The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr

The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr. New York: Penguin, 2003. Review by Sharon Harrigan

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The Shell Collector is a thematically and stylistically coherent collection of short stories about the blur between reality and magic, degradation of the environment caused by humans, the impossibility of living fully in the man-made world, the ravages of war and the trauma it causes to individuals, and the suffering caused by cutting oneself off from other humans. Most of the stories are long and complicated in structure, going back and forth in time, often with twenty-year increments, sometimes forming chronological figure eights.

What struck me as original and daring in these stories is Doerr’s courage to take on big topics. His characters are on a heroic quest, and the language and stakes and suspension of disbelief have mythic, archetypical, or fairy tale qualities. One way he achieves this effect is to use mostly labels instead of names. For example, the protagonist of the title story is known on as “the shell collector,” and in the second story the characters are “the hunter” and “the hunter’s wife.”

Nature is a dangerous place in the title story. Scorpions lay in wait in people’s shoes; a poisonous tentacle, dried and on the shore for eight days, stings a boy and swells his legs; and the geography snail, smaller than a pinkie, can paralyze and drown a human.

This fictional world is full of spirals and shells. The shell collector’s blindness is like a shell, according to the Muslim imam. Nancy, an American woman visiting Africa on a quest for self-fulfillment, is trying to hide from her family and responsibilities, to put herself in a shell. Life is like a snail shell: “spiraling upward from the inside, whorling around its inhabitant, all the while being worn down by the weathers of the sea.” The end of life is “diving into its reverse spiral by now, into that dark, whorling aperture.” The story structure itself is like a snail shell, going back and forth in time, opening up smaller and larger spaces.

The stories boldly tackle old-fashioned morality. The shell collector describes his wife and son as do-gooders and goody-goodies—terms of contempt. At the end, the poison cone shell changes the shell collector’s moral compass, cures him of his turpitude, the way it did for Nancy, the American woman who had abandoned her children then decided to return to them after being stung.

Towards the end of the story, the shell collector starts to collect a cone snail with the intention of poisoning and possibly killing the reporters who have come to tell his story, but decides not to, after he has been stung but doesn’t know it yet. “He would not poison them,” we are told. “It felt wonderful to make a decision like that. He wished he had more shells to hurl back into the sea, more poisons to rid himself of.” But it’s too late; he gets this epiphany only after his body starts to become paralyzed. At the end, he is almost immobile like the cone shell. He has changed from bad to good, but too late. The tragic fairy tale quality of this story is as big as life and death and gorgeously executed: “He remembered this: blue. He dreamed of the ocean. Time passed, he couldn’t tell them how much.”

“The Hunter’s Wife,” the second story, stretches past physical possibility into the realm of magical dreams. The title character learns to see animals’ and humans’ dreams just by touching then and even to see where they go after they die. Like the shell collector, the hunter does not believe in anything beyond what can be explained scientifically. The shell collector doesn’t believe that the snail’s poison can cure moral ills as well as physical ones. The hunter doesn’t believe that the hunter’s wife can really see the dreams of dead animals and people; he thinks she’s exploiting mourners for their money. She convinces him at the end of her magic, but he wonders is she is hypnotizing him, then decides it doesn’t matter.

“For a Long Time, This Was Griselda’s Story” is as jocular and playful as its title. We know we are going to go on a wild ride, especially because of the use of first person plural narrator. The story opens with a wide-scope lens: “In 1979 Griselda Drown was a senior volleyballer at Boise High, a terrifically tall girl with trunky thighs, slender arms and a volleyball serve that won an Idaho State Championship despite T-shirts claiming it was a team effort.” Then the narrator becomes the voice of the town: “There were rumors; whether they were true or not didn’t matter. We all knew them. They might as well have been true.”

Female sexuality and society’s insistence on squelching it confronts us at the very beginning of the story: “She [Griselda] was a gray-eyed growth spurt, orange haired, an early bloomer, and there were rumors about how she took boys two at a time in the dusty band closet where the dented tubas and ruptured drums were kept, about how she straddled the physics teacher, about her escapades during study hall with ice cubes.”

Her sister Rosemary’s story is a cautionary tale about what happens when female sexuality is suppressed. The story describes her relationship with her husband, Duck: “Occasionally, they grappled together at awkward sex. It never took.”

This story is unusual in the collection because the characters have individual names, and the names are a bit whimsical, like the whole story. The name Griselda reminds us of a character from the Decameron and Canterbury Tales, giving it a bawdy overtone. Rosemary, the sister’s name, reminds us that she is only about as alive as a plant, one that does not sexually reproduce. Mrs. Drown, their mother, kills herself with paranoia and worry, like her name suggests. Duck Winters, Rosemary’s husband, is as ridiculous, cold, and barren as his name.

The story comes full circle at the end, decades later. It starts in high school, with the description of Griselda playing on the volleyball team and ends at the high school, where she stops on her world-wide tour to give a spectacular performance, dressed like a an armored Viking diva on stage, assisting a carnival performer who eats metal, whole cars and airplanes, before everyone’s adoring eyes.

By tackling good and bad, life and death, magic and skepticism, these stories take enormous and admirable risks. I can imagine these stories being workshopped and hearing people say they are too unrealistic.

Are the stories plausible? It doesn’t matter. I was immersed in their complete alternate universes of lethal snails and dreams from the dead and metal-eating goddesses. I am usually a skeptic, but these magical stories completely won me over.