Loading summary
Transcript203 lines
- [00:01]
Podcast Host/Announcer
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.
- [00:23]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
This New Yorker podcast is supported by the Audible original Pride and Prejudice, an intimate performance that'll have you falling in love with the Jane Austen classic all over again. Pride and Prejudice stars a full cast, including Marisa Abella as Elizabeth Bennett and Harris Dickinson as Mr. Darcy, plus Marianne ja Batiste, Will Poulter, Bill Nye and Glenn Close as Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Whether you're fresh to Pride and Prejudice or want to revisit a cherished favorite, you're in for a new and delightful listening experience. Dare to fall in love Listen to the new Pride and prejudice@audible.com JaneAusten.
- [01:06]
Karen Russell
This.
- [01:07]
Deborah Treisman
Is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker Magazine. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month we're going to hear the Stone by Louise Erdrich, which appeared in the New Yorker in September of 2019.
- [01:26]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
One night as she lay in the hot water, she became acutely aware of the stone. The smooth, empty scoops in its face seemed profoundly interested in her. A gentle, thrilling ripple spread through her body.
- [01:41]
Deborah Treisman
The story was chosen by Karen Russell.
- [01:44]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
Who'S the author of six books of.
- [01:45]
Deborah Treisman
Fiction, including Orange World and Other Stories and the novel the Antidote, which was published earlier this year.
- [01:52]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Hi Karen, Hi Deborah.
- [01:55]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
So, not so long ago, maybe a year ago, Louise Erdrich read and talked.
- [01:59]
Deborah Treisman
About your story Haunting Olivia on this podcast.
- [02:02]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
And now you are reading and talking about a story of hers. Can you tell me a bit about the affinity you two have for each other?
- [02:10]
Karen Russell
Yeah, I'm happy to. And I feel some anxiety too, because I love Louise and am aware that I just won't have time to fully honor that love on this podcast. She's been someone, she's so important to me long before I met her. You know, I was reading her novels. My best friend gave me the Antelope.
- [02:30]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Wife when we were in graduate school.
- [02:31]
Karen Russell
Together, and we're still sort of pacing the docks anytime a new Louise story or book comes out. I have the privilege of occasionally getting to text with Louise, which is such a delight. And this story feels I could have chosen any of her stories I truly love them all. But I think I have a particular affection for this one because she had texted me. I had just written something for the New Yorker about my own relationship to.
- [02:57]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Other than human nature, to sort of.
- [02:58]
Karen Russell
Flowers and trees and my own maybe peculiar rituals around that. And in that text she said, a stone is a heavy secret, which later.
- [03:06]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Appeared in this story.
- [03:07]
Karen Russell
I was massively pregnant at that time, kind of lumbering around my neighborhood and then I listened to this story kind of with my newborn daughter strapped to my chest. And it felt a little bit like the story. You know, this stone keeps coming in and out of view. Sometimes it's hidden, sometimes it's visible, but it really retains a kind of opacity and mystery. The story itself is like that. The woman in the story is like that. I think we're all like that to a certain extent. You know, kind of walking mysteries.
- [03:38]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
And do you think that you and Louise Erdrich share a kind of writing voice or tone or approach to storytelling?
- [03:48]
Karen Russell
You know, I've learned a lot from Louise and I think one thing that she does that only she can do, right. I think she's just one of our greatest writers and there's no one like Louise. But I think one thing I've learned from her is how to hold multiple tones. How to write a story that's short but contains many time signatures. This is a story that tells a woman's entire life and it also distills 1.1 billion years into a story that's.
- [04:18]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Under 10 pages, which is really quite sorcerous. I mean, she can do that clause to clause.
- [04:23]
Karen Russell
I think something about her multi voiced novels that also include just her whole approach to the living world where it's.
- [04:31]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Not just the static backdrop for human.
- [04:34]
Karen Russell
Dramas, but I mean, every, you know, it's a real wondrous sort of ever fluctuating acknowledgment of kind of the ways that we're Internet.
- [04:45]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Yeah, yeah.
- [04:46]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
And this, this story, as we'll see, is both about a person and about a stone, an object. And it's hard. I think after the story we'll, we'll discuss who you think is the central character here.
- [05:02]
Karen Russell
Yeah, I would love to. And one other thing I should say about Louise is she's so funny. I sometimes feel like. Yeah, I just want to lay a little of the stress there because there's so much tonal complexity in every sentence of what she writes. And I think she gets at the deep, funny sadness and strangeness of being alive.
- [05:23]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
Absolutely. Let's listen to the story now and then. We'll talk some more after the reading. Now here's Karen Russell reading the Stone by Louise Erdrich.
- [05:36]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
THE Stone her family drove north every summer to stay at.
- [05:42]
Karen Russell
The end of an island in cold.
