Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood

Published by Doubleday on March 7, 2023

Aging women are the primary characters in Margaret Atwood’s latest story collection. Sexism and ageism blend in the background of the stories, as they did in Don Lemon’s astonishing remark that women are past their prime by time they enter their 50s. Atwood is proof that Lemon doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The stories are diverse. A couple are probably meant to appeal to intellectuals. Some are funny, although the humor is uneven. The best stories are poignant. All of them showcase Atwood’s love of language, sometimes overtly, as characters discuss the origins and meanings of meanings of words they like or despise.

My favorite story in this collection is “My Evil Mother.” The narrator meets the father who (she suspects) abandoned her. When she was a child, she believed that her mother turned her father into a garden gnome. The narrator’s mother chats with her daughter about spells and potions. The daughter is never quite sure whether her mother is cooking soup or a witch’s brew. The mother tells her daughter that she has been carrying on a battle for the last four hundred years with the daughter’s gym teacher. Back in the day, the gym teacher collected severed penises, keeping them in a cedar box and feeding them bits of grain, as was the custom. Is the narrator’s mother mentally ill or does she just have a bizarre sense of humor? Probably more of the former, but the exasperated (and often embarrassed) narrator eventually realizes that lessons she learned from her mother will serve her in her relationship with her own daughter.

One story is told by a snail whose soul has transmigrated into a customer service representative. The story might be seen as an amusing if uncomfortable take on people who feel they have been born into the wrong bodies. A story told to quarantined humans by an alien has some funny moments. Fans of Chaucer or the Decameron (as well as readers who know how to google) might appreciate the story’s relationship to the character Griselda in folklore. Both stories ask questions about the purpose of being human.

A story set in the world of academia recounts a salty (and slightly drunken) conversation about the history of feminism as a group of women plan a symposium to lay “the foundations for the brave new generation of emerging non-cis-male creatives.” In another story that is probably meant for readers who appreciate education, Hypatia explains how her mother was murdered (skinned by clamshells, to be ghoulishly precise) by a mob of Christian men in Alexandria — while noting that, if it happened today, mob members would have recorded the murder on their phones. Not being an intellectual, I needed to google Hypatia of Alexandria to give the story some context. To be honest, I did the same for Griselda. Atwood is far above my level of intellect but I made an effort to keep up.

In a less successful story, Atwood uses a medium to help her interview George Orwell. He’s not surprised to learn about “cancel culture,” the insurrection, and evil uses of the internet. In another story that didn’t work for me, two aging Hungarians share scandalous memories, some of which might be real, other just fake news.

Atwood has chronicled the marriage of Tig and Nell during her writing career. Those characters star in the first three stories. The first suggests that fears of death are best ignored, lest we mourn events that have not yet happened. Better to preserve an illusion of safety until our fate is revealed. In the second, Nell does a favor for departed friends by telling their story, because they wanted to become words rather than a handful of dust. In the third story, Nell tries to immortalize a dead but beloved cat by making it the subject of Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur.”

The last four stories are about Nell and her memories of Tig after Tig’s death. Nell learns some things (and surmises others) about Tig’s father by reading poems that he wrote during the war. She isn’t sure what she learns, isn’t sure she’s the right audience for the amateurish poems, but she wants to say to the man, I hear you, or at least I’m trying.

One of the post-Tig stories takes the form of a letter in which Nell explains what it means to be a widow: grieving, coping, “tidying up” after a partner’s death, her sense that Tig is still present. The letter is heartfelt and honest, achingly sad and ultimately unsent because she knows that her friends want to hear conventional nothings from widows. Another story is devoted to memories of the lost husband, memories of both his vital and declining days.

The theme of the final story is that death is inconsiderate. It leaves the surviving partner to perform all the chores/repairs that were the duty of the lost partner. Yet she can’t blame Tig. He didn’t intend to grow old.

Growing old is not typically the subject of fiction until writers reach the age when looking back is easier than looking forward. At least when we are older, we don’t fear our own inevitable deaths so much as we fear the deaths of those we love — including, perhaps, a cat. I appreciated Atwood’s willingness to confront the subject in these stories with fearless honesty.

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The Wehrwolf by Alma Katsu

Published by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on September 27, 2022

“The Wehrwolf” is a long short story but probably too short to be called a novella. The story is set in the German forest where the Brothers Grimm collected folklore to weave into their fairy tales. While the stories were later sanitized to appeal to the delicate sensibilities of city kids, Alma Katsu suggests that sturdy Germans of the forest were accustomed to seeing their children mauled in the woods and prepared their kids for the agony of life by terrorizing them with gruesome stories. Perhaps the Grimms unwittingly prepared Germans to accept Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Hans Sauer has returned from the front at the war’s end. Perhaps he is a deserter, although he claims he returned to protect his village from approaching allies. His return coincides with the gruesome death of a Roma in the woods, a man apparently torn apart by animals. Hans wants Uwe Fuchs to join his band of villagers in protecting the village. The Nazis have encouraged such local militias to defend the Homeland.

Uwe is uncertain about joining Hans, but he’s curious when Hans claims to have killed Russian soldiers. The bodies seem to have been attacked by animals. Uwe refuses to listen to the entreaties of his wife because he wears the pants in the family. The importance of marital equality, or maybe just "listen to your wife," might be one of the tale's intended lessons.

To be initiated into the band, Uwe is locked into a cellar with Jurgen Jäger, about whom dark stories are told. When Jurgen ties an old leather belt around his waist, he becomes a monster. A myth associates the belt with the devil, but to Uwe, it looks like an ordinary belt that might be found hanging in any barn. “A simple thing can turn you into a monster,” Uwe thinks, a thought that is presumably another of the story’s lessons. After Uwe is initiated, Hans can turn him into a werewolf simply by donning the belt.

Uwe’s disregard of his wife’s advice leads to an ending that is worthy of one of Grimm’s uncensored stories. Suffice it to say that Uwe learns and then teaches a lesson.

Like a fairy tale, the story invites the reader to draw obvious conclusions. While Uwe doesn’t want to accept the fact that he’s a monster, a reader might conclude that Uwe’s decision to join a militia to fight in support of a Nazi government is what makes him a monster. Not surprisingly, a willingness to kill Russian who are fighting Germany easily translates into a willingness to kill Germans who do not meet a standard of normalcy demanded by the werewolves. Apart from the irony of Aryan werewolves judging others for being abnormal, the story teaches another lesson: Those who give themselves the power to condemn others will inevitably misuse that power to enforce shared bigotry.

There are other lessons here about resisting the temptation of evil even if it makes us feel strong, the triumph of empathy over supremacy, and the immorality of vigilantism and unregulated militias. If this is a modern fairy tale, I’m not sure I would want a small child to read it, but it would have value for older kids and adults with weak minds who are attracted to authoritarian militias. I’m recommending it to everyone else for the polished prose.

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I Walk Between the Raindrops by T.C. Boyle

Published by Ecco on September 13, 2022

Many of the T.C. Boyle stories collected in this volume were published in Esquire, The New Yorker, Playboy, or literary reviews. They vary in style and subject matter but not in quality. The title story didn’t speak to me, but the others include some of the best short fiction I’ve read in recent memory.

My favorites:

The narrator of “The Thirteenth Day” is quarantined on a cruise ship with a passenger from Wuhan who has COVID-19. Fear, privation, domestic discord, and culture war lunacy ensue. The story is so realistic it reads as if Boyle was actually a passenger on the ship.

“Big Mary” is a large woman who beats every man she arm-wrestles. She slowly becomes the lead vocalist for a bar band before jealousy (largely the narrator’s) leads to the kind of drama that breaks up bands.

“The Shape of a Teardrop” - Parents evict their loser son because he refuses to work, knowing his wages will be garnished for child support. The mother insists she loves her son but her brand of tough love suggests her primary loyalty is to herself. This is the kind of story that makes me even more grateful to have been raised in a functional family.

