In September 2004, Harcourt released Gifts, a new novel by Ursula K. Le Guin aimed at the young adult market. The press release I have for it states, “Gifts is Ms. Le Guin’s first novel for teens in decades. Like so much of her writing, it is beautifully crafted and extends beyond the typical YA audience.”
I hadn’t thought about Gifts in a long time, until a friend told me he was using it in a YA fiction workshop he’s teaching. I vaguely remembered reading the book, but had mostly forgotten it. From the archives of The Mumpsimus, I see I read it in 2008 when the trilogy for which it is the first book got completed. The only thing I wrote about it was:
I read all three of Ursula Le Guin’s recent YA novels: Gifts, Voices, and Powers, but though they were pleasant enough to read, they didn’t really do much for me. Voices was my favorite by far, though even there I thought Le Guin was treading on ground she’d walked more gracefully before, particularly in Four Ways to Forgiveness, just about my favorite of her books.
It is true that Four Ways to Forgiveness is richer, more complex, more challenging than any of Le Guin’s young adult novels. That’s partly a result of the genre: it is not a hard and fast rule that YA novels must be simpler than adult novels (see Octavian Nothing, which is more complex than plenty of novels aimed at adults), but if there is to be a distinction between YA and A, then there needs to be something other than the fact that it’s a story about teens, or else Samuel Delany’s Hogg is a YA novel. More than anything else, YA is a marketing category, and different publishers have different standards for what fits as YA vs. A vs. Middle Grade, etc. But writers also need their distinctions, at least if they are intentionally creating something for a particular audience, as Le Guin seems to have done with the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy. (It’s a different question when something is retroactively made YA, as lots of old science fiction has been. Calling books originally published for an adult audience YA — whether old SF or books that got commonly assigned to high school classes such as The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, etc. — is an appropriation that may not serve the books well. Or consider: Is The Color Purple YA?)
For Le Guin, the difference between her nominally adult and teen novels is not simply a difference in protagonists (she frequently wrote about young characters) but a difference in what I can only think of as pitch. She could have said her 1978 novel The Eye of the Heron is a YA novel; its language and structure are straightforward enough to fit what she seemed to think of as appropriate for a story aimed at teenagers, and it has enough young characters to hold the interest of readers who can’t bear to spend a whole novel in the mind of someone a generation older than themselves, or who, if adult, prefer primarily to read about characters a generation [or more] younger than themselves. But The Eye of the Heron, while perfectly appropriate for a younger audience, doesn’t seem pitched at them in the way Gifts and the other Western Shore novels are — these are books where Le Guin seems very much to be sitting down to tell a story to teens. It’s a fuzzy distinction, I know, and hard to point to any specific textual effects that represent some sort of border between Le Guin’s work for younger audiences and her work for adults, but it still feels baked into the books for me: that sense that here is a writer sitting down with a particular audience in mind. It’s not exclusionary, she’s not putting up “Keep Out!” signs against those of us who are very much not young adults anymore, but at the same time this is not a book for us older folks. Thus, when in 2008 I said the trilogy didn’t do much for me, that is in some ways simply a description of how it affected someone who was not the books’ primary audience. These were not books intended to do much for someone like me!
Rereading Gifts, I still had some of that sense, but it is less pronounced now. Now, I find myself captivated by and even a bit in awe of Le Guin’s narrative tenderness. It’s enlightening to think of the book in the old Russian Formalist terms of fabula (overall story) and syuzhet (organization) — the story and the world of that story are the stuff of countless epic fantasies, but this is not an epic novel. It’s the tale of some young people with inherited powers who must learn to use those powers to save their loved ones and the little tribe of which they are a part. There are moments of violence and even some battles, but they are dealt with cursorily. Much more attention is given to the details and events of their everyday lives. The fabula is rich with adventure and conflict, the syuzhet, in contrast, is almost shockingly small and quiet. For those of us who cherish Le Guin, this is one of the key things we cherish: hers is not the way of writers who want lots of swordfights and magic battles, hers is the way of attention to ordinary life in worlds where swordfights and magic battles may be happening, but cows still need to get milked and crops still need to get planted. This is what I mean by the tenderness of her narrative structures. She attends primarily to the ordinariness of her worlds and characters, even when they are extraordinary worlds and extraordinary characters.
(I think of Le Guin as fundamentally a rural writer. Even though she lived in cities and wrote about cities, still she writes about them as small places. Her imagination seemed to need the constrictions of small settlements and feudal political structures for her to be able to tell stories about the kinds of relationships she sought to illuminate and explore.)
In Gifts, there are few surprises in terms of plot — for instance, the narrator, Orrec, is clearly going to end up with the one love of his life, Gry — and part of what kept me from fully embracing the novel when I first read it was this general lack of narrative tension and surprise. Of course, Le Guin rarely (especially in later life) wrote stories that relied on a conventional idea of surprise. That’s part of what makes some of her work feel so strange, because it goes against what we expect from narrative. I have often thought that it is surprise (or novelty) that drives narrative, but Le Guin makes me wonder about that. Hers is an art of accumulation of detail — much as I resist the concept of worldbuilding (I’m on M. John Harrison’s side with regard to that), the whole thrust of so much of her writing is in that direction, though not in any typical way. Hers might be called mythic worldbuilding, maybe even just mythbuilding (a term sadly too close to Mythbusters for us to use it): she is not interested in creating encyclopedias of details to be referenced and cross-referenced, she is not (as so many writers seem to be) adding chunks of plot to what is essentially a worldbook for a roleplaying game that doesn’t exist. She is instead weaving together details of setting, character, imagined history, and imagined politics to render in the reader’s mind a sense that what we experience when we read is a shard of a legend. This is different from building a world in the reader’s mind. Yes, there is a world (a setting). It has details and the text continues to add details as we go along. The setting becomes more clear, more familiar. But not for its own sake. The setting, characters, and events serve a greater and unified purpose, a purpose that is sometimes didactic (Le Guin could be an assertively didactic writer, and her weakest books and stories are the ones where the tendencies of the preacher overcome the tendencies of the storyteller) but more often about weaving a texture from narrative elements to create a fabric of image, emotion, and suspended disbelief.