- [05:43]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Lake Superior, and it was there that she found the stone. It wasn't on the beach, where stones are usually found, but in the woods. She was wandering in the brush behind the cabin, uncurling ferns, kicking up leaves, snapping the heads off mushrooms. She sat down beside a birch clump, and after a few moments her neck prickled. She had the distinct feeling that someone was staring at her. Looking around, she saw the stone. It was black and rounded, nestled in the crotch of the birch clump. Water had scoured two symmetrical hollows into the stone, giving it an owlish look, or a blind look, or anyway, some quality that was oddly attractive. At first she was startled and a little spooked, but then she ran her hand over the stone and it felt like a normal stone. It was about half the size of a human skull and very smooth. The girl's mother called to her, and she got up holding the stone and carried it into the cabin. At first she put it beside her pallet in the bedroom she shared with her siblings, but then, thinking that her brothers or her sister might take the stone, she tucked it right at the bottom of her sleeping bag. That night her feet rested on the cool curve of the stone and she brushed the smooth eye sockets with her toes.
- [07:07]
Karen Russell
After a month the family got ready.
- [07:09]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
To return to the city, and the girl put the stone in her backpack.
- [07:13]
Karen Russell
Which she kept at her feet for.
- [07:14]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
The whole long drive. She did not let anyone else handle her pack, and when she got home she went straight to her room, took the stone out, and set it on.
- [07:24]
Karen Russell
Her nightstand, where there was also a.
- [07:26]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Digital clock and a pile of books. She was old enough now to say goodnight to her mother and father before entering her room. They did not sit by her bed to read to her anymore. She took her own laundry downstairs as well. Her mother was not the type to go through her children's rooms often, or to clean for them, so school had started by the time her mother noticed the stone. She mentioned it at dinner. That rock by your bed looks like it came from the island. Did you find it there? The girl nodded, but her mother's remark gave her an uneasy feeling, and that night she put the stone at the bottom of her least used drawer. There was a boy named Vic who.
- [08:10]
Karen Russell
Often acted up in order to get attention.
- [08:13]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
One day during art class, the girl felt A little tug at the end of her ponytail and looked around to see that Vic had used his art scissors to snip off a piece of her dark hair. He dangled the lock from his fingers and grinned at her, but she said nothing. She was frozen, staring at her hair. He made a move to hide the hair, but she found her voice and told him to drop it. She snatched the lock as it left his fingers and balled it up in her fist. At this point, the teacher noticed that something was going on and asked the girl what was in her hand. When the teacher saw the hair, she.
- [08:47]
Karen Russell
Said that cutting your own hair was.
- [08:49]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
The sort of behavior most children had outgrown long ago, and she would have to write a note to her parents. Her mother was mystified. Why did you do that? Her father lectured her about the beauty of hair. That night she put the little clump of severed hair into one of the empty hollows in the face of the stone. As soon as she'd done this, she was flooded with a sense of peace and relief. The entire incident ceased to matter, though she had been terribly upset by it before. She breathed out and laughed as she closed the drawer. It was nothing at all after that. Whenever something happened to upset her, the girl would go to the stone. She would sit on the bed with the stone in her lap, stroking it until her agitation subsided. As she got older, in the most difficult of times to calm herself, she would take the stone into the bathroom with her and set it on the edge of the tub while she soaked. One night, as she lay in the hot water, she became acutely aware of the stone. The smooth, empty scoops in its face seemed profoundly interested in her. A gentle, thrilling ripple spread through her body.
- [10:02]
Karen Russell
After a while, she took the stone.
- [10:03]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Into the water with her and held it on her chest, then slid it down her body until it rested heavily between her legs. There was the weight and the pressure of the stone and the heat of the water. She put her hand on the stone and pushed against it. Then she put the stone back on the edge of the tub and closed her eyes. The boy Vic, made the varsity basketball team. In fact, he was a starter, and the most popular girls followed him home. One night, however, he called the girl and asked her to go out with him. She did. They went to a movie, and in the darkness he took her hand. His palms sweat unpleasantly, but she did not move her hand, although she wanted to. Later he drove her home in his family car, which had a child's car seat in the back and smelled of peanuts and other food eaten while driving. He parked the car outside her house and bent toward her. His breath was hot and he panted like a dog, she thought. But she put up with the kissing. He took a strand of her hair between his fingers and whispered something in her ear. He said that she was different from all the other girls, more loyal because she'd never told on him for cutting her hair with his art scissors. She, too, had never forgotten the incident. Gently she tugged her hair from his fingers. She got out of the car, walked into the house, and called out to her parents that she was home. She was the oldest of four children, and the others were asleep. Her parents slept downstairs. The house was quiet. Something rustled in the drawer where she kept the stone. She opened the drawer quickly, but there was only the stone, its eye sockets calm. Everything was understood. She slept that night with the stone beside her, and every night after that, too. Before she went to college, the girl would hide the stone immediately upon rising so that nobody in her family would notice it. But in college there was no need. She had a single room, and anyone who noticed the stone on her pillow considered it an interesting, even artistic, sort of sleeping companion. Much better, for instance, than the childish stuffed animals that so many girls affected, or the giant stuffed footballs or beer kegs that could be bought at the college bookstore. But one girl saw the stone and thought it a pretentious thing to do. Sleeping with a stone. How artsy. Fartsy. There was some envy, perhaps, of a girl so self sufficient, though pleasant, smart, musical, organized, sociable, that all she needed to sleep with was a smooth black rock. Basalt, the girl corrected whenever her stone was mentioned, which the other girl, Mariah was her name, found so infuriating that one night she picked up the stone and carried it off, just stole it. She put the stone on her highest bookshelf, above her bed and waited to see what would happen. That night the stone fell off the shelf and struck the bone around her eye, causing an orbital fracture and maybe a concussion.
