Annie Bell's Dust Bowl: I Will Send Rain

The Dust Bowl is one of those time periods in history I’ve heard about often enough that I feel like I know it, only to stop for a moment and realize I don’t. Upon reflection, I realize my knowledge doesn’t extend beyond the bounds of The Grapes of Wrath, a few old photographs I’ve seen, and countless mentions of the words “Dust Bowl.” And really, I don’t even get much of picture of the Dust Bowl itself even from The Grapes of Wrath. That novel begins with the devastation already in place, the main thrust then being the struggle for a new place in the world upon leaving all that behind. I Will Send Rainhowever, Rae Meadows newest novel, provides a wonderfully detailed picture of people actually trying to live within the Dust Bowl:

Birdie loved the musty, sweet fruit and larded crust of mulberry pie. Before she turned toward the house, though, she saw what her father now saw. The clouds were not gathering overhead as they should have been, they were instead moving at them like a wall, the sun lost in a hazy scrim, the winds picking up, dry and popping with electricity, biting and raw against her skin.

“What in God’s name?” Her father squinted against the darkening sky, which turned brownish and then dark gray, even green in places where the sun was trying to burn through. It was midday but it looked like dusk, the sweep of an otherworldly hand….

“Fred!” he yelled, though it was pointless given the wind. Dirt began to blow. The world had gone dark and haywire. Dear God, Samuel thought, what is this ugliness?

Annie Bell and her husband try to protect their family and provide as the dust storms ravage their farm. Her husband dreams of tremendous floods and begins to build a boat, feeling called by God. Her daughter pines both to get away and for her boyfriend from a nearby farm. Annie’s son, an asthmatic, simply tries to keep breathing amidst the worsening dust. Facing heavier and heavier burdens in an already difficult life, Annie finds herself increasingly attracted to the cosmopolitan mayor despite still strongly loving her husband and family:

“Oh. Hello, Mayor,” she said, registering how quickly he had managed to make it out to the sidewalk, She wished she’d had a chance to blot her face with a handkerchief….

“Nothing wrong with a parade,” she said. She should have kept going then, but there she stood, a tension between them both awful and delicious. “You can call me Annie.”

“Can I carry that for you? Help you to your car?”

No one who saw them would have thought anything of it, and yet Annie knew different. What could people see anyway? They couldn’t see the weight of a glance or the impurity of a thought. They were in plain view, but the town might just have easily fallen away. “No, no. I’m all right,” she said. But she didn’t move on….

“The truth is I didn’t want to go home just yet.” She felt lighter having said it, a new hollow in her gut.

“Can I walk with you? I’m in no rush to get back to my desk.”

She was pleased, but she knew it was not quite right for him to ask. Are you doing good by God, Annie, she heard her mother say before she could quiet the voice.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay, Annie,” he said. “And you can call me Jack.”

Meadows paints this picture of the tense and ravaged farming landscape in unadorned, straightforward prose. At the same time, a good amount of beauty and warmth manage to come forth. There is suffering, people bearing more than they can because there is no choice, being pulled between many different kinds of needs, but there is an overwhelming sense of home within it. Maybe some of that is my childhood in Nebraska calling to me, but that isn’t it entirely. There’s definitely more. Of course, that sense of home breeds a great deal of tension in the face of almost ever-present possible doom. Wonderfully tuned suspense keeps the pages continually turning.

I Will Send Rain is delightfully vivid, both in the setting and the windows into the characters. The reader can taste the dust, and the longing in the characters’ mouths. I didn’t feel that I was reading as much as watching, and that kind of dive into prose always speaks highly for a novel. I Will Send Rain is an impressive showing from Meadows, well worth checking out.

