Louise Erdrich Reads Karen Russell

Summary

Podcast Title: The New Yorker: Fiction
Episode: Louise Erdrich Reads Karen Russell
Release Date: September 1, 2024
Host/Author: WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
Guest: Louise Erdrich

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of The New Yorker: Fiction, Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker, welcomes acclaimed author Louise Erdrich to read and discuss Karen Russell's short story, "Haunting Olivia." Released in the June 2005 issue of The New Yorker, "Haunting Olivia" is Karen Russell's inaugural story in the magazine, preceding her first book. Louise Erdrich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author known for her profound narratives in novels like The Roundhouse and The Night Watchman, brings her insightful perspective to this haunting tale.

Notable Quote:

"Karen Russell has a genius for language... she also has such a high level of art and coins appallingly wonderful words."
— Louise Erdrich [01:50]

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Reading: "Haunting Olivia" by Karen Russell

Louise Erdrich masterfully narrates "Haunting Olivia," a story that intertwines themes of grief, sibling bonds, and the supernatural. The narrative follows two brothers, Wallow and Timothy, as they embark on nocturnal expeditions to locate the ghost of their deceased sister, Olivia, using peculiar pink goggles that purportedly reveal underwater spirits. Set against the backdrop of a boat graveyard and the mysterious Glowworm Grotto, the story delves deep into the brothers' quest for closure and understanding in the wake of loss.

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Discussion and Analysis

After the reading, Deborah Treisman engages Louise Erdrich in a thoughtful discussion, unpacking the layered meanings and emotional undertones of Russell's story.

Themes of Grief and Responsibility: Louise Erdrich emphasizes the profound sense of responsibility that Wallow feels for Olivia's death. She notes that Wallow's journey is driven by a desire to seek forgiveness and make amends, encapsulating the universal struggle of dealing with guilt after a loved one's passing.

Notable Quote:

"Wallow feels responsible for her death and he wants to apologize."
— Louise Erdrich [55:42]

Symbolism of the Goggles: The pink goggles serve as a potent symbol in the story, representing the thin veil between the living and the dead. Erdrich interprets them as both a literal tool within the narrative and a metaphorical device that allows characters (and readers) to perceive deeper truths and unseen realities.

Notable Quote:

"These little pink goggles... have the ability to cut through time, to see into another world."
— Louise Erdrich [57:55]

Character Dynamics and Development: The relationship between Wallow and Timothy is central to the narrative. While Wallow is portrayed as aggressive and driven, Timothy embodies vulnerability and a yearning for peace. Erdrich highlights how their contrasting motivations drive the story forward and deepen the emotional resonance.

Notable Quote:

"Wallow is a better brother than I could ever hope to be."
— Louise Erdrich [58:38]

Narrative Structure and Pacing: Erdrich appreciates the story's steady pacing and the way Karen Russell weaves suspense throughout, maintaining an enigmatic atmosphere until the very end. The seamless blending of magical realism with raw emotional experiences allows readers to navigate the complexities of grief alongside the characters.

Notable Quote:

"There's a kind of suspense... whether Olivia is going to come back."
— Louise Erdrich [67:37]

Use of Language and Imagery: Karen Russell's distinctive use of language, characterized by inventive wordplay and vivid descriptions, is a focal point of the discussion. Erdrich commends Russell's ability to transform mundane language into something extraordinary, enhancing the story's otherworldly feel.

Notable Quote:

"Her language is so heightened and vivid that it goes into the stratosphere of writing."
— Louise Erdrich [01:50]

Interpretation of the Ending: The ambiguous conclusion of "Haunting Olivia" leaves room for multiple interpretations—whether the supernatural elements are real or manifestations of the brothers' grief. Erdrich suggests that the ending symbolizes acceptance and the transcendent nature of memory, drawing parallels to literary classics like James Joyce's The Dead.

Notable Quote:

"Olivia could be everywhere... raining down across the entire world."
— Louise Erdrich [54:23]

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Final Reflections

Louise Erdrich concludes by praising Karen Russell's unique storytelling ability, noting the eternal quality and depth of her narratives. She reflects on how Russell's fascination with ghosts and the supernatural serves as a conduit for exploring profound human emotions and the complexities of loss.

Notable Quote:

"She always taps into something that's way out there and way in there."
— Louise Erdrich [68:21]

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About the Authors

Karen Russell is a celebrated author known for her novels Swamplandia! and collections St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Orange World and Other Stories. Her forthcoming novel, Antidote, is set for release in March 2025.

Louise Erdrich is an esteemed novelist with works including The Painted Drum, The Roundhouse, and The Night Watchman. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her latest novel, The Mighty Red, is anticipated in October.

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This episode of The New Yorker: Fiction seamlessly blends immersive storytelling with deep literary analysis, offering listeners both a captivating reading and an insightful exploration of Karen Russell's "Haunting Olivia." Whether familiar with the story or new to The New Yorker's literary offerings, listeners will find value in the rich discussions and expert interpretations provided by Louise Erdrich and Deborah Treisman.

Transcript

[Deborah Treisman]

This is a message from sponsor Intuit. TurboTax Texas was getting frustrated by your forms. Now Taxis is uploading your forms with a Snap and a TurboTax expert will do your taxes for you. One who's backed by the latest tech which cross checks millions of data points for absolute accuracy. All of which makes it easy for you to get the most money back guaranteed. Get an Expert now on TurboTax.com only available with TurboTax Live full service. See guarantee [e-mail] guarantees this 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 Haunting Olivia by Karen Russell, which appeared in the New Yorker in June of 2005.

[Louise Erdrich]

The diabolical goggles were designed for little girls. They are pink with a floral snorkel attached to the side. They have scratch proof lenses and an adjustable band. Wallow says that we are going to use them to find our dead sister Olivia.

[Deborah Treisman]

The story was chosen by Louise Erdrich, who's published more than a dozen books of fiction, including the novels the Roundhouse, LaRose and the Night Watchman, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2021. A new novel, the Mighty Red, is coming out in October. Hi Louise.

[Louise Erdrich]

Hello. How are you?

[Deborah Treisman]

I'm all right. So you chose to read a story by Karen Russell today, and I know that she feels a huge affinity with your work, and I'm wondering what kind of affinity you feel with hers.

[Louise Erdrich]

I feel an affinity on many levels. Karen Russell has a genius for language, for one thing, and she's a delightful writer, but she also has such a high level of art and coins appallingly wonderful words. There is so many in this particular story. She'll turn nouns into verbs and she'll also just use, you know, your run of the mill words and make them entirely new. That's one of the things I love. And I also love the emotional depth of her work, the way it resonates on almost an ordinary level. I mean, these are people that anyone will relate to. But this is also language that is so heightened and vivid that it goes into the stratosphere of writing, I think.