- [13:13]
Karen Russell
As she forgot where she was and.
- [13:15]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Could not speak for several hours during the chaos of the incident, the girl picked up her stone, tucked it under her blouse, and carried it back to her room Again. She had to hide it. She kept the stone hidden for a long time as she continued her education, perfecting her musical skills. She became so proficient at the piano that she gave concerts and was hired by an orchestra in a large city. Now she carried the stone to every rehearsal in a leather bag and set it beside the piano. She carried it to Every concert as well. She became known for this eccentricity, for.
- [13:53]
Karen Russell
Sweeping on stage in an elegant low.
- [13:55]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Necked black velvet gown with a black leather bag, which she deposited beside the piano before she played. And then one evening, years later, the black bag was not with her. She was such a remote and yet vulnerable person that nobody wanted to question her. But there was certainly some curiosity. The bag did not return, and it was guessed that the orchestra director had at last forbidden it. People forgot. The woman had no other peculiar habits. Her playing was the same as always, perhaps a bit improved. What had happened was that the stone and she had quarreled. Or perhaps that is not exactly the right word. It began in the bathtub one night, right after she lifted the stone, as usual, to the edge of the tub and closed her eyes. Her hand was perhaps too relaxed. She dropped the stone on her knee. Tears sprang to her eyes, not so much from hurt as from betrayal, and she lifted the stone out of the water roughly and shook it. Then, rising from the bath, she smashed the stone down on the bathroom floor. Basalt is hard, but so is ceramic tile. It all depends on the angle of impact. The bathroom floor was only chipped, but a piece the size of a baby's fist sheared off the stone, destroying its strange symmetry. The spell was broken. It was like falling out of love. As she had before. The woman put the stone, now in two pieces, into a drawer she rarely used. Then she dialed the number of a man who had been hounding her for months. They married. She tried to pretend that she was not a virgin, but he could easily tell and was inexpressibly moved. Her piano playing was now filled with such emotion, in addition to her precision and clarity, that she was invited to tour Europe. She took her husband and left her stone behind. A stone is, in its own way, a living thing, not a biological being, but one with a history far beyond our capacity to understand or even imagine. Basalt is a volcanic rock composed of augite and sometimes plagioclase and magnetite, which says nothing. The wave worn piece of basalt that the woman had slept with for more than a decade was thrown from a rift in the earth 1.1 billion years ago, which still says nothing. Before she broke it and dumped it at the bottom of a drawer, the stone had been broken time and again. It had been rolled smooth by water and the action of sand. Because of its strange shape, it had been picked up by several human beings in the course of the past 10,000 years. It had been buried with one until a tree had devoured the bones and pulled the stone back out of the ground. It had been kept by a woman who revered it as a household spirit and filled its eyes with sweet grass. It had been shoved off a dock, lifted back up with a shovel, deposited in a heap. It had surfaced in a girl's left hand. A stone is a thought that the earth develops over in human time. It is a living thing to some cultures and a dead thing to others. This one had been called Nimishumis or my grandfather, and other names too. The woman had not named the stone. She had thought that naming the stone would be an insult to its ineffable gravity. And yet once she had broken it, she set it casually in a drawer with old belts, unmatched socks, pilled sweaters, and stretched out bras. She had left it there and gone off with a man named Ferdinand, who'd always hated his name and went by Ted. Ted could feel her pulling away from him gradually and so gently that it was a long time before he understood that while he'd been adjusting to each tiny incremental motion, she'd been shifting entirely. By the time he saw things clearly, she had turned her back on him. It wasn't on purpose. She didn't know that she was doing it. He couldn't point to any evidence. In their day to day life, she was never unkind. She was always attentive, thoughtful, even loving. But there was a glassy distraction. He could feel it, though he could not describe it in a way that made sense. By this time her concerts were few and far between, and she taught at a local institute for music. She and Ted had moved back to.
- [18:31]
Karen Russell
The city and inhabited the same apartment.
- [18:33]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Now a condominium, half of an old house in a bucolic part of town. There was a large yard with plenty of birds, a nearby park.
- [18:42]
Karen Russell
What should have been a pleasant life.
- [18:44]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
However, became painful because of this invisible distance. It took a few more years, but eventually Ted understood that he didn't want to live with a simulacrum of intimacy. He left and the woman wept over him until at last, to restore her balance, she decided to clean the house and open the drawer where she'd put the two pieces of the stone. There are glues that can join stone to stone so well that the seam can hardly be detected, and the woman used such a glue to fit the stone back together. This was one thing that had not happened to the stone before. Now only the thinnest line told the story. The woman placed the stone on a sunny kitchen sill and felt so well that she began to cook a nourishing dinner for herself. She chopped fresh basil and garlic as much as she wanted and dripped olive oil into a saucepan. Then she put the stone in the sink and and poured olive oil over it as well. The pores of the stone soaked up the oil. Whenever the stone looked dry. From then on, she oiled it. When the stone looked bored, she carried it to the window so that it could watch what was happening at the bird feeder. At night, when she settled in the golden light of her reading lamp, she placed the stone beside her on an antique piece of embroidered linen. She became very old in this comforting life and in the last few years divested herself of many possessions so that her niece and nephew, of whom she was fond, would not have much to go through after she was dead. She was lucky enough to die when an aneurysm ruptured in her sleep with the stone beside her. As the blood seeped into her brain, she dreamed that she had entered a new episode of time in which she and the stone would become the same. Through the endless repetition and decay of all things in the universe, molecules that had existed in her body would be joined with the stone's molecules over and over in age after age. Flesh would become stone and stone become flesh, and someday they would meet in the mouth of a bird.
