New short story collection by Evans is exhilarating thrill ride

Themes in “The Office of Historical Corrections” include death and mother-daughter bonds.

Ten years ago, Danielle Evans made a splash in the literary world with the short-story collection “Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self.” Now she has followed up with “The Office of Historical Corrections” (Riverhead, 265 pp., ★★★★), a new collection that is so smart and self-assured it’s certain to thrust her into the top tier of American short story writers.

Evans’ stories feel particularly urgent at this moment of national reckoning over race. In college Evans double majored in anthropology and African American studies, and she brings an anthropologist’s eye to the material conditions of her characters’ lives.

The masterpiece of the collection is the title novella, which starts as a sort of female buddy story but turns into a deftly plotted mystery that may or may not involve a murder.

The main character, Cassie, works for a government institute its critics scathingly refer to as the Big Brother Institute or Department of Political Correctness. Established by Congress, its mission was to deploy a “friendly citizen army” of public historians to remedy “the contemporary crisis of truth.”

While it begins on a comic note, with Cassie correcting a flyer in a trendy bakery that misidentifies Juneteenth as the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation – it’s actually the date in June 1865 when Texas slaves learned they were free – the story turns darker when she is sent to investigate the decades-old death of a Black man in rural Wisconsin.

Cassie’s assignment will end up reuniting her with her lifelong frenemy Genie, now going by Genevieve. The two women have known each other since fourth grade, when they were the only Black girls in their class at a private school in Washington, D.C. And now, Genie’s life may be in danger.

In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a white college student, Claire, gets sucked into a campus uproar when a picture of her in a Confederate flag bikini goes viral. It turns out she’s just clueless, and the story is only incidentally about campus cancel culture. It’s really about Claire’s inconsolable grief over her mother’s death from cancer and the way it disfigures all the relationships in her life, including with the Black boy and girl who were her best friends growing up.

Mother-daughter bonds and the death of a loved one are recurring themes throughout the book – Evans began writing it when her own mother was dying of cancer. In “Happily Ever After,” a woman named Lyssa has a one-night stand with a director shooting a music video for a second-tier pop star, but most of the action takes place inside her head as she ruminates about her mother’s death (yes, cancer) and the extraordinary efforts she had to make to ensure she got the same medical care as a white woman would.

“She had bought clothes she couldn’t afford, taken off early from work to press her hair, never met a new doctor without a full face of makeup,” Evans writes. “There was always something they wouldn’t tell everybody, and she wanted to be told, which meant she had to look like a real person to them, like a person whose mother deserved to live.”

In “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain,” Dori, a bride-to-be, goes AWOL the morning of her wedding with Rena, a woman she has long suspected of sleeping with her fiance. Improbably, they end up at a water park, where Dori decides to go on the tallest slide.

Evans describes their ascent of the stairs, their plunge into the pool, and the “unexpected lightness” they feel as they surface. Reading these stories is like that ride – afterward, you feel a sense of lightness and exhilaration.