[Deborah Treisman]

Yeah. And strangely, some of her stories do sort of take place in the sky. This one takes place more in water. Yes, Haunting Olivia was the first story Karen published in the New Yorker. It came out in 2005 in a debut fiction issue. Before her first book was published.

[Louise Erdrich]

Really?

[Deborah Treisman]

Yeah. She was 23 at the time.

[Louise Erdrich]

No, she was still a kid.

[Deborah Treisman]

It's possible.

[Louise Erdrich]

It is true.

[Deborah Treisman]

It's true. And she was still an MFA student. Do you think it feels early in her development as a writer or are all the sort of distinguishing characteristics there already?

[Louise Erdrich]

It's crazy. I have her book, an advanced reader form now. It's called the Antidote. And this feels as accomplished as the wonderful book.

[Deborah Treisman]

I know you've talked already about her coinages and use of words, but what are the kind of hallmarks of a Karen Russell story?

[Louise Erdrich]

I think the relationships are so strong in her stories. She gets something about relationships that go into a surreal world. One of her stories is about a devil living in the sewer system right next to someone's house that is calling a woman out at night. And it's so real, it's so believable. It would be called bizarre, except that it's totally ordinary. And she manages to do that somehow. There's compassion in all of her stories, I think.

[Deborah Treisman]

Right. That story, Orange World, the devil is an idea. The devil is a metaphor for certain things, for motherhood. But it's also just a real down and dirty devil in the sewer.

[Louise Erdrich]

It's a down and dirty devil. Yeah. So every level. Exactly.

[Deborah Treisman]

Yeah. Do you remember when Haunting Olivia first came out? Do you remember when you read it for the first time?

[Louise Erdrich]

I don't remember exactly when I read it, but I feel like I must have read it at the time. I read almost every thing as it comes out, but I remember reading it the time I reread it, which was for this, and my jaw dropped. I was really astounded at how terrific this story is.

[Deborah Treisman]

Well, let's talk some more after the reading. And now here's Louise Erdrich reading Haunting Olivia by Karen Russell.

[Louise Erdrich]

