They don't have to make sense to the reader to achieve the effect Le Guin is going for - she just wants us to see them, to see that these are the sort of stories that get told there, and to learn what we can from how they're told and what seems to be significant to the tellers. They're told by people of the valley as stories that would make sense to other people of the valley.

It's these short narratives that are embedded the deepest in the world. A lot of them are only a couple of pages, some are only half a page, some are a good bit longer. There are various other little stories throughout, grouped by theme. The longest of the stories - about a novella's worth - is called 'Stone Telling' after its narrator, and is split up into three sections throughout the book.

There's a framing conceit that an anthropologist from our time has somehow visited the Kesh people, in a part of far-future former California (after centuries of climate and social upheaval) called the Na Valley, and attempted to understand its culture by collecting information and stories. In accordance with that approach, Always Coming Home is filled with things to discover and moves a lot like falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, or reading all the non-rules text of an RPG manual. Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids.ĭoes it ever occur to such reviewers that the meaning of the story might lie in the language itself, in the movement of the story as read, in an inexpressible sense of discovery, rather than a tidy bit of advice? One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. But books don't actually have to be like that to be good (see Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities for another shining example), and Le Guin argued against such a rigid approach to storytelling in some of her essays:

There's supposed to be an arc to everything, there's supposed to be conflict driving every scene, there are supposed to be chapters, you're not supposed to fill nearly half the book with poems and plays and worldbuilding notes. There's a way writers are supposed to do things. What constitutes good writing seems to be pretty well codified these days. It is with my voice that the universe speaks, and the word I hear it speak when I listen is myself. I've had a hard time writing a coherent review, so I've given up on that and I'm going to follow the book's lead and do a lot of little sections.

Always coming home