Lifestyles of the Rich, Damaged and Totally Despicable
Three dazzling new short-story collections rattle and shake with horror and heartbreak.
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By Samantha Hunt
- March 25, 2022
By the end of BEING HERE (160 pp., University Press of Kentucky, $21.95), the discrete gossamer threads of Manini Nayar’s linked stories have become entangled in our minds, by beautiful design. The secret tunnels that connect these pieces are where this slim volume holds its intensity — the way the recurring character Nina, an Indian immigrant to the United States, can hold within her a pregnancy, a marriage, her mother’s voice, memories of her faraway home, the reverberations of both colonialism in India and terrorism in America.
Though it’s presented as a collection, “Being Here” ends up reading like a generational novel, with twisting strands of DNA. In the Indian immigrant communities Nayar describes, from the Himalayan foothills to Manhattan to South Bend, Ind., connections thin with geographical distance. Nayar tests how far familial relationships can stretch before breaking.
Through multiple stories and perspectives, Nina stays close. Once in America, the young bride lives through cancer, divorce and worse. Her family story requires this fragmented telling: Broken hearts must be told in broken ways. Nayar reassembles the pieces while leaving the stunning cracks still visible.
And the stories outside of Nina’s world fall into place around her: the man who murdered his young wife in India and now dines with a racist white woman in New York; the charming uncle who steals jewelry from his own family; the snobbish, mourning mother who is also a colonial apologist; a runaway child; the Indian American immigrant who conflates 7-Elevens with 9/11. Nayar makes even the tangential reappearances feel epic. In “Tintinnabulations,” the driver of a used red Ferrari can feel the spirit of its former owner, who dies in a crash elsewhere in the book. “Something of its provenance remained in the chassis,” Nayar writes, “causing James Hanrahan to brake and look over his shoulder sharply one September afternoon while he was driving to Chicago, as if he sensed a presence there.” With this collection Nayar reveals the invisible details that unite us, even if we are “not around to witness any part of these brief convergences and eddies, carried lightly into history, now insubstantial as air.”
Megan Mayhew Bergman’s HOW STRANGE A SEASON (282 pp., Scribner, $26.99) is a collection of horror stories couched in the glittering worlds of privilege: Lifestyles of the Rich, Permanently Damaged and Totally Despicable. The women who haunt these pages — former beauties, former athletes, formerly full of potential — have been kneecapped by the patriarchy. Raised on a system whose perks they’ve enjoyed, they’ve been bred to breed, to protect entrenched hierarchies. Mothers parade daughters on marriage circuits — cocktail parties and country clubs — hoping to catch a big one. Money has corroded these minds.
The men are also contemptible. They pay to go on a “Big Dig” and spend the day operating dude-size Tonka trucks, unearthing planted loot. They steal, drink, hurt women. They do nothing. With inherited wealth, they shirk the responsibilities of fatherhood and marriage. They are along for the ride, unable to stop or even acknowledge the evil that years of sexism, racism and capitalism have wrought.
Even the characters who engage in art or ecology do so frivolously, like dilettantes. A floral artist creates tremendous and tremendously expensive installations only to see them rot in a day or two. A college student named Lily takes a job as an environmental activist charged with persuading coastal North Carolinians to eat the invasive (and poisonous) lionfish. Wade, an older, trust-funded drunk, spells out the truth: “You’re trying to tell these poor folks how to fix a rich folks’ problem.” Wade is a specialist in guilt. “He ties himself to the front of the pier when the storms come in,” as a way of making amends “for his family owning all that land and enslaving people.” A local cashier notes, “I just don’t think that’s how asking for forgiveness is done.”
Most disturbing is the novella “Indigo Run.” On a South Carolina plantation in the 1950s, marriages and families are crumbling. The land itself is toxic, having been made productive by enslaved people’s labor. Bergman’s characters have upheld noxious traditions for so long that poison tastes like love; and the only character left standing hopes, sympathetically, that a terrible storm or raging fire will someday burn it all down.