Haunting Olivia. My brother Wallow, has been kicking around Gannon's boat graveyard for more than an hour, too embarrassed to admit that he doesn't see any ghosts. Instead, he slaps at the ocean with jilted fury. Curse words come piping out of his snorkel. He keeps pausing to readjust the diabolical goggles. The diabolical goggles were designed for little girls. They are pink with a floral snorkel attached to the side. They have scratch proof lenses and an adjustable band. Wallow says that we're going to use them to find our dead sister Olivia. My brother and I have been making midnight scavenging trips to Gannon's all summer. It's a watery junkyard, a place where people pay to abandon their old boats. Gannon, the grizzled, tattooed undertaker, tows wrecked ships into his marina, battered sailboats and listing skiffs. Yachts with stupid names knot at work and Sail la Vie, the paint peeling from their ponds. They sink beneath the water in slow increments, covered with rot and barnacles. Their masts jut out at weird angles. The marina is an open, easy grave to rob. We ride our bikes along the rock wall, coasting quietly past Gannon's tin shack and hop off at the derelict pier. Then we creep down to the ladder, jump into the nearest boat and loot its dubious booty. We mostly find stuff with no resale value, soggy flares and UHF radios, A1 eyed cat yowling on a dinghy. But the goggles are a first. We found them floating in a live bait tank deep in the cabin of La Calavera, a swamped Largo schooner. We'd pushed our way through a small hole in the prow. Inside, the cabin was rank and flooded. There was no bait living in that tank, just the goggles and a foamy liquid the color of rug beer. I dared Wallow to put the goggles on and stick his head in it. I didn't actually expect him to find anything. I just wanted to laugh at Wallow and the pink goggles bobbing for diseases. But when he surfaced, tearing up the goggles, he told me that he'd seen the orange, unholy light of a fish ghost. Several, in fact. A school of ghoulish mullet. They look just like regular bait fish, bro, Waller said, only deader. I told my brother that I was familiar with the definition of a ghost. Not that I believed a word of it, you understand. Now Wallow is trying the goggles out in the marina to see if his vision extends beyond the tank. I'm dangling my legs over the edge of the pier, half expecting something to grab me and pull me under. Wallow, you see anything Phantasmic yet? Nothing. He burbles morosely through the snorkel. I can't see a thing. I'm not surprised. The water in the boat basin is a cloudy mess, but I'm impressed by Wallow's one armed doggy paddle. Wallow shouldn't be swimming at all. Last Thursday he slipped on one of the banana peels that Granina leaves around the house. I know. I didn't think it could happen outside of cartoons either. Now his right arm is in a plaster cast, and in order to enter the water he has to hold it above his head. It looks like he's riding an aquatic unicycle. That buoyancy, it's unexpected on land. Wallow's a loutish kid. He bulldozes whatever gets in his path. Baby strollers, widowers, me for brothers. Wallow and I look nothing alike. I've got Dad's blonde hair and blue eyes, his embraceably lanky physique. Olivia was equally heartland, apple cheeks and unnervingly white teeth. Not Wallow. He's got this dental affliction which gives him a tusky warthog grin. He wears his hair in a greased pompadour and has a thick pelt of back hair. There's no accounting for it. Dad jokes that her mom must have had dalliances with a minotaur. Wallow is not Wallow's real name, of course. His real name is Waldo Swallow. Just like I'm Timothy Sparrow and Olivia was is Olivia Lark. Our parents used to be bird enthusiasts. That's how they met. Dad spotted my mom on a bird watching tour of the swamp, her beauty magnified by his 10x binoculars. Dad says that by the time he lowered them, the spoon bills he'd been trying to see had scattered. And he was in love. When Wallow and I were very young, they used to take us on their creepy bird excursions, kayaking down island canals, spying on blue herons and coots. These days they're not enthusiastic about much, feathered or otherwise. They leave us with Grannina for months at a time. Shortly after Olivia's death, my parents started traveling regularly in the Third World. No children allowed. Granna now lives on the other side of the island. She's 84, I'm 12 and Wallow's 14, so it's a little ambiguous as to who's babysitting whom. This particular summer our parents are in Sao Paulo. They send us postcards of bullet pocked favelas and flaming hillocks of trash. Glad you're not here. Xoxo the rents Guess the idea is that all the misery makes their marital problems seem petty and inconsequential. Hey. Wallow is directly below me, clutching the rails of the ladder. Move over. He climbs up and heaves his big body onto the pier. Defeat puddles all around him. Behind the diabolical goggles, his eyes narrow into slits. Did you see them? Wallow just grunts. Here. He wrestles the lady goggles off his face and thrusts them at me. I can't swim with this cast and these bitches are too small for my skull. You try them. I sigh and strip off my pajamas, bobbling before him. The elastic band of the goggles bites into the back of my head. Somehow wearing them makes me feel even more naked. My penis is curling up in the salt air like a small pink snail. Wallow points and laughs. Sure you don't want to try again? I ask him. From the edge of the pier, the ocean looks dark and unfamiliar, like the liquid shadow of something truly awful. Try again, Wallow. Maybe it's just taking a while for your eyes to adjust. Wallow holds a finger to his lips. He points behind me. Boats are creaking in the wind. Waves slap against the pilings. And then I hear it too, the distinct funk of boots on wood. Someone is walking down the pier. We can see the tip of a lit cigarette suspended in the dark. We hear a man's gargly cough. Looking for buried treasure, boys? Gannon laughs. He keeps walking toward us. You know the court still considers it trespassing, be it land or sea. Then he recognizes Wallow. He lets out the low, mournful whistle that all the grownups on the island used to identify us now. Oh, son, don't tell me you're out here looking for my dead sister? Wallow asks with terrifying cheer. Good guess. You're not going to find her in my marina, boys. In the dark, Gannon is a huge stencil of a man, wisps of smoke curling from his nostrils. There is a long, pulsing silence during which Wallow stares at him, squaring his jaw. Then Gannon shrugs. He stubs out his cigarette and shuffles back toward the shore. All right, bro, wallow says. It's go time. He takes my elbow and gentles me down the planks with such tenderness that I'm suddenly very afraid. But there's no sense making the plunge slow and unbearable. I take a running leap down the pier and launch over the water. It's my favorite moment. I'm one toe away from flight and my body takes over. The choice is made, but the consequence is still just an inky shimmer beneath me. I'm rushing to meet my own reflection. Gah. Then comes the less beautiful moment when I'm up to my eyeballs in tar water and the goggles fill with stinging brine, and for what seems like a very long time I can't see anything at all, dead or alive. When my vision starts to clear, I see a milky, melting light moving swiftly above the ocean floor. Drowned moonbeams, I think at first, only there is no moon Tonight, Olivia disappeared on a new moon night. It was exactly two years, or 24 new moons ago. Wallow says that means that tonight is Olivia's unbirth day, the anniversary of her death. It's weird. Our grief is cyclical, synced with the lunar cycles. It accordions out as the moon slivers away. On new moon nights, it rises with the tide. Even before we lost my sis, I used to get uneasy when the moon was gone, that corner of the sky as black as an empty safe. Whatever happened to Olivia? I hope she at least had the orange residue of sunset to see by. I can't stand to think of her out here alone after nightfall. The last time we saw Olivia was at twilight. We'd spent all day crab sledding down the beach. It's the closest thing we island kids have to a winter sport. You climb into the upended exoskeleton of a giant crab, then you go yee haw. Slaloming down the powdery