On June 12, 1970, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis threw a no-no against the Padres that would live forever in baseball memory. No-hitters are always significant, of course—one of the most magical occurrences in baseball, a sport chock-full of bizarre stats, eccentric personalities, and freak plays. This particular event was more than just the rare no-no, though. It happened during a twi-night doubleheader, when the teams played each other twice in a row, back-to-back, on the same night. Additionally, it would be revealed many decades later (with varying levels of credibility) that the man who threw this no-hitter on this night–on this field, at this point in history–was, by his own admission, under the influence of LSD. He was 25 years old.
Thinking it was a Thursday (when actually it was Friday), Ellis had dropped acid with some friends around noon. At 2 p.m., his girlfriend reminded him he had a game that night. Dock didn’t believe her. The game was on Friday. She showed him the sports page, announcing his position as starting pitcher. “Oh wow,” Ellis reportedly said. “What happened to yesterday?”
He boarded a plane at 3 p.m. and arrived at the ballfield at 4:30 p.m. At 6 p.m., Ellis took the mound and the undreamable happened.
In Bob Smizik’s now-famous 1984 story in the Pittsburgh Press, Ellis described his performance thusly: “I was zeroed in on the (catcher’s) glove, but I didn’t hit the glove too much. I remember hitting a couple of batters and the bases were loaded two or three times. The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. They say I had about three to four fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn’t hit hard and never reached me.”
There is baseball; then there is pitching; then there are pitchers who throw no-hitters; then there is Dock Ellis in San Diego, June 12, 1970.
Similarly: there is fiction; then there is speculative fiction; then there is the Oregonian mother in the title story of Karen Russell’s Orange World (Knopf, 2019—out May 14), who makes a deal to breastfeed the devil (who comes to her in the form of a capybara). Russell takes this twisted premise and makes it a profoundly spooky treatise on postpartum depression and female solidarity.
Scattered across the distant past (“The Prospectors,” set against the backdrop of the New Deal’s public works projects) and the eerily not-so-distant future (the echolocating sisters of “The Gondoliers,” navigating the canals of a post-climate-apocalypse-Florida), Russell’s stories defy conventions of short fiction—even the loose ones of her magical realist contemporaries. In “The Tornado Auction,” an aging father nurtures twisters like show ponies in the plains of Nebraska, attending to their growing winds and propensity for destruction with an affection unknown to his three human daughters. A woman becomes a Joshua Tree, two-headed manatees float through a ruined, toxic Miami.
Sports reporters and fans in the crowd during Dock Ellis’s no-hitter have cast some doubt on his version of events, saying that he seemed perfectly fine, not visibly tripping or in any way different from his usually unusual, iconoclastic self. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean Ellis was lying—only that the plane of existence he was inhabiting at the time might have been invisible to anyone but him. A good pitcher can pitch a no-hitter, and he can also be “high as a Georgia pine”, as Ellis told Smizik. Both things can be true at the same time. Russell’s writing in these stories has a similar effortlessness, always seeming to fully inhabit the worlds she creates with a voice that is simultaneously universally relatable and hyper-specific. The locality of her characters, their proximity to our own interior lives, give them room to stretch out into the weird and psychedelic without losing their centers. The stories of her previous collections, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Knopf, 2006) and Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf, 2013), were praised for their originality and haunting storytelling. Swamplandia! (Knopf Doubleday, 2011), Russell’s only full-length novel, was a critical and commercial barn-burner, a coming-of-age story set in the otherworldly roadside alligator-wrestling park belonging to a Florida family. Richly rendered, fantastical settings are standard fare for Russell, but the stories in Orange World probe further into the psychological realm of their inhabitants than in her previous collections. They are full of unreliable narrators and shifting realities: desert mirages, plants taking sentience over human hosts, the ghosts of neglected lovers.
In “The Prospectors,” Aubby (short for Aubergine, a name gifted to her in a misguided attempt by her parents at class status) explains her approach to flirtation with (and potential robbery of) the men of a Civilian Conservation Corps encampment on top of a mountain. Aubby and her younger companion, Clara, find themselves weaponizing the only resource available to them, one often underestimated: their femininity. “People often mistake laughing girls for foolish creatures,” Aubby says. “They mistake our merriment for nerves or weakness, the hysterical looning of desire. Sometimes, it is that. But not tonight. We could hold our wardens hostage too, in this careful way. Everybody needs an audience.” The waltz of tension Aubby and Clara create spirals out of control, forcing them to contend fiercely with that audience.
With the exception of two stories (“Tornado Auction” and “Black Corfu”), the protagonists of Orange World are women; of the others, one is a greyhound with the loose designation of “belonging to” an imagined—but depressingly realistic—Emma Bovary. Somehow, a story from the point of view of a dog contains more humanity than other authors contain in whole novels, in a heart-wrenching story of ownership, independence, and devotion. Always, Russell bypasses what could be the expected approach in favor of the aerial attack, a blitz of the borders of what we might think fiction should be.
Sometimes, she almost misses: “Black Corfu,” the tale of a doctor in 17th-century Žrnovo, is a winding, spooky story that feels slightly out of place, as if written in someone else’s handwriting. This is not to say the story isn’t good, or engaging, but it feels like the start of a bigger project: a longer existential pause, a closer look at a singular, prickly character who is not particularly easy to empathize with. Russell’s allegories here are much subtler, the writing more philosophical than adventurous. While technically skilled and vividly imagined, it falls slightly flat where elsewhere Russell’s voice so thoroughly resounds. “Black Corfu’s” explorations of race and its complex relationship to physical landscape map previously uncharted territory for the author, and hint at what we might hope to be a longer work that gives breadth and nuance to the allegorical ideas it starts to poke at.
Conversely, “The Gondoliers” is vintage Russell, a reworking of the navigator-meets-wayward-traveler tale that could exist in the world of Swamplandia! a few years in the future. The canals of a sunken Miami take on an eerie likeness to the river Styx, and the vision-guide that of Blister, one of three sisters who use echolocation to ferry their gondolas through the toxic waters floating where civilization used to be. A late-night fare takes the narrator to the furthest depths of self-inquiry, to a literal “dead zone” in the chemically-tainted waters of the Gulf. Her echolocation is faulty there, forcing the duo to examine the roles storytellers and listeners each play in our responsibility to ecological history and preservation of the past. Here, one can see Russell behind the curtain, showing her hand a bit. “The best lies have a speck of truth folded inside them,” Blister contemplates. “All good performers know this. Real gold to bite down on. The ringing truth overrides the hollowness of the lie.” This is Russell’s modus operandi in the stories of Orange World: biting down on the larger truths of climate change, new motherhood, and structural inequality through the agility of her imagination.
It doesn’t matter if a tornado can be a daughter, if the devil can breastfeed, if Dock Ellis was really on LSD, if the setting sun was in the batters’ eyes that night. The commitment to performance, to dodging reality and leaving a perfectly round “0” on the opponent’s scoreboard, to curving slyly around the obvious, distracting your audience until the thunk of leather on leather and a cloud of dust shakes them from their reverie into bright floodlights, bewildered. Reality becomes myth, then that myth becomes legend. That’s the spectacle of Karen Russell’s “Orange World”. She’s a hall-of-famer.