It Begins with a Very Simple Incident: A Review of David S. Atkinson's Not Quite So Stories

One of the most common questions in the world of fiction is, “Which form is superior: the novel or the short story?” (That is, if one extreme must be taken over the other. The novella is usually a suitable compromise.) While it’s impossible to pick one over the other with complete objectivity, there is one important factor to consider: the latter typically allows storytellers to unleash their most unconventional concepts with maximum brevity and pacing, ensuring that these peculiarities leave an impression but conclude before they become laborious or unremarkable. Case in point: Not Quite So Stories, the newest collection by David S. Atkinson (whose previous two books, Bones Buried in the Dirt and The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes, were copiously acclaimed within the indie publishing scene). Comprised of roughly two dozen quirky vignettes, the book proffers an abundance of colorful slice-of-life situations and philosophical ponderings. Although there are a few stumbles along the way, the bulk of the sequence is highly engaging and memorable, making it a very worthwhile read.

Aside from alluding to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, the title Not Quite So Storiesprepares readers for what’s inside: a chain of eccentricities. Atkinson describes it as follows:

The traditional explanation for myth . . .  is an attempt by humans to explain and demystify the world. That’s crap. We may be able to come to terms with small pieces, but existence as a whole is beyond our grasp. Life is absurd, ultimately beyond our comprehension. The best we can do is to proceed on with our lives in the face of that. The stories in this collection proceed from this idea, examining how the different characters manage (and/or fail) to do this.

The majority of the tales included here capture this outlook, with the best examination being “An Endless Series of Meaningless Miracles.” It begins with a very simple incident: one day, “aging [and] pudgy” William P. Forsmythe (who feels a bit like an elderly version of Alvy Singer from Woody Allen’s brilliant Annie Hall) gets into his bathtub for his daily soak and notices that the water level sinks instead of rises. Relentlessly perplexed by how “the tub water had acted contrary to universal laws [of displacement],” he sets out to experience a few more acts of God in a single day and discover a new purpose in life. Despite the pacing sometimes getting bogged down by clarifications as the narrative unfolds (which, to be honest, is a reoccurring issue throughout the collection), the text is nonetheless consistently intriguing and inventive, with a plethora of subtle details that make it feel very realistic. After all, “it did not occur to Warren that the miracle was utterly insignificant, however inexplicable it was. Warren’s life was too insignificant as it was; he craved significance,” and the way Atkinson uses his character’s trajectory to comment on humanity’s need for self-actualization (as well as how easily we ascribe to fantastical beliefs to assuage our sense of desperation and loneliness) is understated yet masterful. It’s definitely a highlight of Not Quite So Stories.

Another metaphysical gem is “The Bricklayer’s Ambiguous Morality,” which concerns an inexplicable accident involving two friends, a brick, and causality. While its surreal events may suggest mere superficial entertainment at first, there’s definitely an underlying commentary on how misguided gun enthusiasm can conflate with misplaced senses of patriotism and masculinity. Atkinson demonstrates skill in capturing the conversations and reactions of conventional adolescent males, and the way he puts a spin on the familiar condition of two kids goofing around until something horrible happens is clever and refreshing. In other words, the catalyst for the tragedy may be purposefully silly, but its implications are strikingly relevant to modern America.

Among the peak creative concoctions in Not Quite So Stories is “60% Rayon and 40% Evil,” a fascinating and novel take on the killer doll cliché. Told from the perspective of a “five-inch stuffed bear” who “fully acknowledge[s] that [he has] a desire for murder,” the story is remarkable because of how the barbaric and remorseless actions of its protagonist are juxtaposed with his intellectual rationalizations. Rather than act as a soulless, bloodthirsty creature from hell (as is usual), Mr. Rictus (as his owner, Tristan, names him) is a product of his own backstory; Tristan pretends that the bear is a homicidal maniac, and, as Mr. Rictus suggests:

However, strangely enough, and according to no mechanism that I at all comprehended, it all became true. In fits and spurts, I found myself becoming aware . . . . After all, it was a game, a theatrical trick, which Tristan had developed. The intent would have been spoiled if it had to be suddenly acknowledged as fact. One of the core features of Tristan’s fiction was that I killed when no one, particularly him, was looking, so that is exactly what I did.