dunes. The faster you go, the more sand whizzes around you, a fine spray on either side of your crab sled. By the time you hit the water, you're covered in it, grit in your teeth and your eyelids along the line of your scalp. Herb makes the crab sleds. He guts the crabs and blowtorches off the eye stalks and paints little racer stripes along the side. Then he rents them down at Pier 2 for $2 an hour, $12 for a full day. The three of us had been racing down the beach all afternoon. We were sunburned and hungry and loused up with sea bugs. Wallow had stepped on a sea urchin and broken his fall on more urchins. I wanted Jiffy Pop and aloe vera. Walla wanted prescription painkillers and porno. We voted to head over to Grannina's beach cottage because she has Demerol and an illegal cable box. Olivia threw a fit, but we still have half an hour on the sled rental. A gleam came into her eyes, that transparent little kid craftiness. You guys don't have to come with me, you know. Legally we did. According to official Herb's crab sledding policy, under 12s must be accompanied by a guardian, a rule that Herb has really cracked down on since Olivia's death. But neither Wallow nor I felt like chaperoning, and Olivia was eight and a half, which rounds up to 12. Stick to the perimeter of the island, wallow told her. And get that crab sled back before sundown. Any late fees are coming out of your allowance. Yeah, yeah, she assured us, clambering into the sled. The sun was already low in the sky. I'm just going out one last time. We helped Olivia drag the sled up the white dunes. She sat cross legged in the center of the shell, humming tunelessly. Then we gave her a final push that sent her racing down the slopes. We watched as she flew out over the rock crags and into the foamy water. By the time we'd gathered our towels and turned to go, Olivia was just a speck on the horizon. Neither of us noticed how quickly the tide was going out. Most people think that tides are caused by the moon alone, but that is not the case. Once a month, the sun and the moon are both on the same side of the globe. Then the Atlantic kowtows to their conglomerate gravity. It is the Earth playing tug of war with the sky. On new moon nights, the sky is winning. The spring tide swells exceptionally high. The spring tide has teeth. It can pull a boat much farther than your average quarter moon. Neap tide. When they finally found Olivia's crab sled, it was halfway to Cuba and empty. What do you see, bro? Oh, not much, I cough. I peer back under the surface of the water. There is an aurora borealis exploding inches from my submerged face. Probably just plankton. When I come up to clear the goggles, I can barely see Wallow. He is silhouetted against the lone orange lamp watching me from the pier. Water seeps out of my nose, my ears. It weeps down the corners of the lenses. I push the goggles up and rub my eyes with my fists, which just makes things worse. I kick to stay afloat, the snorkel digging into my cheek, and wave at my brother. Wallow doesn't wave back. I don't want to tell Wallow, but I have no idea what I just saw, although I'm sure there must be some ugly explanation for it. I tell myself that it was just cyanobacteria or lustrous pollutants from the Bimini glue factory. Either way, I don't want to double check. I shiver in the water, letting the salt dry on my shoulders, listening to the echo of my breath in the snorkel. I fantasize about towels, but Wallow is still watching me, his face a blank oval. I tug at the goggles and stick my head under for a second look. Immediately I bite down on the mouthpiece of the snorkel to stop myself from screaming. The goggles. They work, and every inch of the ocean is haunted. There are ghostfish swimming all around me, my hands pass right through their flat bodies. Phantom crabs shake their phantom claws at me from behind a sunken anchor. Octopuses cartwheel by, leaving an effulgent red trail. A school of minnows swims right through my belly button. Dead. I think they are all dead. Wallow, I gasped, spitting out the snuggle. I don't think I can do this. Sure you can. Squat, boulder shouldered wallow is standing over the ladder, guarding it like a gargoyle. There's nowhere for me to go but back under the water. Getting used to aquatic ghosts is like adjusting to the temperature of the ocean. After the initial shock gives way, your body numbs. It takes a few more close encounters with the lambent fish before my pulse quiets down. Once I realize that the ghostfish can't hurt me, I relax into something I'd call delight if I weren't supposed to be feeling bereaved. I spend the next two hours pretending to look for Olivia. I shadow the spirit manatees, their backs scored with keloid stars from motorboat propellers. I somersault through stingrays. Bonefish flicker around me like mute banshees. I figure out how to braid the furry blue light of dead coral reef through my fingertips. I've started to enjoy myself, and I've nearly succeeded in exorcising Olivia from my thoughts when a bunch of ghost shrimp materialize in front of my goggles. Like a photo rinsed in a developing tree, the shrimp twist into a glowing Alphabet, some curling, some flattening, touching tails to antennae in smoky contortions. Then they loop together to form words as if drawn by some invisible hand. G L O W W O R M G R O T T O We thought the Glowworm Grotto was just more of Olivia's make believe. Olivia was a cartographer of imaginary places. She'd crayon elaborate maps of invisible castles and sunken cities. When the Glowworm Grotto is part of a portfolio that includes Mount Waffle cone, it's hard to take it seriously. I loved Olivia, but that doesn't mean I didn't recognize that she was one weird little kid. She used to suffer these intense bouts of homesickness in her own bedroom when she was very small. She would wake up tearing at her bedspread and shrieking, I want to go home. I want to go home. Which was distressing to all of us, of course, because she was home. That said, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Olivia was an adoptee from some other planet. She used to change into Wallow's rubbery yellow flippers on the bus, then waddle around the school halls like some disoriented mallard. She played house by getting the broom and sweeping the neon corpses of dead jellyfish off the beach. Her eyes were stripy cerulean, inhumanly bright. Dad used to tell Olivia that a merman artisan had made them out of bits of sea glass from Atlantis. Wallow saved all of her drawings. The one labeled Glowworm Grotto is a sketch of a dusky red cave with a little stick, Olivia swimming into the entrance. Another drawing shows the roof of the cave. It looks like a swirly firmament of stars, Dalmatian with yellow dots. That's what you see when you're floating on your back, olivia told us, rubbing the gray crayon down to its nub. The Glowworm Grotto looks just like the night sky. That's nice, we said, exchanging glances. Neither Wallow nor I knew of any caves along the island shore. I figured it must be another Olivia utopia. A no place, Wallow thought. It was Olivia's oddball interpretation of Gannon's boat graveyard. Maybe that rusty boat hangar looked like the entrance to a cave to her, he'd said. Maybe if you were eight and nearsighted and nostalgic for places you'd never been. But if the Glowworm Grotto actually exists, that changes everything. Olivia's ghost could be there now, twitching her nose with rabbity indignation. But I left you a map, wondering what took us so long to find her. When I surface, the stars have vanished. The clouds are turning red around their edges. I can hear Wallow snoring on the pier. I pull my naked body up and flop onto the warm planks, feeling salt shucked and newborn. When I spit the snorkel out of my mouth, the unfiltered air tastes acrid and foreign. The Glow Worm Grotto. I wish I didn't have to tell Wallow. I wish we'd never found the stupid goggles. There are certain things that I don't want to see when we get back to Grannina's. Her cottage is shuttered and dark. Fat raindrops. The icicles of the tropics hang from the eaves. We can hear her watching. Evangelical Bingo in the next room. Revelation 20:13 she hoots. Bingo. Our breakfast is on the table. Banana pancakes with a side of banana pudding. The kitchen is sticky with brown peels and syrup. Grannina no longer has any