- [21:00]
Deborah Treisman
That was Karen Russell reading the Stone by Louise Erdrich. The story appeared in the New Yorker in September of 2019 and will be included in Erdrich's collection, Python's Kiss, which comes out next March.
- [21:15]
Tyler Foggatt
If you're a reader, or even an aspirational reader, I hope you'll join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker.
- [21:21]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and, and how we got here.
- [21:26]
Karen Russell
And because we're culture critics, we just.
- [21:28]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Love to go back to the text.
- [21:31]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
Yes.
- [21:31]
Tyler Foggatt
So if books are for you, Critics at Large just might be for you as well.
- [21:35]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:44]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
So, Karen, let's go back to the question of who or what the story is about. We get the narrative, the full narrative of this girl, then woman's life. But we also get the stone's history and life story in a way. So what would you say is the sort of emotional center of the story?
- [22:07]
Karen Russell
I think what's wonderful about so many.
- [22:09]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Of Louise's stories is it's hard to.
- [22:10]
Karen Russell
Really identify one protagonist. I sometimes feel frustrated with fiction that can feel a little bit claustrophobically attuned to a single consciousness. And this is really interesting. You know, it's grounded in scientific fact. It's a realist tale in many ways, but it also has this mythic quality. The woman is never named. The stone is never named. I know in her interview with you, she mentioned that they both have a kind of elemental quality we learn about, like Hot Breath Vic and Vindictive Mariah Ted, which I think is so funny, is just whatever feels kind of flat footed in this story about kind of the sublime rotations of the earth that produce this stone. And then, you know, here's your husband Ferdinand, who goes by Ted. But we never. There's something equally freighted, maybe, about the respect that this story has for both woman and stone.
- [23:11]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Yeah.
- [23:12]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
I mean, it's interesting because the stone did have a name at some point. Someone called it my grandfather in the Ojibwe language. And yet for this character, the woman, she feels it would be sort of an insult to the stone to give it a name.
- [23:29]
Karen Russell
I think Louise excels at writing a.
- [23:32]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Story where multiple interpretations are possible.
- [23:35]
Karen Russell
So you could see the stone maybe as just a screen for this woman's projection, if you want to.
- [23:41]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [23:41]
Karen Russell
A kind of mirror. But I think the way that it's written, you know, it really allows for the stone to have its own kind of autonomous existence. And I was teaching this story, I taught this class about writing other than human nature. And we talked for a while about that paragraph and its placement. You could almost imagine a story without that paragraph at all, which. Where we hear about the stone's kind of creation and its many different identities.
- [24:13]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Right.
- [24:13]
Karen Russell
The kinds of meanings that it accretes and then sort of sheds as it moves under the surface. And quite literally, you know. But I can't imagine it would be a lesser story.
- [24:26]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [24:26]
Karen Russell
Without that sort of huge dilation in the very center. So I think that kind of paradoxical compression and expansion that happens in this paragraph and also its acknowledgement.
- [24:38]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [24:39]
Karen Russell
Which is funny to me. It's how I feel.
- [24:41]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [24:42]
Karen Russell
When there's the scale that is just quite at the edge of what we can grasp.
- [24:46]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [24:47]
Karen Russell
This wave worn piece of basalt that the woman had slept with for more than a decade was thrown from a rift in the earth 1.1 billion years ago, which still says nothing.
- [24:58]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Yeah, yeah.
- [24:59]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
I mean, I guess when you first read the story, as you were following from the beginning, you hadn't got to the stone story yet. What did you think of the role of the stone in this woman's life? Do you think of it as an active being, an active presence.
- [25:23]
Karen Russell
You know, I think that that's really.
- [25:25]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Deliberately left open for us.
- [25:27]
Karen Russell
You know, I'm not sure that I, as a reader, I certainly, in, like, a court of law, wouldn't blame the stone for concussing Mariah, you know, but that is a really. I mean, there's something. I guess that's what I mean about the way that even though this is a realist tale, there's even in the construction of the syntax, right. There's something that can feel fable like, or almost like a fairy tale in the way that the stone does seem to have, right. This sort of mysterious agency. Certainly it's not just, you know, a paperweight, right. It's playing an active role, a dynamic role in the shape of the woman's life. It outlasts Ted. It outlasts Ted.
- [26:12]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
It outlasts everyone.