From there, the two develop a relationship akin to the one explored in the Twilight Zoneepisode “Caesar and Me.” The way the piece ends isn’t entirely surprisingly, yet there’s no doubt that its final line—“Colloquially put, you people blow my mind. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I kill so many of you”—is chilling.

Filling its hyperbolic central conflict with practical insinuations, “Domestic Ties” feels a bit like a lost Vonnegut effort. It centers on Charlotte, an archetypal 1950s-esque housewife (her husband is even named Ward) who’s preparing her home for the impending arrival of a prisoner. You see, a jury notice:

notified that the state would be requisitioning the use of her home for the purpose of providing shelter to a convict. The prisons were impossibly overcrowded, the letter informed. Unable to determine any other immediate solution, the state had no choice but to place prisoners in private residences.

Once he arrives (and is confined to a small space in her kitchen), the two engage in various instances of uncomfortable cultural shock, as Charlotte is dutifully respectful yet cautious because the prisoner is both incredibly meek and inherently threatening. All in all, it’s a very engaging and tastefully written tale, with a conclusion that, while not overly dramatic or substantial, makes readers question the nature of Man.

Although most of the book is wonderfully captivating and idiosyncratic, there are a few missteps along the way. The most glaring issue (aside from the aforementioned repetitiveness) is that some of these selections fail to warrant their length. In other words, either the premises themselves aren’t appealing enough or not enough happens within them. Works like “G-Men,” “Cents of Wonder Rhymes with Orange,” and “The Elusive Qualities of Advanced Office Equipment” are certainly written well, but they aren’t especially compelling; instead, they just kind of happen without leaving much to reflect on or remember. The biggest offender of all is “A Brief Account of the Great Toilet Paper War of 2012,” a lengthy exploration of how a simple marital squabble over pride escalates into ridiculous territory. The issue at hand is certainly relatable, and even a bit humorous, but the joke wears out its welcome far too soon, resulting in a tedious slog to the end. Empirical resonance notwithstanding, even people who’ve been in the same situation before will want to move on ASAP.

Not Quite So Stories succeeds far more often than it fails, and honestly, isn’t that the real test of a short story collection? None of the pieces are without merit, and the bulk of them provide resourceful plots, three-dimensional characters, and best of all, enthralling writing on a technical level. Atkinson has a gift for fleshing out strange narrative shells with dense minutiae, articulate wording, and weighty meanings. He certainly has a distinctive perspective on life, as well as an equally original way to deliver it; anyone looking to be simultaneously entertained and enlightened should read Not Quite So Stories.

Lies Full of Truths: Rob Roberge's Liar, A Memoir

Rob Roberge’s Liar is a memoir, not so much about re-living the past, but rather trying to put the past together through a series of flashbacks. Written in nonlinear excerpts and vignettes, Roberge seeks to make sense of a past full of alcohol, drugs, relationships, murders, and music. The nonlinear narrative makes complete sense, as Roberge’s life is full of tangled lines, and the only way to make sense of it is to untangle them when and where it’s possible. Within this clashing and clanking and untangling and tangling, there is a remarkable beautiful buzz of energy that keeps his story moving along. This buzz of energy is transferred from one word to the next, from one sentence to the next, and from one memory to the next and as a result, we have Roberge’s life before us. There is elegance in his chaos.

It’s a constant tug-of-war between sobriety and relapses, between love and hate, and between guilt and solace. Told through the second person point of view, there is a triple layering that occurs as Roberge uses “you” to piece together his life. There is a “you” that refers to Rob Roberge writing to himself as he’s trying to make sense of his troubled past. There is a “you” which refers to the reader, solely as the reader, solely learning about the author’s life through bits and pieces. And then there is a “you” which transforms the reader into Roberge, causing some kind of mirroring effect.