teeth. For the past two decades she has subsisted almost entirely on bananas. Banana based dishes and other food that you can gum. This means that her farts smell funny and her calf muscles frequently give out. It means that Wallow and I eat out a lot during the summer. Wallow finds Olivia's old drawings of the Glowworm Grotto. We spread them out on the table next to a Crab Shack menu with a cartoon map of the island. Wallow is busy highlighting the jagged shoreline, circling places that might harbor a cave, when Granina shuffles into the kitchen. What's all this? She peers over my shoulder. Christ, she says, still moaning over that old business. Grannina doesn't understand what the big deal is. She didn't cry at Olivia's funeral, and I doubt she even remembers Olivia's name. Grannina lost like 92 million kids in childbirths. All of her brothers died in the war. She survived the Depression by stealing radish bulbs from her neighbor's garden and fishing the elms for pigeons. Dad likes to say this in a grave voice, as if it explained her jaundiced pitilessness. Boys, your grandmother eight pigeons. Wasn't much for drawing, was she? Grannina says. She taps at stick. Olivia wasn't much for swimming either. Wallow visibly stiffens. For a second I'm worried that he's going to slug Grana in her waddled neck. Then she raises her drawn on eyebrows. Would you look at that. The Gnudi Cave. Your grandfather used to take me skinny dipping there. Wallow and I do an autonomic full body shudder. I get a sudden mental image of two shelled walnuts floating in a glass. You mean you recognize this place, Grannina? No thanks to this chicken scratch. She points to an orange dot in the corner of the picture, so small that I hadn't even noticed it. But look where she drew the sunset. Use your noggins. Must be one of them coves on the western side of the island. I don't remember exactly where. What about the stars on the roof? Grannina snorts. Worm shit. Huh? Worm shit, she repeats. You never heard of glow worms, Mr. Straight A science Guy? Their shit glows in the dark. All them coves are covered with it. We never recovered Olivia's body. Two days after she went missing, Tropical Storm Vita brought wind and chaos and interrupted broadcasts, and the search was called off. Too dangerous, the Coast Guard lieutenant said. He was a fat, earnest man with tiny black eyes set like watermelon seeds in his pink face. When wind opposes sea, he said in a portentous sing song, the waves build fast. Thank you, Billy Shakespeare my father growled under his breath. For some reason this hit dad the hardest. Harder than Olivia's death itself, I think. The fact that we had nothing to to bury. It's possible that Olivia washed up on a bone white Koimar beach or got tangled in some Caribbean fisherman's net. It's probable that her lungs filled up with buckets of tarry black water and she sank. But I don't like to think about that. It's easier to imagine her turning into an angelfish and swimming away. Or being bodily assumed into the clouds, most likely. Dad says a freak wave knocked her overboard. Then the current yanked the sled away faster than she could swim. In my night terrors I watched the sea turn into a great gloved hand that rises out of the ocean to snatch her. I told Wallow this once, hoping to stir up some fraternal empathy. Instead, Wallow sneered at me. Are you serious? That's what you have nightmares about, bro? Some lame ass Mickey Mouse glove that comes out of the sea? His lip curled up, but there was envy in his voice too. I just see my own hands, you know, pushing her down that hill. The following evening, Wallow and I head over to Herb's Crab Sledding Rentals. Herb smokes on his porch in his yellowed boxers and a threadbare Santa hat, rain or shine. Back when we were regular sledders, Wallow always used to razz Herb about his get up. Ho ho ho, herb says reflexively. Merry Christmas. Sleigh bells ring. Are you listening? He gives a half hearted shake to a sock full of quarters. Hang on. Naughty cats can't sled without informed consent. Thanks to the Olivia Bill, new island legislation requires all island children to take a 14 hour sea safety course before they can sled. They have to wear helmets and life preservers and sign multiple waivers. Herb is dangling the permission form in front of our faces. Wallow accepts it with a genial thanks, Herb. Then he crushes it in his good fist. Now wait a sec. Herb scratches his ear. I didn't recognize you boys. I'm sorry, but you know I can't rent to you anyhow. It'll be dark soon and neither one of you is certified. Walla walks over to one of the sleds and unhelmeted, unjacketed, shoves it into the water. The half shell bobs there. One of the sturdier two seaters, a boiled red color. He picks up a pair of oars so that we can row against the riptides. He glares at Herb. We're gonna take the sled out tonight and tomorrow night and every night until our parents get back. We are going to keep taking it out until we find Olivia. He pauses. And we are going to pay you $376 in cash. Coincidentally, this is the exact dollar amount of Grenina's Social Security check. Herb doesn't say a word. He takes the wad of cash, runs a moistened finger through it, and stuffs it under his Santa hat. He waits until we are both in the sled before he opens his mouth. Boys, he says, you have that crab sled back here before dawn. Otherwise I'm calling the Coast Guard. Every night we go a little farther. Out here you can see dozens of shooting stars, whole galactic herds of them, winking out into cheery oblivion. They make me think of lemmings flinging themselves over an astral cliff. We are working our way around the island, with Gannon's boat graveyard as our ground zero. I swim parallel to the beach and Wallow follows along in the crab sled, marking up the shoreline that we've covered on our map. X marks all the places where Olivia is not. It's slow going, I'm not a strong swimmer, and I have to paddle back to wallow every 15 minutes. And just what are we going to do when we find her? I want to know. It's the third night of our search. We are halfway around the island on the sandbar, near the twinkling lights of the Bowl Abed Hotel. Wallow's face is momentarily illuminated by the cycloptic gaze of the lighthouse. It arcs out over the water, a thin scythe of light that serves only to make the rest of the ocean look scarier. What exactly are we going to do with her, Wallow? This question has been weighing on my mind more and more heavily of late. Because let's just say for argument's sake that there is a glowworm grotto and that Olivia's ghost haunts it. Then what do we genie in a bottle her keep her company on weekends? I envision eternal Saturday nights spent treading cold water in a cave, crooning lullabies to the husk of Olivia and shudder. What do you mean? Wallow says, frowning. We'll rescue her. We'll preserve her. You know, her memory. And how exactly do you propose we do that? I don't know, bro. Wallow furrows his brow, flustered. You can tell he hasn't thought much beyond finding Olivia. Well, we'll put her in an aquarium. An aquarium? Now it's My turn to be derisive. And then what are you going to get her? A kiddie pool? It seems to me that nobody's asking the hard questions here. For example, what if Ghost Olivia doesn't have eyes anymore? Or a nose? What if an eel has taken up residence inside her skull and every time it lights up it sends this unholy electricity radiating through her sockets? Wallow fixes me with a baleful stare. Are you pussying out, bro? She's your sister, for Christ's sake. You're telling me you're afraid of your own kid sister? Don't worry about what we're going to do with her, brother. We have to find her first. I say nothing, but I keep thinking it's been two years. What if all the Olivia ness has already seeped out of her and evaporated into the violet welter of clouds? Evaporated and rained down and evaporated and rained down Olivia slicking over all the rivers and trees and dirty cities in the world so that now there is only silt and our stupid salt diluted longing and nothing left of our sister to find. On the fourth night of our search, I see a churning clump of ghost children. They are drifting straight for me, all kelped together, an eyeless panic of legs and feet and hair. I kick for the surface, heart hammering. Wallow. I scream, hurling myself at the