Rachel Ingalls has been rediscovered to acclaim for incorporating elements into her books others might consider schlocky, fantastical and melodramatic elements such as those featured in B-movies. (She had a tolerable professional experience with Hollywood.) Reading a short story collection, the one book of hers available in the library system back in California, Times Like These (2005), I found the mode of storytelling at once reminiscent of Shakespeare and The Twilight Zone. Her approach isn't gimmicky, nor is she making a point of blending genres. Instead I sense it comes naturally, a weird product of style and love. My reaction to the collection overall was lukewarm but I was still curious to see what would happen when she applied her approach to a longer form, the short novel or novella. Mrs. Caliban (1982), which the library system here in New Jersey did have, is the book she's chiefly known for, the one I'd originally been seeking out. It's the story of a romance between a housewife and a monsterman.
The sudden intrusion of this "monsterman," a 6-foot 7-inch humanoid frog creature named Larry, is what gets the plot rolling. As both torrid love affair and tale of a visitor to our world, however, the novel is predictable and rather dull. There's some human-on-monster sex, in case you were wondering, and if the notion is amusing or hot, reading the one or two pages in total devoted to it doesn't add anything. Larry, meanwhile, whose people aren't individualized, doesn't have a personality. He likes avocadoes. But when it comes to cereal, he'd sooner eat the box. And that's about it.
Despite what its reputation may suggest, the title tells us whose book it is. Ingalls's use of ambiguity is what lifts it from being wholly forgettable, creating at least two different stories, depending on whether Larry exists or he's the imaginary lover of Dorothy, childless after one dies accidentally and another is lost in miscarriage, married only in legal terms, quietly stagnating. I have to disagree with readers who describe the book as comic or tragicomic, since I didn't laugh, really, and not because I think Ingalls tries to make me laugh and fails. One version is tragic. The other isn't so easy to classify.
To escape a life of suffering, to have a chance of starting anew, one option, this other reading says, is to shatter it.
I don't remember "The Metamorphosis" merely for its premise. I remember the apple lodged in Gregor Samsa's bug flesh. And to remember it is to feel it. I remember Ingalls's fantasy but I don't feel it.