In reference to his first girlfriend who was murdered early in their relationship, Roberge writes:

You try to think about what she looked like, but you really have no memories of this. You remember two long brown pigtails, but you could be getting those from her picture now on an Unsolved Murders in CT website, in her last school picture ever, taken the year she was killed. (2)

Here, we see a deep personal reflection of the author thinking to himself about his girlfriend. He is “talking” to himself, trying to make sense of what has happened. It doesn’t feel like he’s telling the reader a story, but rather, telling himself, and this allows us to enter Roberge’s mind, travelling around in his brain amidst the chaos and confusion.

Later on in his memoir, Roberge writes how he had stolen his wife’s painkillers for his own personal use, though his wife needs them for an illness that causes her strong physical pains. The author doesn’t tell her that he took them, but ironically, he pretends to help her find her medicine:

And you help her look. And you think of the saying that a junkie will steal your shoes and then help you look for them. You are a cliché. You are worse than a cliché for your wife. You are someone who hurts her. You are letting her feel terrible pain. What kind of person are you? (197)

Here, there is a distance created between the author and the reader. Roberge is making a commentary on the kind of person he is being, and the “you” separates the author from his audience. We are on the outside, trying to figure out the author, perhaps, judging the author as the author is judging himself.

Then, there is the “you” that transforms the reader into Rob Roberge, giving a feeling of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, where the reader follows along with Roberge’s choices, leading the reader into one dilemma after another in reference to drugs, alcohol, bipolarity, manic episodes and so on. The reader becomes the author, feeling his pain, guilt, and search for hope. Roberge writes, “You snort a line. Very soon, you are calmer and happier than you can ever remember feeling. It’s a perfect waking dream…It’s like you are living in someone else’s body. Someone not at all like you. Someone happy.” (176) The author brings the reader in close–we become the text. We snort the line, we are happier, we are in dream, we are not ourselves, we are happy. Here the reader becomes Roberge as he takes drugs. As he acts, we are acting with him, hoping to survive the text, hoping to survive Roberge’s life.

Roberge confesses that he is a liar–whether it’s to himself, to his friends, to his wife, he lies. He admits that at times, he is unable to separate truth from fiction, and that, ironically, is what makes the memoir so true. True in that his life has been one big blur, full of drugs and liquor and failed relationships and murdered friends. In there, somewhere, there is the truth, or, there are multiple truths. One important truth is the love for his wife, Gayle. This is the essence of his story–how he is still around, though he has thought about killing himself multiple times, because of Gayle. In those moments we see Roberge interact with his wife or write about his wife, we see the author at his humblest. It is in this humility, where the truth lies. It is within the guilt he feels for the pain that Gayle goes through, whether caused by Roberge or not, where the truth exists. He is embarrassed at times, He is remorseful. He is being truthful.

Roberge is seeking for the truth in his own memoir. He’s putting bits and pieces together, and it’s almost like he’s posting a series of Post-it notes against his own brain so that he can remember what has happened in the past to the best of his ability. He reveals a countless amount of dark moments in his life, and it’s easy to see why it’s difficult for him to remember. You wouldn’t want to remember some of these events. You would feel pain trying to seek the past, trying to make sense out of a life that was on the brink of death more than once. You would wonder if it’s all worth it.

Liar is a memoir full of puzzle pieces, with some of the pieces missing. It is through these holes, we find beauty in Roberge’s writing. The constant inconsistencies in his life make his memoir extraordinary because there is no happy ending or sad ending–there is no ending, in fact, there’s just Rob Roberge. His willingness to give himself up, to call himself out, to tell us how he has been struggling with life since he was a child gives us a world where beauty doesn’t necessarily mean happiness, but where beauty means the truth. And by facing the truth, you are able to move forward.

