[REVIEW] Ice Bar by Petra Kuppers

(Spuyten Duyvil, 2018)

REVIEW BY SARAH NANCE

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What must stories do? asks the voice of Petra Kuppers in the background of her first collection of short stories, Ice Bar. In her closing remarks to the collection—aptly titled “Field Notes,” positioning the author as a kind of sociologist—she suggests that the ethical charge of a story is to approach the “contours of the world you want to see” (176). The stories in Ice Bar are thus configured to face a world on the brink of environmental, commercial, and industrial collapse, carving out a space for queer lives, disabled lives, and intersectional lives. It will take a new kind of hybridity, Kuppers proposes, to face some of the potential future paradigms we have set ourselves up for: the collapse of infrastructure, large-scale environmental destruction, heightened violence at borders between countries and worlds.

It’s not all doom-and-gloom, however; Ice Bar also imagines other possible futures that present new versions of human life and existence: bodies that merge with machines and plants, otherworldly beings that take form as trolls, dinosaurs, and dolphins to curry favor with humanity and escort us to alternative dimensions, and cracks in time and space that offer challenges to current models of power and privilege. Ice Bar passes no moral judgements, offers no consolation in the face of oncoming disaster, but instead taps into a different kind of potential energy: what are the possible worlds we may face, and how can we recognize every kind of person who can and should be a part of these futures?

The collection’s title story and opener, “Ice Bar,” is set in a near moment of apocalyptic collapse. Alissa, a survivor of sunlight and radiation—a heat that killed—navigates the ravaged cityscape of Oslo until she finds a door to an underground lair: the Ice Bar. Here, a former tourist-trap made of ice is repurposed as a space for interactive performance, friendship, and living. “Dance on the volcano. We will survive,” one patron says to her, “Dance the freaking music baby” (6). In this bar at the end of the world, Alissa joins in a rotating group of performers, navigating a space where binaries of the former world fall away, leaving in its place a queer space of possibility, of paradoxes that the stories which follow complicate, investigate, and celebrate. 

Kuppers transforms prose stories into lyric meditations in ways that are convincing and disarming in their beauty. “The Road Under the Bay” takes the storied history of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, tracing the human and natural costs of infrastructure innovation through the underwater world, where a bridge worker lives on, suspended in water in a new hybrid bodily form. Meanwhile, a woman named Doris feels drawn to the water, having heard a hum calling to her since childhood. As the story reaches a high lyric pitch, Doris’s body shifts in a flurry of scientific description: “DNA strands unweave and reweave, a mitosis of a new embrace. Small cytoplankton organisms wander in, and find their home in new pools, rooting deep through her flesh. Cells burst gently, opening like flowers. Tiny fragments of mitochondria unspool and align themselves with the sticky ends of Doris’s older strands, new pearl strings clicking into place” (120). The story merges the individual worker with grand cultural mythos of the bridge, creating the possibility of a parallel world where he and his labor abide beyond the longevity of humans: “I shall not pass over,” he asserts. “All my nows are down here now, and will ever be. My wages are still waiting to be paid, I shall have my recompense, my promised land, a warm bed” (113).

The collection’s strongest innovations come from its ability to insert the reader into what appear to be conventional settings or situations, and then drop the bottom out from the story in thrilling and unexpected ways that reconfigure what it means to be human, or to have an identity. Ice Bar’s most memorable stories play off of stories new and old, “reinvent[ing] the myths of otherness” to “claim old ground,” as Kuppers describes it (174).

In “Dinosaur Dreams,” a student and an activist both disappear on a seemingly ordinary day, finding each other in a dark underground world where voices beckon them for help. “[W]e need you,” they say, suggesting the world that is to come and beckoning the reader alongside the bewildered women. “They need you, too, after the bombs and fires. We need to build. Are you ready?” (71). Similarly, “Grave Weed” also follows two strangers who meet by chance, this time in a bookstore as they search for the same dusty botanical tome; they become “grave weed” scavengers together, gathering lichen growing on graves in asylum graveyards, tinged with “some mixture of madness, medication and exposure” that “created mineral-rich bones, a special fertilizer” that endows psychedelic qualities when consumed. Their drug trips create interdimensional spaces where they both follow the contours of their institution-related traumas. And, in the fantastically imagined “Vicki’s Cup,” the owner of a coffee shop harbors a magic-infused secret recipe for a drink that keeps her shop afloat; however, in training another woman to help, disastrous outcomes result, suggesting the tenuousness of creation, craft, and supply chains.

The possibility of this break in the supply chain—whether on a personal, institutional, or national level—becomes one of the book’s guiding critiques. Where are we left when guiding institutional structures break down, when the environment’s destruction turns against us, when we are forced to compete for furiously diminishing resources? Stories such as “Dumpling’s Pillar” situate us within the crossroads of destruction, suggesting new ways of forging connection in an era of scarcity. The story’s first-person narrator, a bike messenger, notices something odd about the public transit system one day during her delivery schedule: “All the trains in Southern Norway were down, standing still, their massive engines cooling in the early fall sunshine” (43). As the weeks progress, networks fail one by one, until even cell phones become useless, charger cords repurposed as “garlands in old Christmas trees, slung like off-white offal into the green plastic branches” (44). As the narrator and her companions find new ways of interacting in the world—forming groups for safety, enacting trading economies, jumping on local internet networks that broadcast like old short-wave radios—the story itself shifts from a near-future science-fiction infused tale to one of unexpected fantastical dimension, taking readers in one direction, then abruptly folding in on itself, becoming something else entirely. The narrator meets up with an old friend, Kristin, and the two follow the electronic echoes of an open network where anonymous users exchange mysterious messages. A crack in a tree takes them down a tunnel and underground; there, they happen upon something they could never have expected to find.

In this, one of her most imaginative and unexpected stories, Kuppers suggests a pattern that the rest of the collection builds upon: the current models of networking, infrastructure, and power dynamics are failing us, and possible solutions only lie in unexpected—often unassuming—places. The state of our current cultural moment requires us to imagine alternative worlds that privilege dynamic, hybrid, and intersectional bodies and minds, that promote a sharing of experience instead of hierarchies. It’s no wonder that so many of the stories in Ice Bar take place underground or underwater; these alternative possibilities are not available to us at surface level. Ice Bar’s speculative stories refuse singularity or continuity, offering instead a range of possibilities for rebuilding, reevaluating, and restructuring our world.

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Sarah Nance holds a PhD in English from UCLA. Her work examines the intersections of illness, environment, and violence in literature, and she’s at work on a book project on the varying micro and macro scales of illness as represented in contemporary culture. Her writing has appeared in The Crab Orchard Review, Belletrist, Faultline, and elsewhere. She lives, writes, and teaches in Colorado Springs.