The haunting of history in modern America: The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans ★★★½

TW: domestic violence

Two months into the new year, and I’m on my second short story collection. As with all short story collections, this one is somewhat uneven – but when it works, it really works.

The back cover copy refers to how history ‘haunts us’ in this book, and that hits the nail on the head. These character-driven stories explore racial injustice, sexism, the inescapability of history, and how to reconcile all of these in contemporary America, through the lenses of mostly Black, female protagonists.

Grief is everywhere we turn, and yet Evans’s meticulously controlled and precise writing prevents the narrative from ever feeling bogged-down or emotionally congested. There is the generational trauma of a wrongful conviction of a great-grandfather a century before (Alcatraz), a woman at a wedding who ends up on a road trip with the bride in the direction of the house where her sister was shot by her husband (Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain), a drug mule who boards an interstate bus alone and leaves with a toddler, raising him until it’s no longer tenable (Anything Could Disappear).

‘For a week before the wedding, her sister had been terrified of rain, and Rena had lied about the weather report to comfort her, and the weather had turned out to be beautiful, and her sister turned out to be beautiful, and Connor turned out to be the man who, a year later, suspected Elizabeth of cheating because he’d seen a repairman leave the house and she’d forgotten to tell him anyone was coming that day, and so he put a bullet through her head.’

The writing coolly sweeps you along and then punches you in the gut.

The titular novella, The Office of Historical Corrections, is built on a brilliant premise: a government funded project, the Institute for Public History: a ‘solution for decades of bad information and bad faith use of it.’ Cassie’s job is to correct the public record – souvenirs with the dates wrong, an off-colour poster about Juneteenth in a cake shop. And it’s all the menial bureaucratic work of a lowly government employee until she’s embroiled in the case of a historical lynching in a small Wisconsin town and a colleague who has gone to set the record straight, igniting the ire of local far-right racists.

‘White people love their history right up until it’s true.’

The premise is superb, as I said, but the rhythm felt off in this one: the short stories packed a bigger punch in their economical word count than a novella that takes up about a third of the book’s page count. It felt simultaneously over-long and under-explored, and even though it was a deft conclusion to the themes in the short stories that preceded it, I didn’t feel it was strong enough to be the axis of the book. Nevertheless, there are some really powerful, incisive stories in here, by an assured and refreshing voice.

Subversive and surreal short stories: Bliss Montage by Ling Ma ★★★★½

After reading Ling Ma’s Severance, one of my favourite books of 2020 (and I’ll be so bold as to say this decade), I was going to read whatever she published next.

Bliss Montage is a surrealist collection of short stories narrated by Chinese-American women. One lives in a house with 100 of their ex-boyfriends, but only two who matter: the one she was in love with and the one who beat her. A twenty-something aspiring PhD takes a banned drug (for old time’s sake) that turns her invisible. A professor finds a liminal space in another dimension in the back of her office closet.

The stories are bizarre and unsettling at times, but despite the weirdness, they never stop feeling real: whether we’re living in our 2023 or a near-future world order where microplastics wreak havoc on our bodies and America has fallen spectacularly from grace (see: Tomorrow), the rhythm of human life follows the same patterns. We fall in and out of love. We make and lose friends. We wonder what to do with our lives. We grapple with who we are and want to be.

‘When I think about Y now, I think less about the beginning than about the end, which is where all my feelings have now pooled, having rolled downward towards the inevitable outcome.’

It is our shifting identities that are at the centre of the book: the way we perceive ourselves and the way others perceive us, the way we write and rewrite our own histories and the histories of others. This is particularly poignant in ‘Peking Duck’, a metafictional narrative where a woman on an MFA program shares the story of her immigrant mother’s unpleasant encounter with a door-to-door salesman. When her story is published, she shares it with her mother, whose response is indignant. “How would you even know what happened? It happened to me, not to us.” In the workshop, the story is derided as “stereotypical” and “a kind of Asian minstrelsy“.

Ma resists giving us tidy conclusions. The stories often take us on an unpredictable path and then end without a full resolution. This sounds like it would be frustrating, but it feels the most honest approach in a book about the complexities of our modern condition. The writing is cool and restrained but also wryly funny at times (like the financier husband who speaks only in dollar signs) and I could have read 10 more stories in the same volume and still be enchanted and haunted by them all.

TW: domestic abuse

Book Review | Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

This collection of short stories – simultaneously full of caustic humour and emotional devastation – is very clever. And I don’t mean clever in a trying-to-be-clever way, in a way that’s itching after English-student dissection and critic bamboozlement and literary prizes. Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s debut is highly attuned to the intricacies of love, in all of its many incarnations, and plays with surreal and off-beat turns of plot and genre.

Like in any collection, there are stories that worked better than others. I admire Bob-Waksberg’s playing with form, from rhyming couplet long-form poems to lists, but the ones that worked best for me were a little more traditional in their approach. In ‘A Most Blessed and Auspicious Occasion,’ a couple take on wedding planning in a short story that manages to satirize the wedding industry in an alternative universe where how many goats to slaughter during the ceremony to how long the wailing chorus should lament to how much to spend on a promise egg are the central preoccupations of everyone around them. Bob-Waksberg manages simultaneously to issue a critique of capitalism and tradition, all while being laugh-out-loud funny.

In a story that felt very much like a short film, ‘Missed Connection – m4w’ shows a man falling in love with a woman he sits across from on the Brooklyn Q train, ‘in that stupid way where you completely make up a fictional version of the person you’re looking at and fall in love with that person.’ Whilst working up the courage to say something to her, the years melt into decades, and still they ride the train back and forth on the same line – neither ever summoning the strength to speak.

‘For months we sat on the train saying nothing. We survived on bags of Skittles sold to us by kids raising money for their basketball teams. We must have heard a million mariachi bands, had our faces nearly kicked in by a hundred thousand break-dancers. I gave money to the panhandlers until I ran out of singles. When the train went aboveground I’d get text messages and voice mails (“Where are you? What happened? Are you okay?”) until my phone battery ran out.’

There is such an intense and yet understated lyricism to the way these stories cut open affairs of the heart, in both romantic and familial love. In ‘You Want To Know What Plays Are Like?’, a sister goes to her playwright brother’s opening night, only to discover the play is an excavation of their childhood which doesn’t portray her in the most flattering light. The second-person narration (which Bob-Waksberg does so well) describes her feeling like ‘The Museum of You is now open for business, every piece of you hung up on a wall, laid bare on a table, harshly lit and awkwardly described.’ He’s economical with words, and yet they perfectly encapsulate our deepest vulnerabilities.

‘…There remains one place more than any other you know you can never return to. You know where it is and you go out of your way to not see it, to not be reminded of the thing that happened there. It’s too much, this place. It would swallow you whole, this void, this pit, this unassuming two-story brownstone in Carroll Gardens that houses the one-bedroom apartment a much younger you and the man now listed in your phone as “DO NOT CALL HIM” were ever so foolish as to refer to as “home.”’

There are more I could talk about – ‘Rufus’, narrated from the perspective of a dog trying to communicate with his owner. ‘The Serial Monogamist’s Guide to Important New York City Landmarks,’ where too many places in the city bring back memories of failed relationships, ‘tragic victims of your fickle heart’. ‘Move across the country,’ a quietly devastating exploration of running away from Sadness, personified. But this is not a necessarily pessimistic excavation of love. In its propulsive and gut-wrenching way, it feels honest and unflinching and, ultimately, kind of hopeful. Dare I call it one of the most brilliant short story collections I’ve ever read?

‘And when the morning comes, our love like bugs will scatter in the light.’

4.5*