Off the top of my head I'm not totally sure of her background but I'd imagine these are the kinds of short stories you'd get if a lifelong copy editor decided to try their hand at fiction—meticulously assembled and boring as fuck. "Public Facilities" is pretty good though. One star.
"Blood Test" by Charles Baxter (2024)
So, a rather boring, mild-mannered insurance salesman living in Ohio decides to pay for an experimental blood test from Cambridge that claims to predict future behavior. The results tell him that he's likely to commit murder. You wouldn't expect a comedy with that premise to boast the energy of a mildly edgy family sitcom (the edge: a running theme throughout the book is American hatred) but that seems to have been the plan. It's a decently entertaining, evenly paced, easy, drink-of-water read that's rarely tense or laugh-out-loud funny (that seems to be the publishing sweet spot nowadays) but when the sitcom ending arrives, the moral lands with a total thud, in one fell swoop, completely destroying whatever goodwill you might have earlier been willing to grant. And we're talking the limp kind of goodwill you grant to someone or something whose most sparkling quality is that they're merely inoffensive. Like lightly toasted bread. One star.
"Birds of America" by Lorrie Moore (1998)
I pulled this off my shelf expecting to be enchanted. Instead, I finished it bored out of my mind. I've read this before and what's striking is none of the stories except one seemed familiar—apparently, I had easily forgotten them. Now, the one story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" is still pretty fantastic, but coming after 200 pages of quippy protagonists who are fond of wordplay, and starring yet another quippy protagonist who is fond of wordplay, to be followed by yet one final quippy protagonist who is fond of wordplay and also accidentally murdered her friend's baby, even this stellar story caused my eyes to glaze over at one point. The cynical thing to say is, stories about white people who work in academia can't possibly be all that interesting. But if I were to try to dig for a deeper reason for its failure, I think it's that the book perfected writer's workshop tenets at the time: it's the epitomy of Carver-like minimalism. It's the "epiphany of the tiny moment, the power of the unsaid" writing writ ideal. In 1998, this book was considered a remarkable gem. By those rules, this book is an unprecedented triumph. Little did anyone at the time realize though, the rules they enforced and celebrated were arbitrary and not universal. One star.
"All Around Atlantis" by Deborah Eisenberg (1997)
Fiction via overthinking. Fell asleep twice while reading. Two stars.
"A Guardian Angel Recalls" by Willem Frederik Hermans, Translated by David Colmer (1971, 2021)
Admission: I didn't choose this book because it was about people dealing with the first few days of unexpected war; I chose it because the unusual title was written in my exact same style. That said, the plot keeps a striking number of balls in the air, too many for me to even attempt to list here. But there are bombs, and heartbreaks, and World War II, and trials, and interlopers, and 6-year-old girls accidentally getting hit by cars, and angels and devils and modernist paintings—a steady stream of complications all held together quite well by the internal moral dilemmas of Burt Alberegt, an unextraordinary public prosecutor who's just trying to do the right thing for the right reasons, all while our narrator, his assured guardian angel (and unwitting accomplice to a manslaughter cover-up) hovers nearby. It could easily become didactic, but doesn't. And it could easily become farcical and satiric, and almost does early on, but as winding and frenzied and coincidental as the journey becomes, war just seems to put a heavy damper on any hilarity. It's a book that definitely sticks with you, and it's a book that's difficult to set aside for too long, but something holds it back. Maybe, by never quite going in the direction you think it's going to go, in the end, that ethos stops the novel from truly ascending. Like a driver who insists they're going to reach their destination by only making left turns, eventually novel fun becomes routine. At least that's my guess for now. Three stars.
"A Curtain of Green and Other Stories" by Eudora Welty (1941)
Welty is one of those writers where every story I've seen of hers, in collegiate fiction anthologies, came from this, her first book. And while those excerpted stories are great, you can also already see why her literary standing would sort of peter out. Unlike other older writers I've read recently, the bulk of this feels very much of its time, it doesn't quite transcend it. Maybe it's the tendency towards overwrought description, maybe it's the "young writer" character choices: old people, deaf mutes, freaks, slow people, hitchhikers, traveling salesmen, and adolescents, all similarly "flat"; maybe it's the overreliance on narrative obliqueness, an overreliance on simile—honestly, I can't pinpoint why it all feels so dusty to me. Stories that feel more like character sketches? That end with unexplained deaths? Too many sensitive characters who have unusually vivid daydreams? Comedy that's a tad too broad and drama that's a tad too serious? Pulp irony that might be nothing more than actual pulp? Before TV, there used to be a divide between "pop short stories" and "serious literature," and this kind of feels like it's trying to bridge that divide—it's not "Criminal Minds" and it's not "The Wire", it's more like "NYPD Blue". And who wants to watch NYPD Blue over the other two? The "complete trash" show and the "prestige serial" show are both great. Two stars.