Capturing Life in Colors: On Daniel Clowes's Patience

The kinds of books that hit me the hardest are the ones that tackle the full range of life. I like to see my fictional friends in public and in private. I want to know their earlier thoughts and their later decisions. Really, I like understanding what makes their fictional hearts tick and their minds process. These kinds of narratives usually appear in the form of a massive tome that occupies a certain—extra durable, solid, and near-the-bottom-of-the-bookshelf—shelf, but, as the grand and timeless colloquialism reminds everyone now and then, big things can come in small packages. And 2016 has delivered one of the greatest small gifts under 200 pages that I’ve ever received: Daniel Clowes’ beautifully written and spectacularly drawn graphic novel Patience.

Clowes opens his graphic novel just like how life begins—with conception. It’s 2012, and Jack and Patience, the young couple who serve as dual protagonists, are going to be parents. After receiving the news, Patience says to Jack, “I never thought I’d ever be happy.” Her kind of reaction is both exciting and upsetting. She has a promise of happiness, but it’s a promise that is probably unable to be kept. After all, I ask, can having a child really give a grown adult self-fulfillment?

For Patience, life is difficult. She grapples with difficult ideas about what could happen to her and her family. Patience asks, “Do you worry about the future? Like, what if global warming gets really bad?” She continues, “We’ll be dead before then, probably, but what about the poor baby?” And again, “I don’t want her to feel like a loser all her life.” Patience is a perfect example of a young American woman edging closer and closer to some kind of early-life crisis. She is so honest about her fears and her dreams, but her honesty serves as a kind of shield that keeps her separated from actually living her life. She’s been too present in a world of technology and worry. The hyper-reactive world has worn her down.

For Jack, life doesn’t seem as difficult. He’s a young person who is stuck in a mindless and seemingly endless job, but he’s going to be a father. He has the hopes of a bright future. Until, suddenly, he doesn’t. He comes home to find Patience dead—killed. She and the couple’s unborn child have been brutally murdered.

Patience’s death is not a spoiler. It happens too early in the book for it to be considered such. What unfolds after her death is beautiful and powerful to unravel. Instead of Patience standing as a graphic novel about a new family burgeoning on adulthood and adapting to the required changes, Clowes’ work turns into a psychedelic, science fiction, vengeance-bound love story that somehow—miraculously—manages to be hopeful and, yes, romantic.

After finding Patience’s body on the floor, Jack appears in split panels, saying first, “I couldn’t move for what seemed like hours, like I was stuck in drying concrete. Probably just a trick by my DNA to keep me from bashing my brains in.” Then, he says, “The fact is, I didn’t want to kill myself. My memories were all that was left of her. I couldn’t bear to snuff those out too.” His honesty is striking, but the emotional sentiment behind his words is downright tear-inducing.

Jack sets out to find who could have killed Patience and why someone would have wanted to commit such an atrocious crime. He travels ahead to 2029, and he goes back to 1985 and 2006. Each section of time shows Jack becoming more and more determined to understand the woman he so loved. As Jack encounters Patience in these different time periods, he approaches her with ease and kindness. He tries to help the woman he loves, but he always tries to respect the past that made her. Jack works a delicate balance in shifting from past to future, but he never falters on his reasoning for giving up his life to understand how someone could end the one he held the dearest.

The images populating Clowes’ graphic novel are totally immersing. The colors pop, as Clowes uses sharp, bright coloring. They, in their naturally kind tones, work to illustrate the fact that Patience, even with its scene of murder and moments of revenge, is foremost a love story.

Clowes uses a variety of approaches in his drawings. In most of the more contemplative and internal segments, the panels appear closed off and centered. These images appear bolder and with a more focused vision. In other sections, the ones set in different times and the ones with a more boisterous narrative occurring, the drawings often become larger and more playful. The edges are more varied, with shapes less defined.

Yes, Patience is a short piece of fiction, but it’s one that spans decades and captures life in all of its glory and pain. Patience examines happiness, hurt, guilt, power, and hope. It’s a masterwork of the genre.

