Lost in America
Emily Fridlund became a name to watch with “History of Wolves,” her Booker Prize-nominated debut novel. Now comes “Catapult,” a kind of tasting menu showcasing Fridlund’s stark, dissonant voice. Her descriptions blindside you with rude audacity. On a boyfriend’s hands: “Every time he lifted his sandwich, I could see his veins rise up and do a ghostly glide over his knuckles . ... His veins were like a second, more complicated hand that lived inside the ordinary one.”
In artfully imagined predicaments, men, women and kids (even babies) try to figure out how and whom to be. Here’s the title story’s 14-year-old protagonist, bossing younger kids: “I had no patience for pretenders, for people who needed shoes or snacks . ... They loved me because I was the only one who could get them ... past their own marginal, limited minds, which required so many little suicides, so much constant sacrifice, surrender after surrender.” Another young woman struggles to reconnect with a quirky bestie: “With most people in my life, I come to the end of myself pretty fast. I walk to my borders — where there’s dinner on a dropleaf table, maybe small talk or sex — then wave politely and turn back. Lora made me sorry there wasn’t anywhere better to go.” Story after story replenishes Fridlund’s flinty, wistful vision.
Respecting the fact that T.C. Boyle has delighted so many for so long, “The Relive Box and Other Stories” reminds me of why I’m not a fan. While always ably imagined and (his admirers remind us) socially conscientious, Boyle’s stories to me soon grow tedious and heavy-handed, feeling at best like whimsical what-ifs, duly fleshed out. “She’s the Bomb” features a miserable, failed student calling in a bomb threat at graduation ceremonies. “Are We Not Men?” considers a future in which babies are made by adding in preferred elements, like menu choices. “The FivePound Burrito” watches a taqueria owner succumb temporarily to the lure of big profit, until his clientele and employees turn into grotesques. In “The Designee,” an 80-year-old man falls for the hoary “you’ve been named the recipient of great wealth” scam.
The title story (this collection’s strongest) posits a near-future appliance via which people may relive portions of their pasts, resulting in an addicted population. “Was this a recipe for disaster? ... Were they going to pass laws? Ban the box? ... I didn’t care ... Time has no meaning when you’re reliving.” Boyle repeatedly constructs variations on a series of “Twilight Zone”-ish themes, wherein the set-up pretty much is the punch line: The assiduous carrotdangling that follows seems to ignore a deeper obligation.
By contrast, James McBride (“The Color of Water” and National Book Award-winning “The Good Lord Bird”) quietly delivers on that obligation in “FiveCarat Soul,” a string of tragicomic testaments — from a buyer and seller of antique toys to soldiers in an all-black Union regiment to a group of Kiplingesque zoo animals to the denizens of a rough Boston slum called the Bottom, including the eponymous Five Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band, which jams in a space above a Chinese grocery. “Goat” follows the painful triumph of a boy who can run. “It’s like a different person climb into him when he runs. He leans forward and gets low and just flies along like a diesel train.” Goat’s mother, who can’t read, declares sadly to his earnest teacher: “When you have been spit on ... it don’t matter much what else you think you know.” Yet Goat runs. A furious joy drives these glimpses of brave lives in perilous places.
Jeffrey Eugenides (“The Virgin Suicides,” “Middlesex,” “The Marriage Plot”) starts out strong in “Fresh Complaint” with “Complainers,” a near-flawless story about two aging women struggling to emulate characters in a popular novel — namely, two old Native American women left to perish by their tribe. “Take charge ... Don’t mope” becomes their motto. Almost tenderly, the Pulitzer-winning Eugenides takes “Complainers” where it has to go.
I wish I felt that way about more of this collection. “Complainers” is dated 2017; other, earlier-dated stories, while always finely controlled, don’t wield the same impact. In “Air Mail” (1996), a young man languishing with (strikingly described) dysentery in Thailand believes he’s entered an enlightened state. “He’d found the paradise beyond the island.” The prior boyfriend of a woman trying to get pregnant narrates “Baster” (1995): “Everyone knows that men objectify women. But none of our sizing up of breasts and legs can compare with the cold-blooded calculation of a woman in the market for semen.” “Find the Bad Guy,” (2013), about a lout’s boozy downward spiral wrecking his marriage, and “The Oracular Vulva” (1999), recounting a sex researcher’s exploits, struck me as unredeemed ordeals.
But I found the title story (2017) movingly postmodern: a young Indian student connives to seduce a married physics professor so as to escape her own pending, arranged marriage. You may disagree.
Joan Frank’s latest novel is “All the News I Need,” winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction, published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Email: books@sfchronicle.com