Skin

Kellie Wells (hardcover, 243 pages, University of Nebraska Press; 2006. $27.95)

Reviewed by Rachel Swearingen

In Skin, Kellie Wells’ novel-in-stories, scars are sites of healing as much as they are repositories for suffering. The motifs of skin and scar appear repeatedly throughout the book, and the structure of the novel itself forms a tissue of interrelated, almost symbiotic smaller narratives. For Wells, skin is not just the vast organ that protects the human body; it is also the narrative fabric that connects the human community, and the membrane that separates the otherworldly from the all-too earthly. 

Skin follows the lives of the residents of What Cheer, Kansas, where the “gardenia-scented air fills them to their gasping gills with a barren hunger no fecundity could ever answer.” This hunger winds throughout the novel and highlights the longing that each of its characters experiences in different ways. Evangelical Ansel Dorsett, for example, hungers for word from God, while his neighbor, the elderly Charlotte McCorkle wishes for an end to her physical presence on earth and a reunion with her husband. As the “sporadic seer” of What Cheer, McCorkle has the ability to imagine the lives of even unfamiliar residents, and her prophetic voice helps to draw all the other voices together. Like most of the residents of What Cheer, McCorkle is independent and pulsing with life. She underscores the importance the novel places on how humans differ from all other beings in their ability to experience through their sense of touch. “Touch is an underrated sense,” she says. “We are tyrannized by the visual, and nearly as often led around by the ears, but what if we lost tactility, what lesser creeping creatures would we be that could not feel?”

Wells is at her best when in the realm of the body. One does not read her words as much as sense them through the fingertips. A sensual writer, her prose is both fleshy and often blurrly erotic, especially when she conjures angels:

He wanted to feel those feathers. He wanted to feel them brush his knees and open the closed places in his body, pass through him, tearing like hot nails, feel them die violently, all blood and sun, then feel them light as nucleolus rise up inside him like resurrection, scattering on the wind, the pollination of a restive demi-divinity.

In Skin, angels signify the tension between the body and the spirit, and the general sense of abandonment that permeates the novel. Wells’ angels do not have perfect, white wings or receive messages from God. Instead, they can be seen feasting on the carcasses of animals in a field or visiting their human companions for a game of Triple Yahtzee. They age and grow sickly, are at once too corporeal and disembodied. Gabriel, Charlotte McCorkle’s nephew, is one such angel. After several operations to remove his wings, they “came in all cockeyed and sickly, curling out to the sides like corkscrews with shriveled, musty feathers, and each time they grew back they came in more gnarled and in less and less likely places.” In What Cheer, angels suffer, perhaps even more than their human counterparts. As Mrs. McCorkle explains, “When we are in the midst of a celestial burgeoning that walks among us, we tend to look the other way, hope we’ll be spared.”

Angels are not the only supernatural elements in Skin. Zero Loomis floats, and his eight-year-old niece Ruby Tuesday grows lemons in her abdomen. There are encounters with skin-stealing aliens and talking animals. Wells’ brand of magical realism is reminiscent of Garcia Marquez, but also distinctly American. Her descriptions of the supernatural are as humorous as they are incantational: 

You will wamble and flap at your own limitations, and molting feathers will twist to the floor. She will gather them and make a picture to comfort you. She will trace her hand on construction paper, a sweet hand small enough to fit comfortably inside your mouth, and she will glue your fallen feathers to the outlined fingers. She will fashion the body and head and wattle of a turkey out of brightly colored kernels of Jolly Time popcorn.

The impetus for Skin grew out of the author’s short story, “Compression Scars,” featured in her collection of the same name, which won a Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. That story is, like Skin, both tragic and comical. In a lesser writer’s hands, the metaphor of scarring might come across heavy-handed, but Wells treats misfortune with tenderness and levity. Much is accomplished through the lively voices of her characters, but one senses the author’s voice too, just below the surface, reminding the reader that there is a fine line between “grace and desolation,” and it is through the skin that we negotiate that line, that we are reminded not only of how alone we are, but also of how connected we are to each other in our shared experience of aloneness.

Rachel Swearingen is a PhD candidate in fiction at Western Michigan University. She will become the Editor of Third Coast in 2008.