Get it while it's cold
Why you should wait until it's snowing to read Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver
*This post originally appeared on Patreon on February 3, 2022. Thanks to Adrian Rennix for editing! You can check out Adrian's terrific (and free) newsletter about immigration policy here.
In Queens the snow is melting. If you’re part of that big Nike swoosh in the middle of the country however, you’re getting a proper blizzard, and I’m jealous. I don’t really like winter, exactly, but I do love a good, deep, untouched snowfall. A year ago, my husband and I and two of our closest friends stayed in a Vermont airbnb, just outside of Stowe: driving there was like driving into the land of winter, as we came north and the snow grew higher and higher, and higher. When we arrived, we found four feet of snow on the ground, and no neighbors for miles, and perfect quiet. Snow is silencing, and blinding: once, as we were coming back from snowshoeing in the deep woods, I thought I saw another house, sort of near our cabin but set off a little ways from it. A dark house, with a corkscrewy top. I pointed it out to the others—but it wasn’t there. The little house was gone. Did I ever see it at all?
I know what you’re thinking—would you describe it as more of a hut or a house, and did it have chicken feet—and I wish I could tell you. What I can tell you is that I was, at the time, deep into a re-read of Spinning Silver, a fantasy novel by Naomi Novik. When it comes to fantasy novels, I think there’s an important difference between books that have magic in them and books that are magic. Spinning Silver is the latter type; it doesn’t just use magic as a plot device but it makes magic, renders you more acutely sensitive to what’s real and what's not, and all the spaces in between.
For the spell to work, however, you have to read it now, while there’s snow outside. Some novels (in any genre) are seasonal, and work best in their proper setting; Russian novels generally make for good winter reads, and Spinning Silver is, in its way, a Russian novel. It’s not real Russia, exactly, but a country that’s like Russia, with a tsar and a cold climate and characters named Irina, Oleg, Sergey, etc. And it also has the fire demon Chernobog, and terrifying ice-elves called Staryk who travel on a white road of death and bring winter wherever they go.
And it has Jews. Very prosaic, unremarkable, (mostly) unmagical Jews, living pretty much exactly the same way my ancestors did in the borderlands of Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, until they were driven out a hundred years ago by pogroms. There are plenty of Jewish fantasy novelists, but there are not many Jews in fantasy novels, except metaphorically or allegorically represented by some group of magical creatures who are oppressed or stereotyped in an uncomfortable way (see J.K. Rowling and her banking goblins.) But Jews, shtetl Jews, who are part of a fantasy story? A Jewish heroine who gets to have adventures and make an accidental bargain with an elven-king and get carried off to his kingdom? This is something we almost never see.
When it comes to discussions of representation in fantasy novels, white Jews occupy a complicated position—we look like and have the privileges of white people, so we can usually feel “represented” by white characters without too much trouble. But there’s always something missing, some dynamic that remains unexpressed (unless, again, it’s awkwardly allegorized by some magical species.) The dynamic of what it feels like to be part of a small group that mostly resembles its neighbors but doesn’t belong to them; what it feels like to know that these neighbors might be perfectly accepting or might be hiding a secret, bloody hatred. In Spinning Silver, Miryem and her family are acutely aware of the lurking potential violence all around them, but they’re also aware of themselves, of their own culture and its comforts. In the very first chapter Miryem remembers the last time she visited her extended family: “They laughed and sang and the whole room was warm, though it had been deep in winter, and we ate fresh bread and roast chicken and hot golden soup full of flavor and salt, steam rising into my face.” I can’t quite express how it felt to read this, a description of the exact meal that my mother makes on Friday nights. In literary fiction I might not have felt much of anything about a scene like this, because litfic writers often package their novels as if they have an educative function, and so describing a Shabbat meal for a readership made up mostly of goyim is just part of explaining a minority culture to the dominant one. But in a fantasy novel it takes on a very different quality—of familiarity, and of an essential act of belonging, even to the world of magic.
And it also feels exposed. One of Novik’s boldest moves is to make Miryem a moneylender, and to explore the concepts of debt and payment—especially as understood by the Staryk, who like any other fairy people are very strict about bargains and recompense. At certain points I kept thinking, Naomi, the goyim can read this too! Are you sure you want to reclaim moneylending? They could easily misinterpret this! They could, and still might, despite the intelligence and nuance of Novik’s writing. But then the book doesn’t feel as though it was written in fear of them, or in fear of anyone, much like its heroines. The book has a tripartite structure, with two other (non-Jewish) protagonists besides Miryem, and Novik weaves all three together with a skillfulness and a sensitivity for voices that’s almost unmatched in modern fantasy. The heroines are delightful, and brave, and complicated, and you’re rooting for them.
It’s not always easy to explain why I love this sort of classically-spirited fantasy novel: for people who think heroism is suspicious, and anti-heroic protagonists are more “realistic,” it’s hard to explain why it might be fun, sometimes, to read about people who—while they often don’t succeed—are generally trying to be good. I find this type of protagonist more “realistic,” to be honest: I’ve met more people who were trying to be good than people who were vicious, or nihilistic, or selfish, or primarily interested in social climbing. The fact that “trying to be good” is realistic, and even prosaic, is one of the elements that helps give (many) fantasy novels their heft; like the detail about “the hot golden soup full of flavor and salt,” these ordinary heroes ground the fantasy novel in reality, just as the Vermont airbnb with its five increasingly narrow floors and fussy stove and the dark trees and the wide bear-tracks left by snowshoes grounded our reality and maybe helped make the strange little house appear to me in the distance, for a moment. (There’s more than one element to a spell, after all.) Anyway read Spinning Silver before the snow melts, and if you look outside and see Baba Yaga’s hut, tell her I say hi (or don’t, she is terrifying.)