- [26:13]
Karen Russell
It outlasts everyone. And I was thinking, too, you know, I wrote down this quote. Cause I felt like it said something that I was having a hard time articulating. It's Flannery o' Connor from Mystery and Manners. She says, speaking of the wooden leg and her own story. If you want to say that the wooden leg is a symbol, you can say that, but it is a wooden leg first. And as a wooden leg, it is absolutely necessary to the story. It has its place on the literal.
- [26:38]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Level of the story, but it operates.
- [26:40]
Karen Russell
In depth as well as on the surface. It increases the story in every direction.
- [26:45]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
And this is essentially the way a story escapes being short.
- [26:51]
Karen Russell
And I just thought that was. I mean, also just. There's something beautiful about the stone's literal movement, right? From, like, born of fire and, like, the core of the earth to the surface and back again. I mean, I think that is how.
- [27:05]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
I felt about this stone, is the.
- [27:07]
Karen Russell
Way it increases this story is remarkable. In her new novel, which is also incredible, the Mighty Red, there are these passages she talks about how history is a flood. And I think she does something similar, that same kind of. I mean, it just. It feels sorceress to me, what she's able to do where she talks about transatlantic slavery and its legacies, colonization, genocide.
- [27:32]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
The buffalo bones that are turned into sugar.
- [27:36]
Karen Russell
And she does this in a paragraph. And there's something so impressive to me about that distillation.
- [27:42]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
Yeah, well, we have two timescales happening sort of within the same story, which kind of meet at the end. We have this human lifespan, and we have the stone's geological, inhuman lifespan. And at the very end of the story. We have these two things coming together and the woman continuing to have a life and as molecules alongside the molecules of the stone. Just an incredibly beautiful image.
- [28:17]
Karen Russell
It's so beautiful. And I do think it does. It merges a fairytale ending just with biological fact. I mean, you know, you're moving beyond the full stop syntax of this woman's death and all of that endless repetition and decay and growth and rebirth. I think the way that it widens, right, from the particularity, the specificity of this particular woman, her consciousness, this particular stone, you know, that's. It's like you could put it in your palm to all things in the universe. And Louise is able to do that in a matter of sentences, over and over in age after age. I marked because I love the way that. That does feel, right. Almost like a prayer or a fairy tale construction. And it's simply true. And suddenly, you know, I always feel this in stories. It's a tricky thing to try to get it that. That simultaneity or that vastness because you're sort of like straight jacketed into grammar. Grammar's pretty linear and you move word to word down the page.
- [29:17]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [29:18]
Karen Russell
But somehow, over and over in age.
- [29:19]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
After age, you can feel in your.
- [29:21]
Karen Russell
Body those billions of rotations of the earth. I mean, I just love the way it kind of bends linear grammar into something like deep time, like this circular time. That for me, it really is right at the edge of what I can even conceive of. But this very short story helps me to access, you know, to the extent that I ever can.
- [29:42]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Right.
- [29:43]
Karen Russell
Some. Some sense of that scale.
- [29:45]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [29:47]
Karen Russell
I mean, let's.
- [29:48]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
Let's think about the stone's role in the course of the human lifetime. When she first finds it, she's. She's a little girl. She's wandering through the woods and she's being sort of destructive.
- [30:01]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Yeah.
- [30:01]
Karen Russell
I think I'm trying to remember what she's snapping off the mushrooms. Yes.
- [30:06]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
Crushing mushrooms, unfurling ferns. And she sits down and she feels a kind of prickling in the back of her neck. Something is staring at her, you know, and that's a slightly uncomfortable feeling. It's not a feeling of sort of benevolent nature overlooking her. And then she's drawn to the stone because it has a sort of human like features. It has these two hollows that could look like eyes at that moment. You know, Louise has this theory that she's talked about in a few places that stones might be using us. Right. That when a stone wants to be moved it makes us pick it up. And that clearly is what's happening in that scene. And it's successful in that. So it's kind of the very first moment in the story where we are on shaky ground.
- [30:58]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [30:58]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
Because we don't know what we're supposed to think.
- [31:01]
Karen Russell
Completely shaky ground. And I think she really suspends that uncanny hesitation.
- [31:06]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [31:06]
Karen Russell
For the duration of the story. I mean, I love even that sentence where it has an owlish look.
- [31:12]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Or is it a blind look?
- [31:14]
Karen Russell
Well, anyway, it could be whatever. We learned something wonderful about this girl. I feel that with my own children sometimes. And I'll unzip their backpack. And I'm like, that's interesting. Like, this didn't seem like, you know, it's not like the rock that's gonna win the beauty pageant, but. Or the acorn or whatever. But something about it called to you. And so I also think it goes from being a discovery to a secret sort of instantly. Which I like. And I thought this story too. And it's about so many things. Right. But I really did love the way that you can chart her own becoming. With all of these sort of periods of rupture and stasis. And some new equilibrium asserts itself. It feels, you know, you might think a stone and a human have maybe not that much in common. But, I mean, even in the way that, you know, she finds herself having. She's violated. This kid cuts her hair off. That becomes a kind of secret. She can go to college. And now.
- [32:11]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
And now the stone is just right.
- [32:12]
Karen Russell
There, out in the open. It's not something sort of private. Something, you know, literally underwater with her. I think the way that children become adults. So much of those milestones really are.
