Late one night not long ago, when I was losing an ugly bout with insomnia and everyone in my family was snoring in syncopated swing, I read a story in Harper’s Magazine that made me wake my husband up and insist that he read it, no, read it right now. The story is from the point of view of a very sick woman, the wife of a writer, and it speaks about family love and grief and jealousy and guilt and rage and illness with a power that took my breath away. That story, “Interesting Facts,” has now been published with five others, all of them so long they could almost be called novellas, in a new collection titled “Fortune Smiles.” Its author is Adam Johnson, who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for his novel about North Korea, “The Orphan Master’s Son.”
The year “The Orphan Master’s Son” came out, the novel was such a bright blaze that all the other books I read seemed photobleached, as if I had stared too long at a halogen bulb and then tried to read through the blobs swarming my vision. I had enjoyed Johnson’s previous two books, a story collection called “Emporium,” which circled the theme of techno-catastrophe, and a novel called “Parasites Like Us,” about an apocalyptic pandemic unleashed by a bumbleheaded anthropologist — but it often seemed with those first two books that the engines of Johnson’s plots didn’t quite have the horsepower to pull along the beauty of his sentences and the manic energy of his invention. “The Orphan Master’s Son” felt like a leap forward, as if Johnson’s absurdist tendencies had finally found their expression in the wild off-kilterness of North Korea, the everyday life that’s so grim there somehow made surreal through Johnson’s exuberant prose.
As with “The Orphan Master’s Son,” there’s a great deal of comedy to be found in “Fortune Smiles,” though the humor in this new book is offset by a darkness so pervasive I found it seeping into my daily life. Despairing men are at the heart of each of these tales, most of them protagonists on the cusp of being antagonists. “Nirvana,” which opens the collection, is a tricky knot of anxiety. In its lightly futuristic world, the president of the United States (who sounds a great deal like President Obama) has been assassinated and the narrator has built a hologram of him out of the dregs of his appearances on the Internet. The hologram is the narrator’s only confidant during an awful span of time in which his wife has been paralyzed and possibly made suicidal by Guillain-Barré syndrome. Another story, “Dark Meadow,” sets a hurdle almost unclearably high: It asks the reader to feel compassion for a man nicknamed Mr. Roses, a person whom most people would find immediately despicable because of his pedophilic tendencies, who starts taking care of two little girls who live down the street. This is the sort of story you read through your fingers, frightened and sickened and moved and made uncomfortable all at once.
In “Hurricanes Anonymous,” a man in Lake Charles, La., after the double-punch of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, finds himself the sudden unwilling single parent of a toddler, a man whose good intentions will probably be thwarted by his weak willpower. In “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine,” the narrator is the former warden of an East German prison where the Stasi did unspeakable things to inmates, and he’s a person who can justify in his mind the unambiguously bad things he has done to his own wife at night. In the title story, “Fortune Smiles,” a defector from North Korea in the cold wonderland of Seoul may or may not have forced his closest ally to defect with him, thereby alienating the only friend he has.
There’s a line in “Dark Meadow” that applies to the collection as a whole, about a soldier on a bomb squad: “He says you can defuse a bomb in the real world, but the bomb in your head, that’s forever.” Each of these stories plants a small bomb in the reader’s head; life after reading “Fortune Smiles” is a series of small explosions in which the reader — perhaps unwillingly — recognizes Adam Johnson’s gleefully bleak world in her own.
Of course, context is everything, and stories do change meaning when they are gathered together under the single roof of a collection. “Interesting Facts,” the narrative that devastated me in a dark house full of my dreaming family, was complicated and made problematic when hitched to all the other stories in Johnson’s collection. The men in these tales are so trapped by their situations that reading one story after another made me feel as if I had been locked in a room with six intense and unpredictable strangers, all starved for my attention. When comedy is applied to tragedy over and over, it can start to take on an element of defensiveness; cumulatively, it can feel as if Johnson is holding the reader at arm’s length by how cheery his darkness can be. “Interesting Facts” arrives in the collection after “Nirvana” and “Hurricanes Anonymous,” and when it does, that dawning sensation of defensiveness becomes compounded. Johnson makes self-referential jokes about the husband (who has written a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about North Korea), and in this story the wife, too, is a writer; her husband has taken a pedophile character out of one of her failed books, a man named Mr. Roses, and has written his own story about it called “Dark Meadow,” which we know from the table of contents is waiting in store. This bite of metafiction tasted a little bitter to me, a bit disingenuous, after all the tonal tragicomedy of the other stories; what was a clever and emotionally acute trick when the story stood alone started, in the aggregate, to feel like a frustrating means to forestall criticism. A reader tempted into the fallacy that this story is about the real Adam Johnson’s real wife would feel like a very bad person, indeed, to even begin to think critically about the story at hand.
Among authorial sins, defensiveness feels minor, but when one is being asked to be moved by a story, when the story is so clearly the most heartfelt one in the book, anything distancing that has been inserted in the space between the author and the reader does matter. Perhaps this is to say that the stories in “Fortune Smiles” may be best appreciated when taken out into the sunshine one by one, each allowed to exist as an individual text and left to resonate until the reader forgets the previous story enough to allow the next to speak its piece in full. Adam Johnson’s stories certainly deserve this kind of slow and loving attention. As a writer, he is always perceptive and brave; his lines always sing and strut and sizzle and hush and wash and blaze over the reader. “Fortune Smiles” is a collection worthy of being read slowly and, like very good and very bitter chocolate, savored.
Lauren Groff’s new novel is “Fates and Furies.”
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