For the South Indian immigrants in Sindya Bhanoo’s tender and precise debut, SEEKING FORTUNE ELSEWHERE (226 pp., Catapult, $26) , life happens somewhere between Pittsburgh, Washington State and Bangalore. Though the view is broad, Bhanoo’s focus is clear and tightly observed, centering the decisions and difficulties of a global life, some of them gut-wrenching. In the epigraph, Bhanoo quotes Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient”: “Do you understand the sadness of geography?” After reading these stories, we do.
Bhanoo’s characters are outsiders twice. These are immigrants with comfortable lives in America who, for various reasons, now find themselves evicted from their hard-won sense of belonging. These ruptures are the heart of Bhanoo’s tales. A professor hosts homesick Indian graduate students at his house for dinners and holidays, until he learns from a local reporter that some students now “claim you made them do personal work for you against their will, that you never paid them.” An estranged mother who left her daughter in the care of her ex-husband attends that daughter’s wedding, only to discover almost everyone else at the ceremony has been invited on the couple’s “buddymoon” except for her. There is the teenage girl whose father has left home to pursue a life as a popular “spiritual leader and scholar-mystic,” paying more attention to his devoted, if deluded, followers than he pays to his own daughter.
And in the O. Henry Prize-winning story “Malliga Homes,” we meet a widow who’s just moved into a senior residence outside Coimbatore, India. “No amount of expensive stone or carefully worded praise from my daughter can change what Malliga Homes is,” she says: “a place for those who have nowhere else to go.” The widow surprises herself by blurting out to her fellow community members — older Indian parents whose grown children live abroad — that Kamala, her own daughter in Atlanta, “plans to remodel our old flat in Chennai and live there.” It is both a lie and a dream of the way her life used to be.
These stories rattle and shake with the heartache of separation, rendering palpable the magnitude of small decisions in our less-than-small world.
BEING THERE Stories By Manini Nayar 160 pp. University Press of Kentucky. $21.95.
HOW STRANGE A SEASON Fiction By Megan Mayhew Bergman 282 pp. Scribner. $26.99.
SEEKING FORTUNE ELSEWHERE Stories By Sindya Bhanoo 226 pp. Catapult. $26.
Samantha Hunt is the author of “The Unwritten Book” and “The Dark Dark,” among other titles.
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How many lives can one author live? In new short stories, Amor Towles invites us along for the ride
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Book Review
Table for Two: Fictions
By Amor Towles Viking: 464 pages, $32 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.
In three bestselling novels over eight years, Amor Towles has established himself as one of our most beloved contemporary novelists, exhibiting a chameleon-esque ability to inhabit vastly different settings and characters in a style uniquely his own, yet never the same from book to book.
He can write elegantly and persuasively from the point of view of young women looking to make their mark in 1938 Manhattan, as he did with “Rules of Civility,” in which the intricacies of New York society are revealed to be as Darwinian as any jungle. With “A Gentleman in Moscow,” Towles transported us to 1920s Russia, where an unapologetic aristocrat is exiled to a once-grand hotel by the incoming socialist regime, and eventually forced to join the ranks of the proletariat. And in 2021’s “The Lincoln Highway,” we follow four boys as they embark on an enthralling road trip that takes them from 1950s Nebraska to a New York City filled with danger and delight.
Towles’ latest is the superb short fiction collection “Table for Two.” For fans who worry that a volume comprising six stories and a novella won’t serve up the deeper delights of his novels, prepare to eat your hat: This may be Towles’ best book yet. Each tale is as satisfying as a master chef’s main course, filled with drama, wit, erudition and, most of all, heart.
Case in point: “Hasta Luego,” the third story in the volume, involves a chance encounter at LaGuardia Airport between a debonair political consultant named Jerry — who could be Towles’ twin — and an amiable schlub named Smitty. The two are thrown together for an evening in Manhattan when their flight is canceled and they are routed to a Midtown hotel for the night. After checking into their rooms, they repair to the bar for their meal, and the drinks flow.
For Jerry, the many tequila shots they consume into the wee hours pose only the risk that he may be hung over the next day. For Smitty, though, the stakes are much higher, something Jerry learns when he mistakenly leaves the bar with his new acquaintance’s phone and receives a series of concerned calls from Smitty’s wife, Jennifer. At first Jerry doesn’t see how Smitty’s dilemma should concern him, but by the time morning comes, Jerry’s studied nonchalance has evolved into something more like compassion. It’s a perfectly constructed story that had me in tears.
