Brief Encounters with the Enemy by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

Published by The Dial Press on August 13, 2013

The characters in Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's stories live in a gloomy world. They are divided by race and religion. Business is bad. Factories have killed all the fish. A war is coming; the war has started; the war will never end. One day we are winning the war; the next day we are losing. It's too hot; it's too cold; it's always raining; cars are buried in snow. To returning soldiers, people say "thank you for your service" and "you're really special" and "you're our hero" because that's what everyone else says, even though they barely know the guy and don't honestly care about him. The young men who don't enlist, who stay stuck in their jobs, are jealous of the attention heaped on the returning veterans.

Sayrafiezadeh's best stories focus on the workplace. Most of his characters are stuck in lives that are going nowhere. In "Cartographer," a bus strike becomes a metaphor for the narrator's motionless life. The short order cook in "Appetite," feeling more machine than human, worries that he will never become an adult, that he'll always be burning grilled cheese sandwiches. While his friends go off to fight a war, the Walmart assistant manager in "Associates" fantasizes about the daughter of the fence to whom he sells merchandise he's stolen from his store. The one bright spot belongs to the disabled janitor in "Victory" who feels fortunate when he starts dating a kleptomaniac who steals from the store where he works.

Some stories are grounded in the surrealistic war that the United States is fighting against an unnamed country. A soldier in "A Brief Encounter With the Enemy" behaves unheroically. Resentful of the pride his boss and co-workers express in his friend upon his return from service, the narrator of "Operators" makes an impulsive decision to enlist that he soon second-guesses. Armed with platitudes, a teacher in "Enchantment" returns home from the war, resuming his teaching job and his affair with a married women.

The only story that doesn't fit within either of those groups, "Paranoia," tells of the narrator's interrupted friendship with an undocumented immigrant.

Although none of these stories grabbed me on an emotional level, they're intellectually satisfying and laced with understated humor. The humor gains force as the same clichéd platitudes appear in multiple stories. Sayrafiezadeh is particularly adept at portraying the dreariness and soul-robbing impact of low-paying jobs. When the focus shifts to the war, the stories become less effective, in part because the nature of the war is so vague (although I suppose that's the point). No story stands out but collectively they humanize the marginalized, encouraging the reader to see the people we pass every day but never notice.

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