A Story I Loved: "Haunting Olivia" by Karen Russell
- Staff Writer
- Aug 25
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 12
Another one of my all-time favorites. Karen Russell isn’t an author I reach for frequently, but this story is an all-time great. It’s special for me.
Here’s the brief run-down: two kids are looking for their dead sister. She drowned, going off on a crab sled by herself on a lake, and her body was never recovered. The boys feel enormous guilt because they are responsible in some ways for her dying- they didn’t supervise her, and so they feel the need to find her body and put her to rest.
Let's start with the things I love. I love how much the kids are real kids in this story. Most of the time, kids in grief are portrayed as particularly mature, particularly sharpened by this grief. The loss and the following emotions have made them more clever, more thoughtful. And maybe sometimes that's true. But most of the time, it's not. The kids in “Haunting Olivia” are relentless in how kid-like they are. They cuss, they are immature, they bully each other, and they are naive in their grief, as proven by the premise of the story. They don't know what to do with the various ways it explodes from their body- as rage, as violence, as anger.
After all, what is more heartbreakingly child-like than the idea of two little boys trying to find their sister’s body? It’s a hopeless task. We know it from the start. This is, after all, literary fiction, not magical realism. But there’s a haunted element to this entire story that comes just for the premise of two little boys, desperately haunting their sister. The title is amazing. The dead don’t haunt the living, do they? The living haunt the dead, because what else can they do? We see the boys' jaded boredom all summer from being dumped by their parents as they travel the world, who have tried to avoid parenting them through their children's grief as a way to avoid confronting their own. Olivia's body, as hallowed emissary of their sister, delivers real purpose, a mission. They’ve stolen Social Security checks and deceived their grandma, they’ve put themselves into physical danger, they’ve swum around for hours until their eyes ache from saltwater and their arms can push no further. The boys, in their own ways, are heroic and tragic and ultimately futile.
This story does its premise in such an interesting and skilled fashion: to put the lens of grief through younger children, who unlike full-fledged teenagers or adults, can’t be consoled by the more metaphysical aspects of grief counseling- by pretty words or thoughtful sayings. They want to know where their sister has gone. They want her body, so at least they can project their grief onto some physical manifestation. It’s both at once such an animal and entirely human act. It's Grecian in its level of tragedy, its minutiae, its bitter irony. It is Achilles whipping Hector's body around the gates of Troy as penance for Patroclus. Love is not always beautiful or fully formed, and neither is the grief that follows, but it is always distinctly human.
Grief is such an interesting thing to play around with in fiction, because much like love, it can inflect a person’s world-view. Grief, I think, is perhaps the most intense feeling in the world, and one that colors everything a person does. Every sentence the boys speak, every action they commit, is in some ways in pursuit of Olivia in this story, and that’s Russell’s real masterpiece, all these brush-strokes hidden so faintly in the fiction. We never meet the girl, or get a full-fledged description of her. She is just as ghostly to us, forever eight and a half. The boys have so little of her, in terms of memory, which also motivates their pursuit of her physical body, as if to make her more real, to grieve for her properly.
I think the ending, for me, is one of the most exquisite in all of literary fiction. The level of description, the words chosen, the beauty, the rushing rhythm of it. There is something gorgeous and so, so painful about all of it. The boy is looking around, and he describes this beautiful scene, illuminated for him. It’s this contrast of being painfully alive, his eyes bursting with imagery, with creation, with all of nature’s bounty. But he’s been unable to see any of it. He can’t admire the world. The world still charges at him, unstoppable, his heart pumping blood, his eyes seeing, his hands searching and grasping and still revealing themselves up empty. His lungs need oxygen, and so he has to come back to the surface in increments. The physical act of searching for her body reminds him of how alive he is. And yet he’s passing through, almost, like a specter, a lost spirit. Everywhere in the world is only marked by the shadow of their sister’s ghost. Every space on earth is haunted by Olivia. She is everywhere and nowhere, all at once.
Resources: Read "Haunting Olivia" here:
