...[a] slim surrealist masterpiece ... There are many familiar things on which it draws (B-grade monster movies, suburban malaise, romance tropes), and it has been justly compared to cultural touchstones from David Lynch and Richard Yates to The Wizard of Oz and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but there is nothing else out there that is 'like' it, or even close.
...a remarkable little novel ... Almost all of Ingalls’s stories evoke an atmosphere of breathless expectancy: something wonderful or horrid seems always about to happen. This tone of suspense often has a menacing quality, paying off at the last minute in appalling reversals of fortune and explosions of spectacular violence ... It is a tribute to the subtlety of the novel that it can lend itself to multiple readings ... Perhaps Ingalls’s finest accomplishment in the novel is the unflappable gentleness of her tone, which records supernatural surprise and flaming horror simply, almost tranquilly. The result is paradoxically quotidian and dreamlike, like a fable or folktale ... One can only hope that this new edition, and the possible film adaptation, will bring to this austere, elegant work — and to Ingalls’s fiction more generally — the sustained attention it so richly deserves.
Every one of its 128 pages is perfect, original, and arresting. Clear a Saturday, please, and read it in a single sitting ... Ingalls’s narrative is a miracle of economy and grace. (Most of her books are novellas, which might explain her obscurity.) She writes straightforwardly, without winking, dropping only occasional hints that Dorothy’s tether on reality might be frayed ... Larry’s connection to Caliban is clear enough—he is a frightening other to be feared, enslaved, and, when that fails, exterminated. As a romance, the book is tender; as a portrait of depression, exquisite and tragic. Dorothy can’t swim against the tides of grief and melancholia. Does Larry really exist? 'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine' is not a statement that Mrs. Caliban ever utters.
...[a] concise, affecting and highly original work ... Mrs. Caliban never makes its points head-on, never strays from its intriguing confusions, never beats us over the head with meaning, but somehow we are moved. The book is a strange conversation overheard on a bus: sketchy, incomplete, maddening, but totally unforgettable ... Rachel Ingalls has created a tight, intriguing portrait of a woman's escape from unacceptable reality and presented an account of derangement so matter-of-fact, so ordinary and at the same time so bizarre, that through her words we experience new insight.
Mrs. Caliban is being reissued, a timely resurrection in this gender-mesmerized time, given the author's proto-feminist take on life … Larry and Dorothy gallivant under the cover of night, through lush flower gardens and by the moonlit ocean...Dorothy's way of coping with Larry's potential for violence forms the fundamental conundrum of Mrs. Caliban, which, sexual politics aside, is in many ways deftly light and humorous … Ingalls has an oddball, off-center vision, replete with sharply observed glimpses of the surreal in ordinary life.
Ingalls captures the surreal monotony of this circumscribed terrain — at once noisy and stultifying, sprawling and claustrophobic — in a brilliant dovetailing of minimalist prose and maximalist premise ... Mrs. Caliban, like the suburbs on which Ingalls trains her gaze, is self-conscious about its porous edges, nodding frequently to the data of its contemporary moment but declining to incorporate it ... Ingalls is subtle but shrewd in her portrayal of suburbia as a species of paranoia. Dorothy’s social environment is structured by the border between the apparent safety of the visible world and the anticipated dangers that constantly threaten it ... Ingalls’s reference to Shakespeare is not developed beyond her novel’s title, perhaps because the parallels can’t be parsed neatly... Dorothy is not Shakespeare’s Miranda, but neither can she promise fidelity to Caliban till death do them part. It is to Ingalls’s great credit that her novel understands this and provides a conclusion to match.
Mrs. Caliban is a novel that explores the things that stick around for too long, becoming part of our everyday experience, after they’ve outlived their expected shelf life. Ingalls uses Dorothy and Larry’s strange arrangement to probe the ways we build lives together … Ingalls imagines a world where we value counterfactuals and remembrances: the lost possibility of what might have been … There’s a sort of conflict at the heart of Mrs. Caliban that expresses itself in Ingalls’s B-movie plot, the publishers’ reissues, and the reader’s approach to the book. It demands that we both take it seriously and don’t. In fact, this is how Dorothy, Larry, and Ingalls teach us to approach the past – whether it’s tragedy we linger on or the farce we laugh off – it’s something that we certainly and always remember.
At 111 pages, shorn of extensive subplots, and paced for an evening’s read, Mrs. Caliban tells the droll story of love between an amphibious monster named Larry and a depressed housewife named Dorothy. It inspects what the love of a monster might mean when it doesn’t involve kidnapping, as it usually does in stories of uncanny ‘romance’ … One of Ingalls’s key moves is simply to imagine casual sex with a monster-man. It doesn’t represent a journey beyond Dorothy’s inhibitions.
... Rachel Ingalls... is funny in an exceptionally dry way, in a way that does not appeal to readers who like things spelled out ... part of the brilliance of [the book] lies in the way Ingalls captures the everyday bathos of a neglected, hard-done-by wife and then turns around to startle us with an almost festive regeneration through a relationship with an impossible creature ... this novel’s sensibility is gloriously low-key even as weirdness abounds.
The plot unfolds brilliantly and heartbreakingly ... The love story is a delight, the social commentary sharp, the writing funny and fun—and yet the sorrow, even bitterness, at the core of this book about our perfidious species is inescapable and profound. Where is the movie?
