Hauntingly familiar
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut story collection, “Her Body and Other Parties,” makes impossible things feel enchantingly, troublingly real. In a story called “Mothers,” a young woman involved with another woman (suggestively named Bad) recounts, “We’d peel off our clothes because they didn’t belong between us. I would look over her smooth, pale skin, the pink shock of her labia, and kiss her mouth in a way that sent quakes straight to my fault lines, and think, Thank god we cannot make a baby.” The young woman is wrong. After their relationship has ended, Bad shows up at her door with a baby and a simple (if implausible) explanation: “I was pregnant. Now there’s a baby. She’s yours.”
A finalist for the National Book Award, the book abounds with fantastical premises that ring true because the intensity of sexual desire, the mutability of the body, and the realities of gender inequality make them so. “Eight Bites” tells the story of a woman who undergoes gastric bypass surgery, only to have her unwanted pounds return as a kind of living entity.
In “Real Women Have Bodies,” young women have been inexplicably fading away, their skin becoming “more like skim milk than whole,” before they turn translucent and then disappear entirely.
Though the stories draw on elements of horror fiction, they’re fueled by tenderness rather than cruelty, and the imagery is beautiful, not grotesque. “Inventory” catalogs a woman’s sexual encounters amid a mysterious pandemic that kills much of the population. The story ends with an eerily lovely vision of apocalypse: “I keep thinking I can see the virus blooming on the horizon like a sunrise. I realize the world will continue to turn, even with no people on it. Maybe it will go a little faster.”
Occasionally, particularly in the last two stories, mystery gives way to murkiness, and our intimacy with the characters suffers as a result. But mostly, these stories stand as exquisitely rendered, poignant hauntings.
If Machado’s stories feature passionate, vulnerable women, the world of Daniel Alarcón’s “The King Is Always Above the People” is one of lonely, disaffected men. Familial discord, particularly between fathers and sons, and a gloomy sense of rootlessness pervade the lives of these characters, some of whom struggle to get by in blighted cities in the United States, and some of whom confront — or attempt to flee — their troubles in other unnamed countries.
“República and Grau” depicts a 10-year-old boy, Maico, who helps a blind man beg at a traffic intersection, in exchange for a share of the proceeds. Though Maico’s father is abusive, the boy comes to understand how his father has tried to shield him from “the careful arithmetic of survival: this much for food, this much if I walk home, this much for the children, for the house, for the soup, for the drink, for the roof over my head, this much to keep the cold at bay.”
“Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot” inventively merges the present time with that of Lincoln’s, as the narrator, a recently laid-off drifter, recalls his “first love” — the man who would go on to become the 16th president. “Lincoln was a good man, a competent lover, a dignified leader with a tender heart. He’d wanted to be a poet, but settled for being a statesman.”
Though the characters and their circumstances can feel elusive, this is perhaps fitting. The collection offers a portrait of men who cling to the illusion that, as one character hopes, “one can start over in any number of places, right? Any number of times?” In Alarcón’s elegant prose, this assumption is interrogated to bracing effect.
Tom Hanks’ first published book, “Uncommon Type,” left me with few questions about who his characters were or what was driving their actions. And that’s too bad. It felt as if the people in these stories stepped right up, proffered a nice firm handshake, announced the basic tenets of their existence, and then returned to their mostly unruffled lives.
To be sure, I’m charmed by the nice-guy-superstar’s aspiring to write stories and then doing it: 400 pages’ worth. The photographs of typewriters that preface each story make for appealing literary eye candy. (Hence the title, “Uncommon Type,” wink, wink.)
The problem is that the characters here tend to come across as types — common ones — lacking in psychologically nuanced interior lives. Potential satires don’t satirize enough. Potentially conflictrich situations fizzle out. A young woman trying to become an actress in New York has her Broadway debut by the end of her narrative, without too much trouble. The story of a Bulgarian immigrant chronicles his attempt to get a job in a coffee shop, rather than delving into the traumatic experiences in his past. The book’s vocabulary suffers from hyper-folksiness. (A sampling: yowza, goner, gander, slugger, cussword, Son of a gun.) It’s a little like “A Prairie Home Companion” without the irony.
Which is to say, also, that these stories have their pleasures: descriptions of food, objects, and rituals that gratify in their careful attention to humble delights. There are cool contraptions, including a homemade rocket ship and a “Chronometric Adventures” plane that allows for time travel. There are some funny bits that poke at the book’s generally cozy milieu. “Nothing is worse than brand-new sheets,” a rich business executive says to the proprietor of a podunk motel. “Not even heart disease,” she retorts.
Hanks’ book raises an interesting question: Can lighthearted, feel-good tales — of the type we might find satisfying in a Hollywood movie — succeed in short fiction form? Or does the genre seem to demand a certain melancholy, an air of unease? The narrator in Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” reflects, “Brides never fare well in stories. Stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle.” And like a candle in a dark room, the best stories seem to glow all the brighter for the darkness that accompanies them.