crab sled I just saw. I just. I'm not doing this anymore, bro. I am not. You can go stick your face in dead kids for a change. Let Olivia come find us. Calm it down. Wallow pokes at the ocean with his oar. It's only trash. He fishes out a nasty mass of diapers and chicken gristle and whiskery red seaweed, all threaded around the plastic rings of a six pack. See? I sit huddled in the corner of the sled, staring dully at the blank surface of the water. I know what I saw. The goggles are starting to feel less like a superpower and more like a divine punishment, one of those particularly inventive cruelties that you read about in Greek mythology. Every now and then I think about how simpler and more pleasant things would be if the goggles conferred a different kind of vision. Like if I could read messages written in squid ink or laser through the Brazilian girl's tankinis. But then Wallow interrupts these thoughts by dunking me under the water. Repeated repeatedly. Keep looking, he snarls, water dripping off his face. On the fifth night of our search, I see a plesiosaur it is a megawatt behemoth, bronze and blue, white streaking across the seafloor like a torpid comet. Watching it, I get this primordial deja vu like I'm watching a dream return to my body. It wings toward me with a slow avian grease. Its long neck is arced in an S shaped curve. Its lizard body is the size of Grannina's carport. Each of its ghost flippers pinwheels, colored light. I try to swim out of its path, but the thing's too big to avoid that leviathan fin. It shivers right through me. It's a light in my belly, cold and familiar, and I flashback to a snippet from school, a line from a poem or a science book, I can't remember which. There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction. I wake up from one of those naps which leech the strength from your bones to a lightning storm. I must have fallen asleep in the crab sled. Otherworldly light goes roiling through an eerie blue froth of clouds. Wallow is standing at the prow of the sled. Each flash of lightning limbs, his bared teeth, the hollows of his eyes. It's as if somebody up there were taking an X ray of grief again and again. I just want to tell her that I'm sorry, wallow says softly. He doesn't know that I'm awake. He's talking to himself, or maybe to the ocean. There's not a trace of fear in his voice, and it's clear then that Wallow is a better brother than I could ever hope to be. We have rowed almost all the way around the island. In a quarter of an hour we'll be back at Gannon's boat graveyard. Thank merciful Christ our parents are coming back tomorrow and I can go back to playing video games and feeling dry and blameless. Then the lighthouse beacon sweeps out again. It bounces off an outcropping of rocks that we didn't notice on our first expedition. White sequins of light pop along the water. Did you see that? That's it, Mallow says excitedly. That's gotta be it. Oh, excellent. We paddle the rest of the way out in silence. I row the crab sled like a condemned man. The current keeps pushing us back, but we make a quiet kind of progress. I keep praying that the crags will turn out to be low heaped clouds, or else a seamless mass of stone. Instead, you can tell that they are pocked with dozens of holes. For a second I'm relieved. Nobody, not even String Beanie Olivia, could swim into such narrow openings. Wallow's eyes dart around wildly. There has to be an entrance, he mutters. Look. Sure enough, there is a muted glow coming from the far end of a salt eaten overhang, like a light from under a door. No way can I fit in there. My gasp, knowing immediately that I can. And that the crab sled can't, of course. Which means I'll be going in to meet her alone. What if the light, I am thinking, is Olivia? It's just worms, bro, wallow says, as if reading my mind. But there is this inscrutable sadness on his face. His muddy eyes swallow up the light and give nothing back. I look over my shoulder. We're less than half a mile out from shore, could skip a stone to the mangrove islets, and yet the land draws back like a fat swimmer's chimera, impossibly far away. Ready? He grabs at the scrub of my neck and pushes me toward the water set. No. Staring at the unlit spaces in the crags, I am choked with horror. I fumble the goggles off my face. Do your own detective work. I dangle the goggles over the edge of the sled. I quit. I quit. Wallow lunges forward and pins me against the side of the boat. He tries to spatula me overboard with his one good arm, but I limbo under his cast. Don't do it, Timothy, he cautions, but it is too late. This is what I think of your diabolical goggles, I howl. I hoist the goggles over my head and with all the force in my puny arms, hurl them to the floor of the crab sled. This proves to be pretty anticlimactic. Naturally, the goggles remain intact. There's not even a hairline fracture. Stupid scratch proof lenses. The worst part is that Wallow just watches me impassively. His cast held a loft in the air as if he were patiently waiting to ask the universe a question. He nudges the goggles toward me with his foot. You finished, Wally? I blubber a last ditch plea. This is crazy. What if something happens to me in there and you can't come in after me? Let's go back. What? Lala barks, disgusted. And leave Olivia here for dead? Is that what you want? Bingo. That is exactly what I want. Maybe Grannina is slightly off target when it comes to the food pyramid, but she has the right idea about death. I want my parents to stop sailing around taking pictures of Sudanese leper colonies. I want wallow. To row back to shore and sleep through the night. I want everybody in the goddamn family to leave Olivia here for dead. But there's my brother, struggling with his own repugnance, like an entomologist who has just discovered a loathsome new species of beetle. What did you say? I said I'll go, I mumble. Not beating his eyes. I position myself on the edge of the boat. I'll go. So that's what it comes down to then. I'd rather drown in Olivia's ghost than have him look at me that way. To enter the grotto you have to slide in on your back like a letter through a mail slot. Something scrapes my coccyx bone on the way in. There's a polar chill in the water tonight. No outside light can wiggle its way inside. But sure enough, phosphorescent dots spangle the domed roof of the grotto. It's like a radiant checkerboard of shit. You can't impose any mental pictures on it. It's too uniform. It defies the mind's desire to constellate randomness. The glowworm grotto is nothing like the night sky. The stars here are all equally bright and evenly spaced, like a better ordered cosmos. Olivia. The grotto smells like salt and blood and batshit. Shadows web the walls. I try and fail to touch the bottom. Olivia. Her name echoes around the cave. After a while there is only rippled water again and the gonged absence of sound. Ten more minutes, I think I could splash around here for 10 more minutes and be done with this. I could take off the goggles. Even I could leave without ever looking below the surface of the water and wallow would never know. Ola. I take a deep breath and dive. Below me, tiny fish are rising out of golden cylinders of coral. It looks like an undersea calliope piping a song you can see instead of hear. One of the fish swims right up and taps against my scratch proof lenses. It's just a regular blue fish, solid and alive. It taps and taps, oblivious of the thick glass. My eyes cross, trying to keep it in focus. The fish swims off to the beat of some subaqueous music. Everything down here is dancing. The worm's green light and the undulant walls and the leopard spotted polyps. Everything. And following this fish is like trying to work backward from the dance to the song. I can't hear it though. I can't remember a single note of it. It fills me with a hitching sort of sadness. I trail the fish at an embarrassed distance, feeling warm blooded and ridiculous in my rubbery flippers, marooned in this clumsy body, like I'm an imposter, an imperfect monster. I look for my sister. But it's hopeless. The goggles are all fogged up. Every fish burns lantern bright and I can't tell the living from the dead. It's all just blurry light. Light smeared like some celestial fingerprint all over the rocks and the reef and the sunken garbage. Olivia could be everywhere.

