The Life of Magical Realism in Modern American Literature

In classes on literary genres, the accolades for brilliant magical realism generally go to Hispanic authors. Books such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate are certainly worth the praise. In fact, these two books are the ones that caused me as a college student and beyond to begin looking under covers of new books for the enchantment that can only come from a well-spun tale woven into a tapestry of magical realism.

During the same year that I was first introduced to the Latin American version of magical realism, I also discovered the writing of Cynthia Ozick. Above all a journalist and essayist, even Ozick’s non-fiction leaped off the page for me, coming to life in a way I only wish my own writing did. But then—then the magic happened. There is little subtlety in Ozick’s writing, and that moment when I discovered magic—real, could-not-happen-on-a-day-in-my-life magic—coexisting alongside my own world in The Messiah of Stockholm changed my understanding of genius for good.

I continued to read Ozick’s work and found the magic of The Shawl in its lonely existence within the world of the Holocaust. I sat entranced as I followed the adventures of a bookish Jewish woman from New York in The Puttermesser Papers. The realities in Ozick’s worlds are as real as the apartment around me as I write this, as real as the Twin Towers that once loomed over the city she loves, and as real as the planes that wiped them forever from New York City’s skyline. Her magic, however, is palpable. Golems grow to gargantuan proportions. A tiny thing takes on a life outside this dimension but in such realistic measure that the reader must believe; and when Ozick’s tale is spun and the magic tapestry has rolled out before us in all its stark glory, we will obsessively check the Times or the library shelves for something new from this amazing mind. We must find the corners of our world where magic lurks, and it seems that only Ozick is capable of pointing out where next it can be found.

I did not stop opening book covers after the discovery of a single author. Leif Enger’s first book, Peace Like a River, brought magic into my own reality. It describes the American Midwest and the Pentecostals that live here in such vivid color that I felt as though I was living parts of my childhood over again. When the supernatural intervened and a meal of chowder multiplied to feed an unexpected guest in our hero’s humble home, I harbored no disbelief. Even the healing hands of the narrator’s father became as much a part of the scenery to me as the gravel roads or the pale winter sky.

While Enger is not as prolific a writer as many who have dipped their pens into the inkwell of American magical realism, he is certainly one to watch. His second book, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, has received much national attention.

I came late to the discovery of Chuck Palahniuk’s books, which caught my attention well after the successful release of the movie adaptation of his book Fight Club. More prolific than Enger and more steeped in pop-culture magic than Ozick, Palahniuk can spin surrealism into an ordinary American landscape so skillfully that only toward the end of his tales, when the magic has turned inside out, when we see the characters he paints for us as what they truly are, can the readers realize what magic was in play within the reality of Palahniuk’s truth.

My first read and current favorite book by Palahniuk is Lullaby, set in a uniquely American town where someone has discovered a book, more specifically a particular edition of a book that contains a culling song. Real grief, real crime and a lullaby with deadly powers are mixed together in a recipe for disaster that has such solid foundations in the American experience that belief is eminent.

The insertion of the supernatural, the surreal, perhaps the impossible into a familiar scene catapults a literary work from being simply a cultural piece into the wonderful world of magical realism. Each author who attempts it must carefully craft the juxtaposition of magic to its surroundings. The break from the expected must be congruent enough with the tale to justify its existence and yet surprising enough to capture the imagination of the reader.

A break from the expected, the point in the plot known by authors and critics as “the turn,” separates a great read from the average piece of literature. In magical realism, the introduction of the supernatural into a familiar scene moves the action to a new level. Truths can be explored that readers may not be willing to entertain in an entirely familiar setting. Conversely, the familiarity of the setting keeps the shock of the surreal to a minimum. Suspension of disbelief is aided as the author carefully sets new rules for this familiar, but altogether different, universe.

The old standbys of genre fiction, mysteries, science fiction, romance novels, and westerns, will continue to come and go on the shelves of bookstores and libraries everywhere. Certainly a few of them will stand the test of time and achieve status as “classics.” But the integrity and intrigue of magical realism will continue to make impressions farther, longer and deeper than any nickel paperback from a Harlequin collection ever did.