RE-IMAGINING NEW YORK Gregory Maguire's Novel, A Wild Winter Swan
magical world of Andersen’s story might not seem immediately apparent at first; however, as Maguire explains, “Besides the obvious and wonderful existence of the monument to the author, erected in Central Park six years before my novel takes place, Andersen’s stories seem largely to concern how ostracized people can be made whole through a magic spell and the charms of their own innate virtues. Think ‘The Ugly Duckling.’ Think ‘The Little Mermaid.’ New York City has always been a beacon to those who have not felt safe or beloved where they were born and has called them home to its enchanted streets and avenues. (‘If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.’) Andersen’s homely rural and fantastic tales have every right to be in New York—because everything and everyone can find a place there, too.” Laura is a character who longs to find her place in that world, but is isolated from her peers by her learning disabilities, and from her family by a constellation of tragedies. Her Italian immigrant guardians are loving but distracted by their struggle to assimilate into upper-middle-class America, seduced (as Maguire suggests the entire era was) by the glamour of American success: “[I]sn’t there some magic in the images of New York from the 1950s and early 1960s? Those images that made it into the romantic movies and the society photo shoots and advertisements for luxury goods? Into the sitcoms of the 50s and early 60s, too. A candy-coated time of trust in American industry, government, and prosperity. I didn’t grow up in New York City, but upstate New York; still, the City supplied us all with a sense of a beating heart for American culture of that time. It was the center of the world.”
Gregory Maguire is best known for his “Return to Oz” series, beginning with the massive 1995 bestseller Wicked, which inspired one of the most popular Broadway musicals of the current millennium. He has become one of the most insightful and consistently entertaining voices in modern fantasy literature, turning out volume after volume of sharp, funny, psychologically complex re-imaginings of childhood classics and fairy tales. He locates stories like the Oz books, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, A Christmas Carol, and The Nutcracker firmly in the historical periods that produced them, peopling them with recognizable humans who respond to their magical situations in both historically and emotionally realistic ways. His latest, A Wild Winter Swan, continues and varies this pattern. The fairy tale that gives this historical fantasy its shape is Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Wild Swans.” But rather than modernize Andersen’s characters, he creates a 20th-century protagonist in Laura Ciardi, a dreamy, discontented semi-orphan who lives with her grandparents in a handsome but dilapidated five-story Upper East Side brownstone. Laura’s life is in disarray for a number of reasons, when the sudden arrival of a mysterious, swan-winged boy offers a possible alternative to the oppressive future her elders have mapped out for her. The link between A Wild Winter Swan’s modern setting and the
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FEATURES | Issue 94, November 2020
The novel is set in December 1962 because, Maguire says, “I wanted to set this story in a time of innocence for the nation, and also to evoke my own relatively trouble-free childhood days. . . . Many, like myself, grew up as protected and therefore ignorant as Laura is.” For Maguire, Laura’s story is both universal and personal: “To a child with six siblings growing up in Albany, New York, as I was, the notion of living as an only child in a brownstone in the Upper East Side of Manhattan would have seemed magic in itself—not unlike Sara Crewe in A Little Princess, whose garret bedroom is secretly turned by her kindly next-door neighbor into a little chamber of cozy delights. But as my own birth mother died in childbirth when I was born, and I spent some of my earliest months in a Catholic orphanage before being reunited with my family, I still feel Laura’s sense of dislocation. . . . Laura is alone, which makes her susceptible to a magic visitor from a fairy tale.” In the novel, during preparations for an elaborate Christmas dinner at which Laura’s grandfather hopes to secure an investor for his gourmet grocery, a strange young man literally flies into Laura’s window. Her efforts to conceal the interloper, with whom she becomes romantically fascinated, are both hilarious and poignant. At the same time, Laura begins to realize some uncomfortable truths about herself, and also sees her own fantasies come to messy, threatening life: “The storyteller inside her was defeated by the irruption of real story.”1 In spite of these challenges, Laura is a brilliant observer of the adults around her. Unable to write well and uncomfortable with her outsider status, she narrates her own life continuously inside her head, adjusting details to make the events of her day meaningful, exotic, funny, or simply bearable. “She had heard words in her head for such a long time. She would keep trying to tell herself into her own