[Deborah Treisman]

That was Louise Erdrich reading Haunting Olivia by Karen Russell. The story appeared in the New Yorker in June of 2005 and was included in Russell's debut story collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which was published by Knopf in 2006.

[Louise Erdrich]

Hi, this is David Remnick. I'm proud to share the news that three films from the New Yorker documentary series have been shortlisted for the Academy Awards and they are Incident Seat 31's Zoe Zephyr and Eternal Father. And they all immerse you in the finest cinematic journalism, exploring themes of justice, identity and the bonds that shape us. These extraordinary films, which were created by established filmmakers as well as emerging artists, will inform, challenge and move you. I encourage you to watch them along with our full slate of documentary and narrative [e-mail] video.

[Deborah Treisman]

So, Louise, let's start with the big question. There's no mystery about Olivia's state. The first time she's mentioned she is our dead sister. So what do you think these brothers are actually looking for? Is it her body? Are they looking for a ghost? Are they looking for a sign? Are they looking for absolution? What do you think it is?

[Louise Erdrich]

Well, I think Wallow says it very well when he thinks he's talking to himself and says that he wants to say that he's sorry. And I think that as you go on in life and you lose people, somehow there's always a part of you that goes back to something you wish you could apologize for or do over or talk through. No matter how fantastic, how wonderful your relationship was, in this case especially, Wallow feels responsible for her death and he wants to apologize. And. And I don't think it's the same for his little brother. I think his little brother wants to help his brother get to the other side of this. He seems as though he wants to do something for each of his parents, especially for his father, to find a memento, something to bury, you know, something. But it ends up being a really transformative experience for him. And you Feel by the end. Happiest for the narrator because the narrator has experienced a sort of transcendent communication, perhaps with her, with the living being that is the ocean. As he says that wonderful last line that Olivia could be everywhere. He's talked about her being rain falling across the entire world. So much like the end of Joyce's story the Dead. So beautiful.

[Deborah Treisman]

Yeah, Yeah. I hadn't thought about that.

[Louise Erdrich]

I felt it was a really beautiful way to end the story.

[Deborah Treisman]

In other words, they've already found her.

[Louise Erdrich]

Oh, yeah.

[Deborah Treisman]

Yeah.

[Louise Erdrich]

But we never know what Wallow's gonna say when he comes up. We never know. We don't know. I mean, Wallow may send his brother all the way around the is again.

[Deborah Treisman]

Yeah. What do you think the diabolical goggles are what happens when Timothy puts them on?

[Louise Erdrich]

Well, that's what's so incredible about Karen Russell's stories. I believe that these goggles enable a human being to see everything that has died in the ocean. I totally believe it. And I'm sure they're metaphorical too, but they're such a great invention. These little pink goggles that are so ridiculous, but they have the ability to cut through time, to see into another world. They have this terrible magical quality.

[Deborah Treisman]

But he sees sea creatures from all times. He sees the ghosts of sea creatures. He doesn't see his sister.

[Louise Erdrich]

No, no. And that's part of what's great about the story, too, is that she is those sea creatures. I mean, undoubtedly she did die the way her father thought she died. And so she is part of the sea. She's literally part of the sea. And so he is seeing her.

[Deborah Treisman]

You know, it's an interesting title, Haunting Olivia. Because usually it's the dead person who haunts you, not you. Haunting the dead. Do you think they are haunting her?

[Louise Erdrich]

Well, possibly. I mean, they're haunting the ocean. Yeah.

[Deborah Treisman]

Yeah.

[Louise Erdrich]

And they're.

[Deborah Treisman]

It's not Olivia's haunting. It's something that they are actively doing, the boys.

[Louise Erdrich]

I suppose haunting also engages your thoughts in something chasing you as well. And they're chasing her. They're trying to come upon her somehow. They're doing everything they can. Or they are, but, you know, it's the big brother. And the big brother is pretty cruel to his little brother. You know, this kid is scared, but he throws them in anyway. Wallow with his tusky teeth and bulky shoulders. Yeah. This is another thing about Karen Russell. The descriptions of people, they're fantastical. I mean, the banana grannina and the Santa hat wearing herb and all of the people who make their appearances are indelible.

[Deborah Treisman]

Yeah. They're ridiculous, but you can see them. It's interesting that both of the boys are named for birds, you know, Waldo Swallow and Timothy Sparrow. And then in the story, they're spending all their time in water, not in the air, as we were saying earlier.

[Louise Erdrich]

Yeah. Though he sees the Pleistar has an avian grace and is sort of winging its way. So, you know, the bird dinosaur connection is fantastic right there. I love that. And it's funny that birds are creepy.

[Deborah Treisman]

Yeah. I mean, maybe just the bird names are just an emblem of their parents fascination and not theirs.

[Louise Erdrich]

Their parents are creepy people, really.

[Deborah Treisman]

Their parents have flown off strange.

[Louise Erdrich]

Yes. You have to have that in order to have a couple of boys who don't have to think about their parents or they don't have to be in the story. You know, I like that she doesn't kill them off in an automobile accident in the first paragraph, which is what always happens. No, she lets them be.

[Deborah Treisman]

In order for children to have an adventure, their parents have to be missing.

[Louise Erdrich]

Exactly.

[Deborah Treisman]

You know, the one thing that's right there from this first story in Karen's work is this idea of ghosts. You know, so many of her stories involve ghosts, involve characters who you don't necessarily know are ghosts. What kind of role do you think they play for her as a writer?

[Louise Erdrich]

You're right. So so many ghosts. Let's see what is going on.

[Deborah Treisman]

Maybe it's like what's happening in the sea here. You know that everything is there if you can see it. Right. The past is there if you can see it. If you have your right goggles on.

[Louise Erdrich]

I'd say that Karen has really got those goggles. Like, I can see Karen kind of hunched over her pad of paper or her computer with those goggles on, writing what she sees all the time.

[Deborah Treisman]

Yeah, yeah. If you write a lot of stories about ghosts, you're also writing a lot of stories about loss and about bereavement. Ghosts are a way either of underscoring that loss or of maybe providing solace for it.

[Louise Erdrich]

There is solace in the idea of ghosts and in the experience that people have. I mean, I used to do this a lot at readings. I would ask people in the audience how many people believed in ghosts. And practically no one would raise their hand. But then I would say, how many people have either seen a ghost or know somebody who had an experience with a ghost? And almost every hand would go up then. Ghosts are really part of our lives from the beginning. I mean, from the very beginning of literature, from the very beginning of human culture, before it was ever written down, there were ghosts. Yeah.

[Deborah Treisman]

Yeah. I mean, there's always been death, so there's always been some kind of contemplation of afterlife, I suppose.

[Louise Erdrich]

And it's this intense longing. I think that's really what the story is about, too. It's about this intense longing that these boys have to somehow do right by their sister. That's part of it, too. They just haven't done right by her somehow, until they go to the end, absolute end of experience to try and find her. Yeah.

[Deborah Treisman]

That's really Wallow's feeling, though, right? Isn't it? Because Timothy just wants it to be over, wants the grief to be over. He wants this hunting for her to be over. Or he resists it.

[Louise Erdrich]

He does. He does. And he's too young to realize that it's never over. You don't get over it. With time, it becomes something that you find a way to live with.

[Deborah Treisman]

Yeah. One way I read the story is, you know, these boys feel guilty because they left. But here you have these boys, you know, they're alive, but no one really seems to care about them in the way that Olivia was cared about. You know, the parents have gone off. Grandina couldn't care less.

[Louise Erdrich]

Right.

[Deborah Treisman]

What they've lost is their own childhood. Now their childhood is clouded by this grief and this guilt, and, you know, they're trapped in it. Well, that's.

