In the Internet age, fanfiction has become a phenomenon, like flame wars and eBay. Each year, thousands of amateur writers try their hand at expanding -- even improving on -- characters who already exist on TV, in movies, or in comic books. The good ones, the Internet's novelists and poets, share their visions and forever color ours, how we see Mulder and Scully, Janeway and Chakotay. They build on what's there, adding elements that become so much a part of canon, it's difficult afterward to distinguish what was written by Jeri Taylor and what's archived on some university server.
You read these stories, and maybe you wonder at the unfairness that keeps talented writers from making money doing something they so clearly enjoy, while the Rick Bermans of the world continue greenlighting crappy Voyager scripts.
For you, I say, there's Gregory Maguire, a man who makes money writing, essentially, fanfiction.
In 1996, Maguire put out a cool, quirky book called Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. It was both exactly what it sounds like and completely surprising: L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz from the witch's point of view. Elphaba, the witch, became our companion for this trip down the Yellow Brick Road, and her inevitable downfall is tragic.
In Maguire's new novel, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, we meet Iris and Ruth, destined to become stepsisters to the fabled Cinderella. Driven with their mother from England, they relocate to 17th-century Holland, where their ugliness and lack of resources eventually lead them to the home of Cornelius van den Meer, his wife Henrika, and daughter Clara (Cinderella).
Iris is our hero, and Cinderella's story unfolds before her eyes. She is a smart, brave adolescent plagued by her appearance. Ruth is ungainly and mute. Their bitter mother Margarethe, who will become van den Meer's wife and Clara's "evil" stepmother, will do most anything to provide for herself and her daughters. Iris considers her mother: "How shallow the words are, really -- She is a witch. One might as well say, She is a mother... that about covers the same terrain, doesn't it?"
They are eclipsed by the unnatural beauty of Clara, her white-gold hair, glowing skin, azure eyes. Clara is a peculiar, fearful girl who resents the attention her face brings. "... It's my beauty that's monstrous, for it sweeps away any other aspect of my character," she tells Iris.
Oh, boo-hoo. "Extreme beauty is an affliction," claims both the narration and a prominent line on the book jacket, but most of us will identify more with Iris than with Clara. Iris' homeliness determines her fate as much as Clara's beauty decides hers.
It would be easy to get annoyed with Maguire's clever treatment of this fable, to roll one's eyes at the appearance of white leather slippers, which shine "with an oil so it's like looking at shoes of porcelain or cloudy glass." But Maguire adds so much to the tale that an old story is reborn into something new. Iris' attachment to the painter Schoonmaker leads to passages about Frans Hals and Rembrandt, artists of a changing age when popular tastes were shifting from religious imagery to portraits and still-lifes.
If a flaw stands out, it's that Confessions sits in the shadow of Wicked, which scored bonus points for quality in spite of its novelty. Confessions is an engrossing, dark read, and the quality remains even as the novelty wears thin, but one wonders how often Maguire can return to this well -- if he will, in fact, turn into the Walt Disney of the fantasy novel.
What Maguire has produced is fanfiction, but it's good fanfiction. In the end, it's worth every penny.
-- Jennifer Rose Hale
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, published by HarperCollins, is currently available in hardcover.
We welcome your comments on The 11th Hour and this review. Please send letters to: letters@the11thhour.com