“Eve in Hollywood” is the book’s headliner. It’s a novella that occupies half the book’s 400-plus pages, and deserves every bit of that real estate. Its heroine, Eve Ross, will be recognizable to readers of “Rules of Civility” as its Holly Golightly-esque character whose life unalterably changes when a car accident in Manhattan leaves her scarred.
We’re fortunate that Towles wasn’t entirely done with the enigmatic Eve. In the new story’s opening scene — which is as tight and suspenseful as a Hitchcock film — she’s on a train out of New York bound for Chicago. The year is 1938, and the plan is to move back in with her parents in Indiana. But on a whim, when the conductor announces their approach to Union Station, Chicago, she decides to pay the extra fare and head to L.A. (Defeat averted!) There Eve takes center stage amid con men, retired cops, movie studio heads and such film stars as Olivia de Havilland, who is just being cast in “Gone With the Wind.”
If Eve was a semi-tragic figure in her first literary outing, here she has reclaimed the verve and spirit of which recent events might have robbed her. Her personality shines even brighter now, but the vulnerability is gone, and in its place is an unshakable belief in her own instincts and intelligence. She has become adept at sniffing out troublemakers, but she’s equally proficient at recognizing a kind soul when she sees one. This noir-ish tale of police corruption, exploitation and 1930s Beverly Hills elan is an ode to such hard-boiled crime masters as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but with a feminist twist.
In the remaining stories — all set in Manhattan during various periods — desperate financial straits prompt desperate schemes, which most of the time leave the perpetrators with pockets emptier than when they started. Few salvage lessons from their failures, yet somehow, they remain sympathetic, even endearing. It’s true that Towles is a polymath whose knowledge of such varied topics as finance, art collection and classical music can feel a little daunting at times, but these stories make clear that, at heart, he is a humanist with deep compassion for even the faultiest among us.
While known primarily as a novelist, the author is not entirely new to short fiction: In 1989, his Stanford master’s thesis, “The Temptations of Pleasure,” was published in the Paris Review. After graduate school, the Boston native moved to New York City, where he shared an apartment in the East Village and chipped away at his goal of writing a novel. But when Towles finally finished that book, he deemed it unfit for publication. He stored it away. Broke and uncertain of his literary future, he turned to a career in investment banking, where he stayed put for 20 years.
On weekends, he worked on what became “Rules of Civility,” and when it was sold at auction to his publisher, he retired from banking and turned to writing full time. He describes his process as one that entails “Plan, design, outline,” which is a system that must work well for him, as his three books have sold 6 million copies. Towles has also said he jots down ideas for future books on index cards and keeps multiple notebooks in which he explores potential plotlines or character arcs. It should be no wonder that “Table for Two” could spring from such a treasure trove.
On the final page of “Hasta Luego,” as Jerry finally makes his way home after being stranded with Smitty, he reflects on his imperfections — that he doesn’t remember birthdays; feels compelled to complain whenever inconvenienced; allows his own priorities to come first, even when it comes to loved ones, including his wife. In fact, he realizes, he hasn’t been very considerate of his wife. But perhaps his rendezvous with Smitty was transformative: “As I stood there in the customer service line thinking of all that had just transpired, what I found myself hoping, what I found myself almost praying for, was that despite all my flaws, when the time came, as it surely would, my wife would be willing to fight for me as hard as Jennifer had fought for her husband.”
Leigh Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.
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The Best Reviewed Short Story Collections of 2022
Featuring george saunders, ling ma, colin barrett, jamil jan kochai, and more.
We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.
Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .
Today’s installment: Short Story Collections .
Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”
1. Bliss Montage by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
21 Rave • 5 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an interview with Ling Ma here
“The eight wily tales mark the return of an author whose inventive debut, Severance, urgently announced her as a writer worth watching … an assured follow-up, a striking collection that peddles in the uncanny and the surreal, but it often lacks Severance ’s zest. Some stories are confident in their strangeness and ambiguity, a handful feel like promising sketches of sturdier narratives and the rest fall somewhere in between. The connections between them are loose, tethered by similar leads …
Wry, peculiar stories like Los Angeles and Yeti Lovemaking confirm that Ma’s imagination operates on the same chimerical frequency as those of Helen Oyeyemi, Samanta Schweblin, Meng Jin. Each of these stories leans un-self-consciously into the speculative, illuminating Ma’s phantasmagoric interests. They are funny, too … Despite their nagging loose ends, Ma’s stories stay with you—evidence of a gifted writer curious about the limits of theoretical possibility. They twist and turn in unpredictable ways and although the ride wasn’t always smooth, I never regretted getting on.”
–Lovia Gyarkye ( The New York Times Book Review )
2. Liberation Day by George Saunders (Random House)
16 Rave • 6 Positive • 5 Mixed (86) Read George Saunders on reading chaotically and the power of generous teachers, here
“Acutely relevant … Let’s bask in this new collection of short stories, which is how many of us first discovered him and where he excels like no other … Saunders’ imaginative capacity is on full display … Liberation Day carries echoes of Saunders’ previous work, but the ideas in this collection are more complex and nuanced, perhaps reflecting the new complexities of this brave new world of ours. The title story is only one of a handful of the nine stories in this collection that show us our collective and personal dilemmas, but in reading the problems so expressed—with compassion and humanity—our spirits are raised and perhaps healed. Part of the Saunders elixir is that we feel more empathetic after reading his work.”
–Scott Laughlin ( The San Francisco Chronicle )
3. Homesickness by Colin Barrett (Grove Press)
16 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an essay by Colin Barrett here
“Its comedy stands in balance to the collection’s more tragic tenor … expands [Barrett’s] range, and though the first took place in the fictional Irish town of Glanbeigh, the books share a fabric shot through with dark humor, pitch-perfect dialogue and a signature freshness that makes life palpable on the page. The language counterpoints the sometimes inarticulate desperation of the working-class characters, and that dissonance lends an emotional complexity to their stories …
As a writer, Barrett doesn’t legislate from the top down. His unruly characters surge up with their vitality and their mystery intact. Their stories aren’t shaped by familiar resolutions—no realizations, morals or epiphanies. The absence of a conventional resolution does risk leaving an otherwise charming story like The Silver Coast with the rambling feel of a slice of life. But in the majority of the stories in this book, to reinvent an ending is to reinvent how a story is told, and overall, Homesickness is graced with an original, lingering beauty.”
–Stuart Dybek ( The New York Times Book Review )
4. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu (Tin House)
13 Rave • 4 Positive Read a story from Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century here
“..the horrors are more intimate, smaller, and less global in scale. This is not a collection filled with fantastic beasts, although a sea monster does make an appearance, but instead illuminates the monstrous nature of humanity … Technology, rather than magic, catalyzes these changes. That is not to say there are not some traces of unexplained fantasy, such as a girl who sprouts wings from her ankles, but mostly, Fu’s monsters manifest from modernity … The success of Kim Fu’s stories is the element of the unexpected. There are surprises lurking in these narratives, whether it is a quick final plot twist or unexpected peculiarity …
Although Fu seems more concerned with alienation stemming from individual relationships, there is criticism of conventional consumer capitalism … The characters in Fu’s collection are eccentric and unexpected in their choices, and many of their stories feature unforeseen endings that strike the right tone for the dark era we live in … Fu opens a window looking onto the sad possibilities of our own failures.”
–Ian MacAllen ( The Chicago Review of Books )
5. If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (MCD)
12 Rave • 4 Positive Read an essay by Jonathan Escoffery here
“Ravishing … The book, about an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet, delights in mocking the trope of an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet … There’s peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism. The book feels thrillingly free … Escoffery’s protagonists, though resourceful, can’t accomplish the impossible; nor do they sacrifice themselves for the reader’s sentimental education … The prose comes alive …
These characters are strange amalgams of limited agency and boundless originality. Their survival, perhaps, comes down to their style … Escoffery deftly renders the disorienting effects of race as they fall, veil-like and hostile, over a world of children … Throughout, the refrain runs like an incantation: What are you? Escoffery, hosing his characters in a stream of fines, bills, and pay stubs, studies the bleak math of self-determination.”