Daniel Clowes knows life. He writes about it and draws it so authentically. Patience is an extraordinary testament to how beautiful and selfless life and love can be.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Talking to Squirrels: On Elizabeth McKenzie's The Portable Veblen

The Portable Veblen is like it sounds, which is to say you don’t know what it is until you get to know it better. Because The Portable Veblen is near impossible to say with grace, and your mother will ask you to repeat it, “The Por-what the what?” although it will come to make sense with a sort of twisted logic: the novel’s protagonist, Veblen, is a thirty-year-old Alice in the Wonderland of Northern California who dares to ask of you, “Do you think wishful thinking is a psychiatric condition?”

Elizabeth McKenzie’s third book (and second novel) follows the eponymous Veblen as she hurtles toward marriage on a sort of whim. Her fiancé, Paul, is a neurologist with a flashy new invention—the Pneumatic Turbo Skull Punch (how Vonnegut-ian)—that lands him a government contract. But the device is rushed to market when there’s profit to be made, and ethics are challenged, and commitments are challenged, and maybe Veblen and Paul have rushed things after all because how much do they really know about each other?

It’s true, Veblen talks to a squirrel: an ally nesting in the attic of her house and Paul’s near-comic nemesis. And to Veblen, the squirrel talks back (sort of).

McKenzie is unparalleled in making her characters’ neuroses palpably real and ultimately important, angling a keen eye to the role of mental health in life. Veblen, who can empathize with the last lima bean on the plate that gets scraped into the trash, is forever “living in a state of wistful anticipation for life to become as wonderful as she was sure, someday, it would.”

Beneath its rom-com surface, The Portable Veblen exploits the hypocrisy of health and healthcare when economics is involved. As satirical as Vonnegut, McKenzie’s touch is light and effective, hinting at class clashes and culture clashes and morality clashes (oh my).

But most of all this is a story of love and family, chosen and otherwise. Veblen’s mother is a brilliant yet hypochondriacal loon, an irrepressible intervener, a woman who named her daughter after an obscure (but actually not so obscure) Norwegian-American economist, Thorstein Veblen—Thorstein coined the term “conspicuous consumption.” While (our) Veblen’s father is an institutionalized burden of a man, an absent yet still undeniable presence in Veblen’s life and legend to her mental health.

Then there’s Paul family. Paul’s mother and father are weed farmers, loving hippies but, in Paul’s eyes, unreliable parents. His developmentally-disabled brother has overshadowed Paul’s own independence, an unwitting saboteur since childhood, and since childhood Paul has done his best to extricate himself from it all.

McKenzie’s prose dances in those spaces where these repressed and dysfunctional emotions are dancing apart:

[Veblen] formed this estimation in faith that it would be so, because that was what she wanted, a family at ease, a family free from the heat of a central beast, traveling through vents to cook you in every room.

The sensitive and nuanced handling of the intersections of family and love and disability is nothing short of brilliant.

The Portable Veblen is not just one thing: not just a satire, not just a rom-com, not just a novel about talking to squirrels. It is all these things at once. But at its heart is love, the bleakest and most optimistic and strangest thing there is, the most squirreliest nut to crack. And isn’t that what we talk about when we talk about love?

Stepping Outside the Genres: A Review of Melissa Goodrich's Daughters of Monsters

I’m a fan of literary fiction that dips into the strange. As much as character development can be interesting, characters arguing in coffee shops get dry after a while. Similarly, ghost can be entertaining, but weird occurrences by themselves don’t always provide enough to really chew on. However, literary fiction that isn’t confined to our precise everyday world can take advantage of the best of both while avoiding the respective drawbacks, being both entertaining and mentally stimulating. That’s why I jumped at Daughters of Monsters by Melissa Goodrich, hoping to find enjoyment as well as something to think about.

