’s part.
The selection:
“This place is so ugly,” Titania said. “Can anything be done about that?” She was talking to the oncology social worker, one of a stream of visiting strangers who came to the room, and a woman who had described herself as a person to whom one might address problems or questions that no one else could solve or answer. “Nonmedical things,” she had said. “You know—everything else!”
“But you’ve made the room just lovely,” the woman said. Her name was Alice or Alexandra or Antonia. Titania had a hard time keeping track of all the mortal names, except for Beadle and Blork, but those were distinctive names, and actually rather faerielike. Alice gestured expansively around the room, not seeing what was actually there. She saw paper stars hanging from the ceiling, and cards and posters on the wall, and a homey bedspread upon the mattress, but faeries had come to carpet the room with grass, to pave the walls with stone and set them with jewels, and to blow a cover of clouds to hide the horrible suspended ceiling. And the bedspread was no ordinary blanket but the boy’s own dear Beastie, a flat headless creature of soft fur that loved him like a dog and tried to follow him out of the room whenever they took him away for some new test or procedure.
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