- [32:23]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Sort of, like, unspeakable.
- [32:25]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [32:25]
Karen Russell
In a sense, like, words really can only spade so much up to the surface. About what's happening to people in the subterranean dimension.
- [32:33]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Yeah.
- [32:34]
Karen Russell
So I found myself thinking about that too. Her sort of erotic. When the stone moves now, it's sort of an erotic pressure or a companion, in a way. And that's sort of a new.
- [32:43]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [32:44]
Karen Russell
She's an adolescent. She's young woman. Her relationship's changing. But I was charting that too. The way, you know, she doesn't only feel this sort of spooked attraction. She feels gratitude and tenderness and fury. I mean, I found that quite surprising when she smashes the rock. You know, I think it seems surprising to this character as well. And even to this sort of partially omniscient narrator. What did you make of that? Because I was noticing And I think Louise does this in other stories and books, too. It's so delicate. But these moments where she sort of ventilates all certainty and she'll say, perhaps. And I thought of it almost like air holes or something, right? Where it's like you point towards one possibility, but you're not excluding other interpretations, explanations.
- [33:38]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
And I think what's one of the things that's interesting to me in the story is the way that we go back and forth between feeling that the stone is something good for her and something bad for her.
- [33:52]
Karen Russell
Right? Yes, right.
- [33:54]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
In the beginning, it makes her feel really happy when she's mad about having her hair cut off and taking the blame for it, and everyone's been yelling at her about it. And then she puts the hair in the hollows and she feels great and she feels at peace and. And it has that effect on her. At the same time, it shuts her off from a lot of what her normal, you know, romantic development would be, her involvement with other people. It keeps her kind of a loner.
- [34:25]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [34:26]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
When she. When she agrees to go on a date with Vic, she comes back and it's rustling away in the drawer saying, you know, what about me?
- [34:33]
Karen Russell
Hey.
- [34:34]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
And it's jealous.
- [34:36]
Karen Russell
Yeah, it's so true. I mean, I love that question too. You know, I had that same thought. You know, she's sort of. There's something a little bit sterile about her piano playing. She's just proficient. And then she gets married and she's suddenly right. There's passion, there's emotion that's inflecting her playing. She's able to tour Europe and she leaves the stone behind. And yet, you know, the peace that she feels with this, you know, this entity, this. This inhuman thought that developed over centuries is interesting to me too. I really love that one sentence. You know, when she's console, the consolation she feels, whatever strange piece floods into her. That sentence, everything was understood. I'm like, wow, where is the woman? Where is the stone? Some divide is totally a face there. There is some kind of sense of unity. And in that mysterious passive construction.
- [35:32]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Yeah, yeah.
- [35:34]
Karen Russell
And, yeah, I think that's what I love, too. You can read this different ways. You absolutely can say, well, this is a woman who has sealed herself off. She's not available for the ordinary give and take and flux of human relationship. She has a glassy distraction. We don't know she. I think that's interesting to me to have a character like this, too, who sort of remains a little bit remote and unknowable. And I. You know, I find that some readers don't. They don't love that, Deborah. They really do want one explanation or one resolution. And I think there's something so artful and generous. And also there's a kind of. What would you call it? Like, a kind of epistemic humility about what's always filtered or incomplete about how we know reality and how we know other people.
- [36:29]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Yeah.
- [36:30]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
I mean, ambiguity can be uncomfortable for a reader, especially someone who's asking themselves the entire time, am I getting this right? Am I understanding right? And this story, you might not understand. You might understand it differently on every reading and even within the course of the story. Because we have these sort of embark on these stages of this woman's life, thinking one thing, and then suddenly it changes, you know, she finally smashes the stone. She marries this man. She's, like, discovering happiness. Her piano playing is better. She doesn't need the stone anymore. And then literally in the next paragraph, she's distracted from him. She's not feeling it anymore.
- [37:17]
Karen Russell
Yes. The velocity of that. Isn't that a wonderful vertigo? I was just looking.
- [37:21]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [37:21]
Karen Russell
Ted could feel her pulling away from him gradually and so gently that it was a long time before he understood that. Well, he'd been adjusting to each tiny incremental motion. She'd been shifting entirely. And I think I just get. I mean, this is my projection, I suppose, but I would imagine it's a little bit of a surprise to this woman as well. You know, I was thinking about that. That kind of drift or the slow violence of that. And Louise does this so lightly. But, of course, there's a by analogy.
- [37:52]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [37:53]
Karen Russell
You can understand, like. Yeah. The Stones kind of biography is a bit. I mean, the sort of ruptures that people undergo in their private lives or that we all experience collectively. It can feel like an avalanche. Feels very spontaneous. But obviously those forces were mounting for a long time. I think something similar happens in human interiors, you know, and there can be, like, a dramatic break. It seems so abrupt, but it was maybe a long time in the making and invisibly building.
- [38:25]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Yeah.
- [38:26]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
It's sort of also fascinating that for so long she's carrying the stone on stage with her whenever she plays a concert. And then when she stops doing that, she actually plays better, which is not what you would expect. Right. So she's been sort of using it, in a way, as a crutch. And I feel as though each time in the story she does that, that's when there's a sudden movement away from it.
