After reading two novels by Kathryn Davis, I’m waving her banner as best I can, everywhere I go. I’m the one carrying that paperback through Hanover, hoping someone will stop and ask about it. She’s a dynamite storyteller, as inventive as Mervyn Peake, a mid-20th-century fantasy author, but kinder to the reader. These stories aren’t necessarily fantasy-genre, but they’re not entirely not, either. There are phantasms that may or may not be angels in love with humans (Labrador), a grade-school girl with a supernatural power normally only granted saints (A Thin Place), and I hear tell The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, which is next on my shelf, features the work of Hans Christian Andersen.
Davis lives in Montpelier and her stories are often set in small northern-New England towns like ours, as well as in upstate New York. It’s dazzling to read such inventive tales set right around the corner, full of the flora we know, populated with figures familiar and compellingly different.
At one point in Davis’ A Thin Place, a novel about the small Vermont town of Varennes that might be based on Vergennes, the narrator realizes that “Humans can’t live without projects.” It’s Davis’ own project to pen winding, gleeful plots with a bead on the human soul. Writing about an angel who may or may not be haunting a young girl in Labrador, she gives us enchanting scenes suggestive of vast spools of story behind the main line. Why an angel, why here, why now? Interesting that God is so often portrayed as a haunting presence in Davis’ works. I’m not confident I know her guiding philosophy here, but I’m eager to find out more.
Davis makes storytelling such fun – such mysterious, day-dreamy fun – with yet plenty of signal, fraught insight into the human condition. In The Thin Place, there’s a scene at a church service that verges on bursting (I remember the Tom Waits lyric about steam grates making “the whole city look like it’s about to blow”). Here at this little white church one summer morning there gather breathless figures, coming in so late, sweating; others sit stiff as marionettes in the pews, clutching purses and hymnals. Each is wound tight, especially when a seemingly rabid woman enters and begins swearing openly at everyone assembled. What a scene of forced small-town intimacy and the loosed madness that sets it all in high relief.
In quieter scenes of reflection and everyday action, Davis enters her characters and pulls out their deepest hopes, disgusts, secrets—these characters are real and Davis a fortune teller. From the opening scene of Labrador, Davis involves the reader in a breathtaking tumble through a fantastical childhood world, from a lake house in New Hampshire to the Canadian tundra. Two sisters, involved in wildly imaginative and long-lived private games, must fall mercy to “the whole world, that sphere of green and blue stuck through like a pomander ball with weapons.” Their long-lost grandfather reappears suddenly one evening, “his body looking as if it had been whittled, late at night in the light of the moon, by an absentminded sailor who did not know when to stop.” It’s seething descriptions like these that have me hooked.
Bear Pond Books in Montpelier had a number of Davis books on the shelf when I bought The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf. The store needs an Enthusiasm all its own. If you go, get lunch (only lunch) at Wilaiwan’s Kitchen, the best and most literal hole-in-the-wall food experience I know.
Kate Oden is a writer and editor living in Hanover. She also runs a tiny literary journal called Mande*.*