For these aspects alone, Daughters of Monsters delivers. By way of example, “Lucky” centers on a young child fleeing with his family from a mysterious and immediately deadly toxic gas that is quickly sweeping over the country. The apocalyptic elements of the story were inventive and captivating, but the realistic behaviors of the characters give the story a great amount of depth. The behavior of the children is particularly interesting. The adults are panicking, trying to figure out how to save themselves. The children know what is going on, but they still react in the situation as kids. Deadly gas nearby; they are still playing:

Elsa goes sailing into the next room and jumps knees first into a beanbag sack and Eric and I surround her with the other beanbags, mashing them over her head and making her punch at us through them. Her voice is small underneath, and I kick her beanbag several times, and I like the games I can win.

Breathe! I dare her. I dare you to take a big breath in!

Then later when we’re done being jerks, the three of us lie on our bellies and wonder how long we have to live in our neighborhood together.  The gas is already at the edge of the Carsons’ property, three blocks down, and they up and left, the doors of their house wide open and definitely haunted.  Their laundry gets up in the night and walks around the place, turns on faucets, locks and unlocks windows, punches holes in the screen door, rattles the chain link of the old dog fence.

This contrast between the situation and how the children behave, which is likely exactly how children would behave in such a situation, both adds tension as well as makes the story more than a simple apocalypse evasion story.

That kind of stepping outside the genres, as well as it’s done here, is interesting enough on its own. Quite a few of the stories are interesting on a language level even beyond that, though. Perhaps it’s Goodrich’s poetic side creeping in, but there’s an ethereal feeling to many of the lines that makes the rhythm and word choice at least as intriguing as whatever is going on, as in this section from the titular story:

Your mother throws her breasts over her back when she’s cooking so they won’t bother her. She’s boiling corn, she’s shucking it over the stovetop and she’s half-naked. Her hair’s in a towel. It’s hissing. Your boyfriend sneaks up behind her and takes a wallop of a suckle. Ew Henry, you tell him. Your mother turns around and says, Normally I would kill you but since you sucked my milk…merely whaps him with a broom. But she’s still thinking of killing you. You can see it in her eyes, the bugling way she watches you.

Your mother is a mystery. You don’t know how it is she lays eggs and makes milk. You don’t know how it is you look okay, your sister looks lovely, and the new baby your mother is making will be stunning, will be fire, will make hearts snap like celery. Your mother is wildly pregnant. Your mother never nursed you. Your mother packs you a basket with cheap wine and cold pancakes, hands you an ax, sends you outside, and you know your luck is beige.

I found the stories in Daughters of Monsters to be wild and wonderful, plenty to dazzle while still having plenty to think about. There’s a great deal of poetry to the language of the stories as well, making them as intriguing on a microcosm sentence level as they are on a macrocosm plot level. Indeed, this book is interesting on a number of levels. I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

The Power of the Alien Cohort: On Helen Phillips's The Beautiful Bureaucrat

What I found perhaps most impressive about The Beautiful Bureaucrat is the way in which Helen Phillips navigates the difficult business of making a surreal reality feel realistic and credible in a real-ish world. In this briskly plotted and thrilling novel, Josephine and Joseph Newbury are a pair of newlyweds who have recently moved from the “hinterlands” (“hinterland, hint of land, the term they used to dismiss their birthplaces, that endless suburban non-ness”) to a city reminiscent of Brooklyn, although it is never called that. After months of unemployment, Josephine has finally landed a job. But right from the very beginning things are not as they should be. For one thing, Josephine’s boss has no face. (“The person who interviewed her had no face” is the first line of the book.) And what’s more, this person (of indeterminate gender) has the worst breath Josephine has ever smelled. Hitherto, he/she is referred to simply as The Person With Bad Breath. Following a series of uncomfortable and inappropriate questions (“Does it bother you that your husband has such a commonplace name?” “You wish to procreate?”) Josephine is led to a small box of an office, with “pinkish clawed walls,” where she enters a jumble of indecipherable names and dates into a mysterious system known as the Database. It is a mind-numbing task that Josephine is neither encouraged to understand nor question.