- [38:50]
Karen Russell
It's so true. And I think there's a little echo also. You know, you might not realize what kind of desires or possibilities. You know, you have these entanglements, you have a relationship, and you might not know what that is binding up for you or what you're not able to do because of it. And when Ted is gone, I just love that she's like, I am going to put so much basil and garlic in this as much as I want. Like, there's something funny and violent to me about that. And in a similar way.
- [39:20]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [39:20]
Karen Russell
You don't. Maybe that's another way of saying, wow, we are so Internet and we co create these realities and you move that sort of physical weight somewhere else and something. Something new is possible. It's just interesting, too, to have a story this short that really gives you the strata of an entire life.
- [39:40]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Yeah.
- [39:41]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
One thing that made me laugh, not in the story, but in the Q and A I did with Louise. We were talking about this kind of breakup with the stone after she breaks it. And Louise said, well, her attachment to the stone is based, like many attractions, on appearance. And when its appearance is made less.
- [40:05]
Deborah Treisman
Perfect, the spell is broken.
- [40:08]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
Which, you know, makes me laugh because, I mean, it's not that she fell in love with the stone for its looks in that way.
- [40:18]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Right.
- [40:18]
Karen Russell
But what a way to reflect on. Yeah. Just all the projection and, you know, the fantasy and everything else that can.
- [40:26]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
That one can, you know, embed emotion into anything.
- [40:31]
Karen Russell
Absolutely.
- [40:32]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
We can see what we want to see. And if we don't like what we see, we can pull out some glue.
- [40:40]
Karen Russell
I love that line so much that now only the thinnest line is left to tell the story. Because you need someone like Louise to come along who's so kind of illiterate of those scars to sort of reopen the whole history.
- [40:57]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
And what's also amazing in that moment is that, you know, we're shocked that she smashed this stone that we've been following through the story. That seems like at the center and perfect. And then she reminds us, this stone has been broken many times.
- [41:10]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
Right, Right.
- [41:12]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
Its whole life has been breaking. The breaking down of a larger sheet of rock. So the fact that this particular fragment has survived in this form through several human lives doesn't mean that that is its form.
- [41:25]
Karen Russell
No, absolutely. You know, in that interview you guys did, which is amazing, everyone should read it. But you ask Louise, you know, if the stone is benevolent or malevolent, how does she see it? And she says the stone is indifferent. I think there Is something mysterious and consoling about understanding that.
- [41:40]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Yeah.
- [41:41]
Karen Russell
The graft of these human moods and needs and everything else. You know, at the end of this woman's life, she could have just ended the story with the aneurysm, that last rupture. But there is this interview fusion of woman and stone. And, you know, I guess there could be a metaphysical reading of that, but there's also just like a scientific read of what is. Yeah. Just right at the edge of what I think anyone can understand that where these binaries between, like, growth and decay and life and death, animate and animate, sort of break down. And that vast indifference. I mean, you know, that sort of. There's this faster order. I think that's something I love about this story that I find hard to do and maybe important for all kinds of reasons today just to acknowledge this vaster order that we're all embedded in.
- [42:33]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Yeah.
- [42:34]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
And there's a way you can read this story as a process, which is the process of turning this woman herself into a stone.
- [42:43]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [42:43]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
That's how she ends up. She ends up as part. You know, her molecules are in the stone with the stone's molecules. And her life is this process of sort of withdrawing in a way. We get her life after the marriage very condensed because presumably she's still quite young at that point. And then suddenly she's basically an old lady in a rocking chair with this stone sitting on a piece of lace next to her. Which is also interesting to me because I feel so that the stone goes from being her lover to being her baby that she's carrying to the window and saying, oh, look at the bir at the end.
- [43:24]
Karen Russell
I love that she can tell when the stone is bored. You know, those units of measure are so idiosyncratic in particular, too.
- [43:35]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [43:35]
Karen Russell
What she does with the stone, brushing it with her toes. Right. Sliding it down her pelvis, carrying it like a baby. It's true you can sort of chart different phases of her. Their relationship, certainly, but also of this person's life and her needs. Her needs, yeah, absolutely. And who's to say that the stone wasn't bored? I mean, they've been giving each other that attention for some time, but it's true that it also feels so much to me, you know, in a skillful way, a story about human nature and what kinds of things we are. And those temporal leaps are destabilizing, too.
- [44:17]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [44:17]
Karen Russell
I mean, I had some questions. I mean, there's a digital clock next to the stone, but you wouldn't say that time is so firmly kept here.
- [44:24]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [44:25]
Karen Russell
You know, there's a lot of sort of. I think that felt a little fairy tale to me, too. Or it would be, you know, at last, or. Yeah, these kinds of, I think, very deliberately open measurements of time.
- [44:36]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
And also the fact that she's a musician, that she is a pianist, which, you know, music being an art form that occurs over time, that takes place in time and surges and ebbs and so on, it feels. I mean, everything is a metaphor for everything else in this story, I think.
- [44:57]
Karen Russell
I like that about it, too.
- [45:00]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [45:00]
Karen Russell
And it's true. I mean, you can. You can think about kind of parental and child parental relationships. You can think about art making and fecundity and sterility and sort of technical precision versus, I don't know, spontaneity and passion and. Yeah, there's so much here.