[Louise Erdrich]

Yeah, that's why the parents are so creepy, because we don't know that they really valued Olivia that much. We just know that if one of their children dies, they value that child the most.

[Deborah Treisman]

Mm. Maybe that's why they're, you know, going around the world looking for children in.

[Louise Erdrich]

Peril, and they don't see that their boys are in peril.

[Deborah Treisman]

Yeah. I'm gonna go back briefly to the idea of Karen Russell wearing her goggles at the keyboard, because I asked her about what inspired this story. And, you know, it's such an otherworldly story, and it was inspired by a very real moment in the world. So she said she had the idea for it when she was working for Putney Student Travel. She was a trip leader. She'd taken a group of high school students on a trip to Cuba, and they were snorkeling next to a shipwreck, she says, and a tiny blue fish came up and tapped at my goggles. I can't put into words why this was so moving to me, but somehow that little tapping displaced me from the center of my experience underwater, I could feel the wild autonomy of all the life around me. The incredibly old and young reef. I surfaced and didn't know how to talk to the sunburned teenagers as about what had just happened. The entire ocean must be haunted by billions of years of living and dying. Wouldn't it be something if you had goggles that let you see underwater ghosts? The kids looked at me with pity and patience. A look that said, hey, lady, where's lunch? So I love that this all started with one little fish, you know, became this work.

[Louise Erdrich]

Yeah, I do, too. I'm going to ask her what set her off on each story, because I hope there's a story with each story that she's reading.

[Deborah Treisman]

A story like that is there for you.

[Louise Erdrich]

There's something. But it isn't always a story or a moment that has such clarity. Sometimes it's, you know, a set of trivial pieces of experience that somehow coalesce, get together. They become a kind of aggregate. And then you start writing. Before I start writing. Yeah.

[Deborah Treisman]

I feel that the pacing of the story is unusual. It feels very even and steady. There isn't really a climax to it, unless you think of the very end as the climax. It seems not quite narrative. It's just moments, in a way.

[Louise Erdrich]

You know, I like that. I was hoping to talk about the pacing, too, because I felt that she built in a kind of suspense. You don't know what happened to Olivia, and you get glimpses all the way through. And there is a kind of suspense in that. Like, is Olivia gonna come back at some point? And then you start understanding as you realize the hurricane and you realize everything that happened. Then another piece of suspense takes place. Because then you realize, oh, my God, these guys are doing something insanely dangerous. Yeah, basically rowing around in a crab.

[Deborah Treisman]

Shell night after night, night after night.

[Louise Erdrich]

You know, I felt like seeing the dinosaur at the bottom. You went to the oldest part of the vision that he's having. You went to the oldest part of the ocean and saw the oldest. One of the oldest creatures. There's all this randomness, and all of a sudden the universe is lined up, but it's a universe of shit. Which I think is really reminiscent of one of the Northwest coast tribal origin stories where human beings are made out of the shit that a raven leaves behind as it's flying across the world or something in that. I can't remember what it is exactly, but it's a very old origin story. So I think that whatever Karen's doing, she always taps into something that's way out there and way in there. And she's absorbing the sorts of stories that have an eternal quality and that's coming out of her pen while she's seeing things through her little goggles. Her little pink goggles.

[Deborah Treisman]

They're also. Most of her stories are kind of mysteries, and this one is an unsolved mystery. I mean, in this one, I guess it's sort of up to the reader because you have that final scene and, you know, she's given us a logical, rational, real world explanation for it. It is the shit. It's bioluminescence. And then she's also given us many reasons to feel that it's not just that. That those little ghost shrimp lined up in the shape of Glowworm Grotto for a reason and that there's. There is something else happening. That's true.

[Louise Erdrich]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Deborah Treisman]

I mean, as an ending, it. It seems sort of perfect to me because you can argue either point of view. You can say it's a natural occurrence and yes, it might give these boys solace. Or you can say it's something completely otherworldly sent to them by the spirit of Olivia. You know, you can. You can choose.

[Louise Erdrich]

That's true. That's true. Yeah. We can go back and assemble an answer out of all of the wonderful things she's given us, including a lot of trash. I always love that there's trash in a lot of her books. I appreciate that.

[Deborah Treisman]

Yeah. She's in a world where there's just heaps of things all the time.

[Louise Erdrich]

Heaps of things. She builds so much out of all of the things that we take for granted and that we. We see every day. And yet she makes marvels out of them.

[Deborah Treisman]

You know, you were talking earlier about Karen's language, her use of words. It's distinctive. What do you think makes it so distinctive to her? I mean, it's very easy to recognize her sentences.

[Louise Erdrich]

It's very magical, it's very strange. And it's like no other writing. And it never lets up. It's not like she has two or three really interesting ways of describing something. The story is absolutely jammed full. And that's what I love too. It's bewildering. But it's not just that. I mean, I happen to be lucky enough to have exchanged some emails with Karen and the crazily. Karen writes this way all the time.

[Deborah Treisman]

Yes, she does.

[Louise Erdrich]

And you think, what? There's something that Karen has that is impossible to quantify and there's nobody else who does this or who can do it well.

[Deborah Treisman]

Thank you so much, Louise.

[Louise Erdrich]

Thanks, Deborah.

[Deborah Treisman]

Karen Russell is the author of five books of fiction, including the novel Swamplandia, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the story collections St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Orange World and Other Stories. A new novel, Antidote, will be published in March of 2025. Louise Erdrich's novels include the Painted Drum, the Roundhouse, which won the National Book Award in 2012, and the Night Watchman, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2021. A winner of the Penn Solbello Award and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, she'll publish a new novel, the Mighty Red, in October. You can hear Louise Erdrich on two previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, reading and discussing stories by Laurie Moore and Joyce Carol Oates. You can Download more than 200 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast podcast or subscribe to the podcast for free and 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 and 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 Michelle Moses. I'm Deborah Treisman. Thanks for listening. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz. And we are Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. Guys, what do we do on the show every week? We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out. That's right. We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a book. Maybe it's just kind of a trend that we see floating in the ether and we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template. We talked about the midlife crisis, starting with a new book by Miranda July, but then we kind of ended up talking about Dante's Inferno. You know, we talked about Kate Middleton, her so called disappearance, and from that we moved into right wing conspiracy theories. Alex basically promised to explain to me why everybody likes the Beatles. You know, we've also noticed that advice is everywhere. Advice columns, advice giving. And we kind of want to look at why. Join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts.

[Louise Erdrich]

From PRX.