Catherynne M. Valente is a weird writer. “The Orphan’s Tales” is told as a girl telling a story about a prince listening to a story about a witch hearing her grandmother’s story, and deeper it goes. One short story that I tried very hard to read, “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica,” is in the form of notes on hypothetical maps of Antarctica. Valente is fond of writing in bizarre forms; not all her books are gimmicked, but her saturated, ridiculous style of writing is what her gimmicks are all about. Sometimes it’s fun, and sometimes it is way too much.
In my mind, a gimmick story is any writing that has some sort of idea behind the structure: stories within stories, a choose-your-own-adventure, a book whose paragraphs get longer the longer you read it. Valente writes gimmicks that require an immense focus on detail. In “The Orphan’s Tales,” her prompt is to write stories within stories within stories. In order to write so many stories, she needs a hundred characters in a hundred predicaments. She pulls backstories and world building out of a seemingly bottomless magician’s hat to fulfill the task she’s set for herself.
In “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica,” each map is named, numbered, dated, condition noted and professionally described. I can barely name the town my characters live in! The gimmicks she writes demand that she comes up with piles of information, lists of stuff, and she is very good at it.
Her list-writing seeps into all of her works, even when they have no particular gimmick calling for it. The opening line of her children’s book “The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making” reads, “Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents’ house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog.” Not only has Valente listed some four drudgeries upon September’s existence, but each is flushed out and given measured time in the sentence. The book is a story about a child who is spirited off to a magical land, with no structural calling for detail, but thick with it anyway.
Some of her writing is so convoluted with stuff that it becomes increasingly difficult to read. I will never read “Radiance,” a novel that contains, among other things, a ship’s manifest, detailing the contents of a hypothetical cargo ship. But while some of her writing is so syrupy with piles of nonsense that most can’t wade through it, the imagery she deploys in her more tame novels turn her prose to opulent word-pictures. Her lists become just as necessary to her traditional format of stories as the bizarre ones, painting tales about the fullness of the world and the peculiarity of living in it.