- [45:19]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
One of the things she said in that Q and A, she said, perhaps this story refers to some everyday part of me that is beyond the reach of other human beings. We all have that aspect, but we don't all acknowledge it or call upon it. This nameless kernel of identity that can.
- [45:34]
Deborah Treisman
Be submerged or damaged, but never completely lost.
- [45:37]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
Even in death. There's a small pebble of self that may be nothing more than a molecular bond, yet it means that we were here and lived on earth.
- [45:46]
Karen Russell
I love Louise. I mean, I was thinking about another question of yours where you were asking, is it a superstition? Right. Is it kind of like a spiritual practice? And now I disclose too much. But I. Sometimes, when I was a kid and I really did need to be studied or something, felt precarious. I would touch leaves or trees. I had a couple in my neighborhood. I felt such affection for certain plants just in my neighborhood. And so one of the reasons that I loved this story is I haven't really seen that depicted. And I think that it did feel both superstitious and, in a funny way, like a kind of a prayer or an acknowledgement of our. Our great precarity here, you know, and just sort of like the astronomically long odds that any of us would be here at all. Including. Including.
- [46:43]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [46:44]
Karen Russell
The other, you know, other life forms, things that aren't human. And I think she. You know, it's funny, I was thinking about how it doesn't make. It certainly, I feel like the story resizes our own human dramas, but it doesn't make them feel less poignant or precious or important to me, anyway.
- [47:03]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
No, it gives good weight to the woman's lifetime. And it's interesting what you're saying about needing to touch leaves and so on, because it's in a way, grounding, making one feel solidly on this planet and in another way, completely unmooring because we'll be gone and these things won't, you know.
- [47:26]
Karen Russell
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's right. And I think that's that indifference that can be both things, consoling and frightening.
- [47:36]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [47:36]
Karen Russell
So I feel my husband was asking me, I was sort of describing this end of the story and how it does kind of merge scientific fact and this sort of gesture towards eternity, this real almost, you know, fable like, or fairy tale, you know, ever after vastness. And he said, oh, well, does that, and it helps with death. I was like, I don't know about that, because I wouldn't say it's anything quite so straightforward. I don't know that anything Louise writes has any pat moral or any sort of. I think that's what makes it so powerful is she finds ways to articulate. Yeah. These very rich states that really are. It's never sentimental.
- [48:25]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Right.
- [48:25]
Karen Russell
I think she's often a very tender writer. She can also be a ferocious writer, but she doesn't connect any easy dots for anyone. And so something about, you know, spading up from those subterranean depths, a story like this one, it's such a gift.
- [48:42]
Interjecting Participant (possibly another guest or co-host)
Yeah.
- [48:43]
Karen Russell
And it.
- [48:43]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
And, well, I hope it will be here when we're not.
- [48:48]
Karen Russell
Yeah, me too.
- [48:49]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
It will be like the stone itself.
- [48:51]
Karen Russell
I prefer, I mean, and I advocate for a relationship with stones over, like, I don't know, AI lovers. That's just my position, Deborah.
- [49:01]
Narrator/Reader (Karen Russell reading the story)
I'm Team Stone.
- [49:04]
Interviewer/Host (possibly Deborah Treisman or another host)
Well, thank you so much, Karen.
- [49:06]
Karen Russell
Thank you, Deborah. This was a delight.
- [49:10]
Deborah Treisman
Louise Erdrich, a winner of the Penn Saul Bello Award and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, among others, has written more than two dozen books of fiction, including the novels the Roundhouse, which won the national book Award in 2012, the Night Watchman, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2021, and the Mighty Red, which was published in 2024. A new story collection, Python's Kiss, will be published next March. Erdrich has been a guest on three previous episodes of the New Yorker fiction podcast, reading and discussing stories by Karen Russell, Joyce Carol Oates and Laurie Moore. Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the story collection's Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Orange World and Other Stories, and the novels Swamplandia, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the Antidote, which came out earlier this year. Russell, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship was included in the New Yorker's 20 Under 40 Fiction issue in 2010. You can download 220 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, including episodes in which Karen Russell reads stories by Carson McCullers and Mavis Gallant, or subscribe to the podcast for free in Apple Podcasts. On the Writer's Voice podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Writer's Voice in other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page, or rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. This episode of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast was produced by John Lamay. I'm Deborah Treisman. Thanks for listening.
- [50:49]
Tyler Foggatt
Hi, I'm Tyler Foggatt, a senior editor at the New Yorker and one of the hosts of the Political Scene podcast. A lot of people are justifiably freaked out right now, and I think that it's our job at the Political Scene to encourage people to stop and think about the particular news stories that are actually incredibly significant in this moment by having these really deep conversations with writers where we actually get into the weeds of what is going on right now and about the damage that is being done. It's not resistance in the activists sense, but I think it is resistance in the sense that we are resisting the feeling of being overwhelmed by chaos. Join me and my colleagues David Remnick, Evan Osnos, Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser on the Political Scene podcast from the New Yorker. New episodes drop three times a week, available wherever you get your podcasts.
- [51:46]
Karen Russell
From PRX.