A story too strong for its container: "The Tornado Auction" by Karen Russell

Once in a while, a story will try to give you clues about how to approach it embedded in the story itself. In the terrible Christmas movie "Love Actually," which I have sat through twice this season, the aging rocker apologizes for making a crass and sentimental piece-of-shit song that plays on the public's willingness to buy anything with Christmas on it. He asks the public to buy the record anyway, because it sure would be nice if an old man like him could catch a break and have a hit song instead of all the young punks who won't appreciate it because they haven't fucked their lives up yet like him. I think this is the writers of the movie asking us to view the occasional mawkishness of the movie with a forgiving and sentimental eye.

In Karen Russell's far better story "The Tornado Auction," Bobby Wurman, the main character, gives us a clue how we ought to read the story: 

Moisture began to clot on my glasses, so I removed them. Some things, I swear, I see better without correction. Tornadoes, for one. My eyes often snag on irrelevancies, when I'm wearing my glasses; without them, I can take in more. The panorama, you know, the whole sublime blur.

There are some obvious, plot-driven reasons why readers are encouraged not to look too closely at details of the story. For one, there's a lot of gobbledy-gook science in here, and if readers are going to comb over the story trying to make the science all make sense, they're going to pick the story apart pretty quickly. The story isn't trying to pretend it was written by a climatologist or an engineer. But there are other elements of the story that make it important not to ask for too much rigor from it. 

Far be it from me to suggest that pulsing infrared beams into a cumulonimbus cloud won't make a tornado, but the science of this story might not really be the point. 

Basics of the plot and other question marks with it

Bobby was married to Estelle, with whom he raised three daughters. The family business was "tornado farming," a highly unprofitable business that Bobby stubbornly stuck to until he nearly killed one of their daughters when a tornado he was raising escaped its nursery. Now, his wife dead and his daughters grown, Bobby has nobody left he might hurt, so he is giving his passion one last go-round. He buys a baby tornado still in cloud form at auction and attempts to raise it. 

In addition to the weird science, there is the big question of how tornado farming became a thing. At first, I thought that tornado farming--which exists, in the universe of this book, along with raising smaller winds and creating lightning--was made necessary by climate change. But it seems more likely that the power needed to create tornadoes is more a cause of climate change than a result of it. The crowd of tornado farmers feels "guilt...like a rippling stink" when someone mentions "the warming." Bobby only doesn't feel too much guilt because he was always a small-time operation.

Bobby used to raise tornadoes for demolition purposes (again, don't look to closely at the science of this), but angry lawyers made that illegal. The only possible buyers of tornadoes now include rodeos, monster truck rallies, and state fairs, who seem to use tornadoes for recreational purposes. People ride them. But even that business seems to be dying. 

Shall I compare thee to at least half a dozen things?

So it's not really clear why tornado farming is a thing. Let's try to look at "the panorama" of this story, as Bobby wants us to. What does tornado farming mean? What do tornadoes represent within the story?

Well, a lot of things, and therein is the main problem with the story. Just like Bobby has a bunch of powerful forces he is struggling to make stronger without them blowing apart, the story is dealing with a lot of big ideas that threaten to flatten the whole thing to the ground. Tornadoes are similar to all of these things in the story:

• God, or a sense of wonder: When Bobby feels a strong wind, he feels "the way I always hope to feel in church."
• Children: Raising a tornado is a lot like raising kids to Bobby. Bobby found raising children to be full of anxiety. Right after recalling how the arrival of his kids "flooded the earth with an infinite number of horrors and perils," he elatedly cries "She's alive!" when he sees his baby tornado survived the night. The juxtaposition makes us see that the two things are closely related in Bobby's mind.
• A dream you have, like being a musician or a writer, that you have to put on the back burner while you raise a family.
• Freedom: Bobby is now able to raise tornadoes again because he has outlived everyone he might have hurt with them. But freedom is not a simple good. Outliving everyone is "a freedom, or something worse."
• A farm animal: Tornadoes are auctioned off just like a bull or horse might be. They are also transported and housed like farm animals. There is a suggestion that the tornado raised in captivity longs, like a horse, to go and join the wild herd. Bobby claims some tornadoes have been seen escaping their pens to go join much larger, natural or "feral" tornadoes. 

This inability to settle on a central meaning for the main image in the story makes it difficult for the emotional climate to create wind speed, as it were. The turbines aren't cranking hard enough. There are a number of punches being thrown, but none lands full-force. 

But this was the best punch

I think the main theme of the story is related to the notion of freedom. Bobby resented what being a family man meant. It meant giving up his dream, and it meant worry for those he was responsible for. He dreads his children dying before him, and thinks that if there is life after death, he'll have to keep lying to himself in the after-life about the fact that his kids are going to die. Because he doesn't want to see his kids die, he has a bit of a death wish for himself. He doesn't move when his tornado makes an unexpected turn that flattens him, and he recalls that this reckless longing for death has always been with him: "In boyhood, I remember feeling very generously toward my fevers." 

At the end of the story, Bobby's tornado escapes and heads off to join a whopper of a storm. It's what Bobby has always wanted: to watch his tornado go off and join the storm of the century, and to be obliterated in the process. 

But Bobby has a vision of his daughter, the one who was nearly killed by his own errant tornado when she was a child, finding him lying in the field. He is unable to stand in the path of the tornado and either watch it die or let it kill him, because one is never really free of the bonds that tied us to loved ones. He knows what she will feel, because he felt it for her, and he can't do that to her. To be truly free of caring about one's family is the "something worse than freedom" Bobby thought he was on his way to discover.

Bobby hoped he'd really be able to embrace this freedom, but he can't. He doesn't see his late-life discovery of the ties that bind him to his daughters as a happy ending. Whether the reader sees it as a happy ending is the best punch this story offers.

It's an excellent story, and I don't mean to take away from that by pointing out that the length of it and the weightiness of some passages--including a Discovery Channel-esque passage on how tornadoes form--kept the wind of the story from picking up the steam it wanted to at points. There are two pages on the emptiness of the Nebraska prairie that, while poetic, probably could have been cut without losing anything. But the fact that the story still had enough energy to deliver force under a lot of excess weight says something about how much power it had in it. 

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This was my first review of the short stories from the 2019 Pushcart Anthology. I plan to do them all, along with my friend, Karen Carlson.