–Katy Waldman ( The New Yorker )
6. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai (Viking)
12 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an essay by Jamil Jan Kochai here
“Kochai, an Afghan-American writer, shapes and reshapes his material through a variety of formal techniques, including a fantasy of salvation through video gaming, a darkly surrealist fable of loss, a life story told through a mock résumé, and the story of a man’s transformation into a monkey who becomes a rebel leader…Like Asturias, Kochai is a master conjurer…The collection’s cohesion lies in its thematic exploration of the complexities of contemporary Afghan experience (both in Afghanistan and the United States), and in the recurring family narrative at its core: many of the stories deal with an Afghan family settled in California… Kochai is a thrillingly gifted writer, and this collection is a pleasure to read, filled with stories at once funny and profoundly serious, formally daring, and complex in their apprehension of the contradictory yet overlapping worlds of their characters.”
–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )
7. Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty (Tin House Book)
12 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Morgan Talty here
“Talty depicts the relationship between David and Paige perfectly—the siblings clearly care for each other; it’s evident beneath the bickering and the long periods when they don’t see each other … The story ends with both mother and son experiencing terrifying medical emergencies; it’s almost excruciating to read, but it’s undeniably powerful, and, in its own way, beautiful … Talty’s prose is flawless throughout; he writes with a straightforward leanness that will likely appeal to admirers of Thom Jones or Denis Johnson. But his style is all his own, as is his immense sense of compassion. Night of the Living Rez is a stunning look at a family navigating their lives through crisis—it’s a shockingly strong debut, sure, but it’s also a masterwork by a major talent.”
–Michael Schaub ( The Star Tribune )
8. How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu (William Morrow)
10 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an excerpt from How High We Go in the Dark here
“If you’re a short-story lover—as I am—you’ll be impressed with Nagamatsu’s meticulous craft. If you crave sustained character and plot arcs, well, you’ll have to settle for admiring the well-honed prose, poignant meditations and unique concepts. Hardly small pleasures … The reader might best approach the book like a melancholy Black Mirror season … This is a lovely though bleak book. Humanity has long turned to humor in our darkest moments, but levity feels absent even in a chapter narrated by a stand-up comedian. That said, the somber tone unifies the disparate characters and story lines … a welcome addition to a growing trend of what we might call the ‘speculative epic’: genre-bending novels that use a wide aperture to tackle large issues like climate change while jumping between characters, timelines and even narrative modes … Nagamatsu squarely hits both the ‘literary’ and ‘science fiction’ targets, offering psychological insights in lyrical prose while seriously exploring speculative conceits … a book of sorrow for the destruction we’re bringing on ourselves. Yet the novel reminds us there’s still hope in human connections, despite our sadness.”
–Lincoln Michel ( The New York Times Book Review )
9. Life Without Children by Roddy Doyle (Viking)
9 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“… a quietly devastating collection of short stories that brilliantly portrays the pervasive sense of hopelessness that immobilised us during the dog days of Covid … Lest he be accused of focusing too much on men and their sense of victimhood, the countervailing magnificence of his women is worth noting. Part of Doyle’s genius resides in a kind of bathetic amusement at the follies of his male characters and always it’s the stoical good sense of women that saves the day … Another of his great strengths is the ability to drop in those little epiphanies that resolve the tension and conflict of a story in a single significant moment … Doyle breaks our free fall into despair by emphasizing the redemptive power of humor, love and the kindness of strangers.”
–Bert Wright ( The Sunday Times )
10. Stories From the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana (Scribner)
12 Rave Read an interview with Sidik Fofana here
“… outstanding … The brilliance of this debut, however, is that Fofana doesn’t let anyone go unseen … masterfully paints a portrait of the people most impacted by gentrification … Fofana brings his characters to life through their idiosyncratic speech patterns. Auxiliary verbs are dropped, words are misspelled, prepositions are jostled, all to create a sense of vernacular authenticity…Grammar is an instrument that Fofana plays by ear, to much success.”
–Joseph Cassara ( The New York Times Book Review )
Our System:
RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points
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