The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr, 2002
The magic trick:
A Western story set far away from the West
I possibly SSMT’s hottest take yet, I will say that this story should be better than it is.
Yes, it won an O. Henry Award.
Yes, its author would go on to win the Pulitzer.
No, I’ve never published a sentence of fiction.
And yet, and yet! Here I am calling Anthony Doerr out!
This story got on my nerves. It is so close to being a masterpiece. Many, many interesting and dramatic things happen. There are multiple relationships examined. The setting – isolated from but still interacting with the modern western world – lends the whole thing a timeless quality. There are many passages of beautiful description. And the author demonstrates a crazy level of knowledge for something very specific (in this case, shells).
But somehow despite all those admirable qualities, the story is just a slog. It starts in a strange place in the narrative. The shell collector’s son is an incredibly flat character. The shell collector himself sucks energy out of the story and never fully comes to life off the page.
At one point, the collector marvels at how Hollywood will probably make a movie out of his story. He lists the various plot points they’ll likely highlight, and reading them I was reminded, “Oh yeah, that happened and then that happened and that happened too. Wow, this has been a crazy story! …. Then why am I so bored, counting the pages until it’s over?”
Because it’s a rambling mess of a story that is overlong and lopsided and repetitive!
Anyway… clearly there are many magic tricks present, nonetheless. Just look at that list of all the good characteristics I noted above.
I guess I’ll single out the setting as a quick item a writer might consider stealing. It’s remote and mostly devoid of technology. The shell collector lives only with his dog in a small house on the coast of Kenya. It gives the story an old-fashioned, classic feel; it also makes the themes feel more essential. Away from the mundane noise of modern America, for instance, the story’s ideas can breathe.
And that’s quite a trick on Doerr’s part.
The selection:
“Here is what you came to see,” he announced, and pulled the snail – a cone – from its collapsing tunnel. Even now its poisoned proboscis was nosing forward, searching him out. The Jims waded noisily over.
“This is a geography one,” he said. “It eats fish.”
“That eats fish?” one of the Jims asked. “But my pinkie’s bigger.”
“This animal,” said the shell collector, dropping it into his bucket, “has twelve kinds of venom in its teeth. It could paralyze you and drown you right here.”
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