Reading it this time, Gifts seemed to me not only a fine exemplar of Le Guin’s approach but also something of a meditation on it. There is a question threaded through the book of whether the various families’ supernatural gifts are real or whether they are powerful because people believe that they are real. The book leans on the side of at least some of them being real — there seems to be magic here within the immediate story, events which are witnessed by multiple characters and not explicable in any natural way — but the weight of the story falls to questions of how much of what is known about the gifts is actually known versus a tale passed down through generations because it served a useful purpose. We see this when Orrec chooses to wear a blindfold because he is convinced he has no control over his destructive ability and could at any moment kill someone he loves. Stories begin circulating of his astonishing and terrifying powers, powers he’s not even sure he has, and which definitely did not manifest in the ways the stories say. These stories, though, are a kind of power of their own. This is the great lesson for him: reality may be less important than the way reality is interpreted, the legends that blossom from the cold facts. When he and Gry leave their little farmlands, they head off to the city where such gifts are not believed in, a path of danger but also maturation, and one which in many ways mimics the path of human history away from small agricultural groups (full of their own weirdnesses, their own superstitions) and toward industrial and post-industrial urban life: plenty weird, plenty superstitious, but supposedly disenchanted (indeed, instead of Gifts another title for the book might be Disenchantments).
More than these ideas or the interesting question of its unconventional plotting, I was drawn this time to some of Le Guin’s prose. She was always a straightforward and unstuffy writer, and her books for younger people are especially so. I did not appreciate this when I first read Gifts as much as I do now. I was stopped short by this passage, for instance, about a loss in Orrec’s family’s life:
Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone. How you bear it is up to you. Or so it seems to me. Maybe in saying so I’m ungrateful to Gry, and to the people of the house and domain, my companions, without whom I might not have carried my burden through the dark year.
So I call it in my mind: the dark year.
To try to tell it is like trying to tell the passage of a sleepless night. Nothing happens. One things, and dreams briefly, and wakes again; fears loom and pass, and ideas won’t come clear, and meaningless words haunt the mind, and the shudder of nightmare brushes by, and time seems not to move, and it’s dark, and nothing happens.
Canoc and I were not companions in our grief. We could not be. However untimely and cruel my loss, I had lost only what time must take and can replace. For him there was no replacement; the sweetness of his life was gone.
Because he was left solitary, and because he blamed himself, his sorrow was hard, and angry, and found no relief.
There’s a formality to this writing, but no stiffness. The formality seems to me to express Orrec’s pain. Another writer might have chosen to underpunctuate the writing and ramp up the emotions, pushing everything in an expressionistic way, making the prose reflect the mental torment of the character. Le Guin went in the opposite direction. Her prose holds the great emotion back, trusting the prose’s own power and the reader’s sympathetic imagination. We do not need theatrics or fireworks. The language can give us just enough to let our minds do the work of feeling.
The second sentence of the first quoted paragraph is relatively long, and its length contributes to its meaning as it continues to defer conclusion until that final, lonely, devastating clause. There are two paragraphs that are only one sentence, but one of those paragraphs is quite short, creating an effect like a timpani in an orchestra, while the other is longer, reiterating some of the serial structure of earlier sentences but also corralling the structure, bringing us to something like an end point. The words are simple ones, most of them only a syllable or two, and quite ordinary. The passage is affecting and poetic not in spite of its ordinary language but because of it — because that language is contained within resonant structures of punctuation and sentence style. The punctuation is doing a lot of work in this passage. The commas create groups, the colons and semi-colons establish both breaks and connections. Note what is absent: exclamation points. Again, we can see how the immense emotionalism contained in the language is, in fact, contained. No screaming and yelling here — and all the more powerful for it.
(I’ve elsewhere told the story of an acting teacher who told us that the key to moving an audience during a sad scene in a play is not to do their crying for them. Bring yourself as the actor as close to tears as you can get without actually breaking into tears. Then let the audience do the rest of the work. That same principle can apply quite well to narrative.)
When I first read Gifts, I had a bit of a sense of “That’s it?” at the end. I remember this, remember even wondering, “So what?” Though this book was written for young people, my youth, I think, was an impediment. My tastes were not mature enough yet for this kind of story. Reader, I must confess: at the end this time I was sobbing. The last scene, the last few paragraphs are not showy, not insistent, not loud. Yet there is something about their absolute ordinariness — I keep using that word ordinary! — in describing events that are monumental in the characters’ lives, something that pulled at my imagination and heartstrings quite deeply. I closed the book and sat with it on my lap for a few minutes while I let the story, characters, setting, and language all settle in my mind. While not in any way a big book, Gifts is a deeply satisfying one. The tale is gently told, and I found myself needing that gentleness, needing a quiet sky for reflection, not a sky lit by fireworks. This is a chamber piece, not a symphony, even if it has all the material for a symphony. The accomplishment is in some ways even greater, the way a perfectly honed short story can be greater than a baggy novel on a similar topic.
It is also a mature accomplishment. While Le Guin’s early writing is often impressive, it’s the assurance of her later work that always most excites me, because it is the assurance of an experienced writer who knew when a gesture or a whisper could achieve more than a grand flailing or a bellowing yawp.
