BLANK PAGES
And Other Stories
By Bernard MacLaverty
261 pp. Norton. $26.95.
The stories in this Irish author’s new book are about loss, death, the inevitability of grief, the indignities of age and the way a life can suddenly slide into the abyss. It could have been very grim going, but MacLaverty writes with such compassion that his stories never feel bleak; they feel humane. They feel hopeful. “Soup Mix” reads like something Flannery O’Connor might have written in lieu of “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” if only she’d felt more pity for her characters. “A Love Picture,” in which a Belfast woman in 1940 hears her enlisted son has been lost at sea, feels as if it’s headed for the cruelest of conclusions until MacLaverty takes an unexpected turn toward kindness. There is humor in these stories, too, most broadly in “The Fairly Good Samaritan,” in which an alcoholic barely manages to call an ambulance for his dying neighbor before helping himself to her medicinal brandy.
MacLaverty tells stories through the accumulation of sensory detail. A woman is moved by the sudden coolness on her skin as perfume evaporates from her wrist. An old man searching for his lost grandchildren grows aware of “spicy, odd smells, like tea, cinnamon, rosemary, musk,” as his panic increases. A man visiting his elderly mother realizes that “for the third time that day he was conscious of a blackbird singing.” The continuous encounters with such exquisite impressions immerse you in each narrative, leaving you vulnerable to its emotional punch. “Blank Pages” may explore some of life’s darkest passages, but they feel true as only fiction can, and are never overcome by the darkness.
SHIT CASSANDRA SAW
Stories
By Gwen E. Kirby
274 pp. Penguin Books. Paper, $17.
Reading Kirby’s collection is like watching an irreverent halftime marching band scatter chaotically across a football field, only to find its perfect formation at the last second. Seemingly random events coalesce into a deeper meaning. Kirby’s characters aren’t necessarily wiser for their often harrowing experiences, but they do appear more content on the other side. As the narrator of “Midwestern Girl Is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories” thinks: “It is lucky that she is not waiting for a moment of epiphany, but is simply looking forward to the rock of the bus as it rolls down the highway.”
Kirby’s characters are mostly women, and they come vividly alive on the page, moving through the world with coordinated ease. They’re athletes, pirates, warriors. Sometimes they grow fangs. A woman “stands in the backyard and howls — not because she is sad, but because her lungs are strong and it is a joy to turn air into sound.” A girl “loves being up to bat, the center of the entire game, feeling all of her power gather in her back leg and her loose hands.”
It’s a thrill to meet fictional women who feel so comfortable inside their bodies, but I couldn’t help feeling afraid for them. Women who are this confident at the beginning of the story get slapped down by the end — don’t they? Women who blithely throw themselves into sketchy situations are about to learn a harsh lesson — aren’t they? Kirby takes joy in subverting the reader’s expectations at every turn. Her characters might be naïve, even reckless, but they aren’t about to be victims: They’re strong, and brave, and nearly always capable of rescuing themselves.
THANK YOU, MR. NIXON
Stories
By Gish Jen
256 pp. Knopf. $28.
A reference to Mark Rothko’s later period features briefly in “Thank You, Mr. Nixon,” and his abstract paintings are an apt metaphor for Jen’s own spare style: On the surface her storytelling seems simple and direct, but the closer you look the more layered and complex it becomes. Through characters distracted by the superficial colors of their lives, Jen invites her readers to consider profound questions about history, ancestry and identity.
This marvelous collection of linked stories begins with a Chinese girl in heaven recalling then-President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972; and it ends with the story of a Hong Kong family living in New York in 2020, grappling simultaneously with the Covid-19 lockdown and the eruption of pro-democracy demonstrations back home. In all her work, Jen locates the tensions between inherited and lived cultures. There are rarely clear conclusions.
Nor are there bursts of metaphysical insight when characters suddenly understand themselves. Instead we get Duncan Hsu, an American who thinks his Chinese heritage has something to do with museum porcelains, until he comes face to face with his cousin, a man who suffered terrible deprivations during the Cultural Revolution, beats his young son and may be dying of tuberculosis. Of the many characters Jen offers us in these 11 stories, Duncan feels the most American: genuinely well meaning, driven by the honest belief that we humans are all the same underneath, wanting to do the right thing; but retreating in confusion when his good opinion of himself is challenged.
MANYWHERE
Stories
By Morgan Thomas
224 pp. MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
Thomas writes in a musical, incantatory style that approaches poetry. Their stories aren’t linear, but a series of memoiristic recollections that fit together like beads on a string. Thomas takes extraordinary care with syntax to let queer characters fully express themselves on the page. It’s almost as if Thomas needed to create a new language to tell these stories; ours is still too binary.
In “Taylor Johnson’s Lightning Man,” Thomas avoids misgendering the historical figure Frank Woodhull, a Canadian immigrant to the United States who was born Mary Johnson. Woodhull had lived as a man in America for 15 years until 1908, when officials at Ellis Island declared Woodhull to be a woman. What gender did Woodhull identify with? We don’t know and never will. Thomas circumvents the need for a gendered or even gender-neutral pronoun by addressing Woodhull in the second person throughout: “I suspected even then you weren’t a woman or a man. You were a lightning man with a knock like thunder.”
In “Bump,” a transgender woman outwardly expresses her yearning for a family by wearing a synthetic baby bump, and pretending she is pregnant. So fierce is her longing that when the bump breaks, it feels like a miscarriage — not only to the narrator but also to the reader. It’s a gorgeous meditation on the pointlessness of biological reductionism when it comes to human wants and desires.
These breathlessly imaginative stories are all the more remarkable for the elegant, organic ways in which the author unhooks language from its entrenched assumptions about men and women.
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