Helen Phillips writes with a wonderful accuracy about the doldrums of office life. “It was wise to put bureaucrats in windowless offices,” she observes. “Had there been a window, September might have taunted her with its high and mighty goldenness. As it was… she spent the rest of the workday blasting through files, devoid of curiosity, dying to get the hell home and just be a person with Joseph.” The mysterious agency where Josephine works is located in a “vast, windowless” complex that stretches endlessly down a block; the concrete halls, punctuated at regular intervals by closed doors, drone with buzzing typewriters, an anxious noise that reminds Josephine of scurrying cockroaches. “So, what do you do for work,” a person asks Josephine at one point. “Such an uncouth, painful question,” Phillips writes. For anyone who has ever worked at a soul-crushing office job, these observations ring horribly (and hilariously) true.

On nearly every page, I found myself marveling at the deft touch and careful craftsmanship with which Phillips omits and reveals, elaborates and elides. Such is the case with Trishiffany, whose very name (“My parents couldn’t pick between Trisha and Tiffany”) is an example of what I mean. Aside from the Person with Bad Breath, Trishiffany is the only one of Josephine’s “busy lookalike bureaucrats” to have a significant role in the book. She looks like a Barbie, wears “bubble-gum” pink suits, and always seems to appear out of nowhere. She also seems to know more about Josephine than Josephine reveals. The first time they meet, for instance, Trishiffany asks, “Mind if I call you Jojo? I’ve always wanted to call someone that. Such a cute nickname for Josephine!” It is only later that Josephine realizes “she hadn’t told Trishiffany her name.”

There are literally dozens of instances like this throughout the novel, which skips from one strange incident to the next, such as when Josephine enters her boss’s office to find The Person with Bad Breath sitting at a desk “covered with a white tablecloth and set for an elaborate luncheon for two.” “The table is set for you, Ms. Newbury,” The Person with Bad Breath says. “I have been awaiting you.” As the luncheon unfolds, The Person with Bad Breath behaves in an increasingly bizarre fashion, monologuing about cats, devouring Josephine’s pumpkin pie, swallowing shakers of salt and pepper, licking “pats of butter off their foil wrappers,” drinking the “remainder of the cream straight from the pitcher.” It is remarkable that Phillips is able to get away with this. But she does, time and again, by telling the reader just enough to make things plausible before wisely moving on, with a sort of dream logic or fairytale momentum, as though the bewildering were the most normal thing in the world. She plays a straight-faced game, and for that reason the surreal-within-the-real works absolutely.

In addition to the strangeness and corporate satire, The Beautiful Bureaucrat abounds with allusions and symbols. A neighbor’s three-headed dog snarls and barks in one of the many hellish sublets the Newburys rent, reminding us of Cerberus. Is there really a three-headed dog, or are Josephine’s tired eyes simply imagining things? Phillips never clarifies. But this strange detail, along with so many others, entices and unnerves, lingers and haunts. Phillips knows this, and she uses the ambiguity to create a mounting sense of unease. Pomegranates play a key role, recalling the Myth of Persephone. And there is plenty of religious symbology: Virgin Mary candles, everything in sixes, sevens, and threes. It can’t be a coincidence that Joseph wants a baby.

Beyond the allegory and satire, however, there is a beating heart, and Phillips is at her best and most sincere when portraying the Newburys’ fledgling marriage, the mundane intimacies and small heartbreaks of which will be recognizable to anyone who has ever been in a meaningful relationship. In one passage, Josephine returns home from work, and Joseph says, “You look like you need a hug.” “She felt like an alien,” Phillips writes. “As though she had never before been exposed to the ways things are done on Earth: that you can return home to someone who cares for you, that a few overused words can hurt your heart with their appropriateness, that your muscles can soften into the muscles of another human being… She wanted to cry out when he pulled away from her.” This was the most winning aspect of the novel for me. As I read, I found myself desiring my other, as Josephine, in her loneliness, desires Joseph; and in the end, I was left with a heightened awareness of the power and importance of having a partner—an “alien cohort”—in this strange and often bewildering world.