Powerful but false: The Crane Husband

Earlier posts on this topic:

What creates power in fiction.

Powerful novels: Night Watch

Powerful novels: From All False Doctrine

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I read The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill late last year.

I had two primary reactions to this book, one immediately and one more toward the end of the story.

The early reaction, to which the lovely cover contributed, was: Wow, this is beautifully written.

The late reaction, as I saw how the story worked itself out, was: Wow, this is awful.

Here’s the post I put up at the time. I’ll pull part of that out below, but first, here are the boldfaced quotes above the description at Amazon:

“If I had to nominate a worthy successor to Angela Carter, I would nominate Kelly Barnhill. “—Laura Ruby, two-time National Book Award finalist and author of Bone Gap

“A slim little novella that packs a narrative punch more intense than that of many books ten times its length.”—NPR

Award-winning author Kelly Barnhill brings her singular talents to The Crane Husband, a raw, powerful story of love, sacrifice, and family.

I don’t know anything about Angela Carter. I admire Laura Ruby — I’ve only read two books of hers and I admire them both. One was Bone Gap and the other was Thirteen Doorways. Ruby is a heck of a writer. I think both those books are powerful and both are also good and both capture something true. I would be more inclined to pick up a book because Laura Ruby put a comment like this on the cover — or I would have been, before reading The Crane Husband.

The NPR comment is correct: The Crane Husband does pack a punch. That’s because of the beautiful writing. It is intense. Of course intensity and quality have nothing to do with length, so not sure about the rest of that comment. I think NPR’s reviewer was saying This is a powerful book. I think they’re right. It is powerful.

That exact term, powerful, is then used in the third bolded line: a raw, powerful story of love, sacrifice, and family. Yes, that’s quite true. What that line doesn’t say is: The Crane Husband is about love that is self-destructive and helpless. It doesn’t say: The Crane Husband is about sacrifice that is worthless and saves nothing. It doesn’t say: The Crane Husband is about the family as something that can’t be saved from hidden or overt evil, and also isn’t worthy of being saved.

Here’s the description:

A fifteen-year-old teenager is the backbone of her small Midwestern family, budgeting the household finances and raising her younger brother while her mom, a talented artist, weaves beautiful tapestries. For six years, it’s been just the three of them—her mom has brought home guests at times, but none have ever stayed. Yet when her mom brings home a six-foot tall crane with a menacing air, the girl is powerless to prevent her mom letting the intruder into her heart, and her children’s lives. Utterly enchanted and numb to his sharp edges, her mom abandons the world around her to weave the masterpiece the crane demands.

In this stunning contemporary retelling of “The Crane Wife” by the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon, one fiercely pragmatic teen forced to grow up faster than was fair will do whatever it takes to protect her family—and change the story.

Bold is mine. Look at that. The girl is powerless. The crane is violent, abusive, threatening, and in the end deadly. The girl is powerless to protect her mother. The girl might “do whatever it takes,” but her efforts fail. She does not change the story. Her mother dies. Her family is permanently shattered. This is not necessary; if the girl had acted in exactly the same way, but earlier, she might have saved her mother. Her early paralysis means that she fails when she might have succeeded.

The girl is acting, at the end, primarily to save her younger brother. He doesn’t die, but he is lost in the foster care system, runs away from his foster family, and is never heard from again — an ending we see in a short epilogue that exists, apparently, to make it clear that the girl has indeed saved nothing. That epilogue shows a damaged girl turning inward, fully rejecting even the memory of the mother she failed to save, the mother who failed her children — it’s failure and rejection all the way around. The core message of this story is: No one can save anything, and there was never anything worth saving.

In my earlier comments, linked above, I said, in part:

This story presents a problem that cannot be overcome in time to save the family; love that is unbearable and broken; relationships that irretrievably shatter; a nameless protagonist who is highly competent and yet unable to save anything she loves; and all of this against a backdrop that showcases the implacable and impersonal destruction of personal history and the roots of families – but the long history of this family is also shown as implacable, impersonal, and destructive. …

Unlike with other stories, I don’t feel that the protagonist is ineffectual because the author lacks the skill to redesign the plot in order to make her effectual. As I’m sure the author has every bit of the skill she would need to do anything, I’m left to conclude that she deliberately chose to draw a world where it’s impossible to win, and worse, a world where winning wouldn’t get you anything worth having because the history of the family is based on abuse, and family bonds are seen primarily as bonds, particularly as bonds for women. The family is shown here as something to escape, in particular for mothers to escape, and if you actually have something worthwhile within the family, too bad, because here we see a situation where even the best family bonds are shown as inevitably and irretrievably shattered.

To sum that up even more briefly: the themes in this story reflect a thoroughly distorted world, a world in which determination does not pay off, where good people first strive ineffectually against evil in order to save relationships that cannot be saved, then realize nothing was worth saving and turn entirely inward. The end.

Or you could say: a world in which families are prisons, in which loveless men use women to produce children, generation after generation; in which mothers both reject their children and are rejected by them; in which families cannot be saved and are not worth saving. The end.

Because Kelly Barnhill is such a skilled writer at the sentence and paragraph level, because she is is skilled at the story level, these themes can’t be accidental. I mean, they don’t have to be conscious. But, whether she thought about this or not, this is the world Barnhill shows the reader. Because she’s a skilled writer, The Crane Husband reverberates with power. Because every theme in this story is both false and pernicious, I’m not too thrilled about that.

It’s not, by the way, that I don’t realize families can be destructive to the people held to them by relationships that are harmful. It’s that this is not usually the way families work and not the way families ought to work and not the way families ever do work if the people in the family have the least notion of how to be decent people. The presentation of the world in The Crane Husband is therefore a thoroughly distorted vision — but powerful.

Because thinking about this story is pretty unpleasant for me, I want to end this post by contrasting the above view of family very briefly with the view of family we see in From All False Doctrine, via a direct quote. This is Kit explaining a revelation about what a family should be and can be:

“But then I met the Peachams, and saw how they had created this home that was a place of such love — on purpose they had done that. Not that it was difficult or anything … you wouldn’t find it anything particularly out of the way, I daresay. They’re just a happy family. But I remember the first time I thought, I could do that. … [Watching the Peacham family] was like … seeing the inside of a car, how the engine works or something. … It was a revelation: they work at it. They try, they do the right things, most of the time, and the result is this beautiful place where love presides even over stupid arguments. And it flashed into my mind that I was probably capable of doing the same thing, that this could be one of the things I was for. You know how if you learn a language later in life, you might never pass for a native, but if you work at it, just because you have to make that extra effort, your grammar and your vocabulary and everything can be excellent … It’s like that.”

There you go. Barnhill, in The Crane Husband, holds up a view of family that makes you want to run screaming from the very idea. She tells you that if you try to build a family, you’re building a prison; that even relationships that seem positive will shatter and be lost. Degan’s view of family is aspirational. She holds up an example of family that makes you want to build stronger, better relationships and tells you that you can do that. They’re both powerful stories. That’s why power and truth aren’t the same thing.

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