A medical student practices surgery on dogs in a hospital's “Dog Lab.” The story highlights the ethical issues surrounding the use of dogs that would otherwise have been euthanized (a fate that is only delayed by the surgeries). The issues cause a rift between the student and his girlfriend. No spoiler intended, but if you want to know whether a dog lover will appreciate the ending, the answer is yes.

The narrator of “Not Me” is an unhappy high school teacher who, unlike some of his unhappy colleagues, is not sleeping with a student. Sleeping with students is against the rules but sleeping with other teachers turns out to be just as problematic.

“The Apartment” - A man agrees to pay a monthly sum to an old woman for the duration of her life in exchange for ownership of her apartment when she dies. The man and the old woman both are wagering on the duration of her life. “We all make bargains in this life,” the woman later says. “Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.”

Other stories I enjoyed:

“These Are the Circumstances” - Nick’s wife Laurel persuades him to go on a nature walk/bath ($25 per hour per person) so they can gain the meditative and calming benefit of communing with leaves and dirt. Nick is bored after three minutes of watching twigs float downstream. He misses his phone. Laurel sees beauty where Nick sees danger. They might both be right, but nature later has an adverse impact on Nick’s life. This is a good story for husbands who oppose their wives’ insistence that they get off the couch.

“Key to the Kingdom” - A stranger knocks on a writer’s door and raises the possibility that he’s the writer’s son, triggering memories of a return to the writer’s alma mater after the publication of his first novel and an unexpected sexual encounter. The knowledge is one more in a series of burdens that the writer has never been able to carry.

“SCS 750” - The ability to get a good job or medical treatment or decent seating on the train is dependent on a Social Credit Score that defines trustworthiness. The score is shaped by conformity to rigid rules (not avoiding surveillance cameras, not buying more than one bottle of gin at a time, not watching porn or playing video games all day, not expressing antisocial thoughts). The narrator chooses friends and relationships based on their impact on his score, a clever twist on the common dystopian theme of government-enforced limits on individuality.

“Asleep at the Wheel” takes place in the future of self-driving cars, including Ubers that want to take their passengers on a shopping trip to stores that have purchased advertising from Uber. The story describes two events. One is a mother’s evening with a man her car told her to avoid. The other follows drunken kids who, inspired by Rebel Without a Cause, decide to disable the self-driving capability of stolen cars and drive them off a cliff. Meanwhile, gentle robotic police make the reader wonder whether society might get something right in the future.

I was indifferent to these three:

The title story tells five interlocking mini-stories. The first and last address a man’s feeling of powerlessness when he is harassed by a woman while waiting for his wife in a bar on Valentine’s Day. One follows a man who deals with the aftermath of a mudslide. One is about a suicide prevention worker’s relationship with a woman who threatens suicide. The only interesting segment involves a matchmaking dinner party. The hosts try to bring two obese people together, a plan that alienates a fat man who wonders why the hosts would assume he is attracted to fat women. All the segments are all meant to address the theme of “fathomless, inexpressible, heartbreaking loneliness,” but the dinner party segment is the only one that touched my heart.

“The Hyena” - The residents of a village go mad. Perhaps there was something in the bread.

“What’s Love Got to Do with It?” tells of a conversation an older woman has with a college student during a train ride. The student is an incel who describes with sympathy another incel who went on a killing spree at a sorority house. The incel wants to be seen but doesn’t understand that the woman only sees him for what he is. I don’t see a college virgin opening up to a woman who is likely oler than his mother about his sexual insecurities, but Boyle’s description of those insecurities seems spot on.

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Two Nurses, Smoking by David Means

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on September 13, 2022

The stories collected in Two Nurses, Smoking depict the rawness of life, a savagery of experience that is occasionally tempered by love. Many of the stories involve characters who respond to circumstances beyond their control. Some make choices they will regret, but the future holds open the hope for better choices as the characters isolate what has gone wrong in their lives. The stories can be hard to read but a spark of hope or redemption or love softens most of them.

What do “Two Nurses, Smoking” talk about on a smoke break? A nurse who serially kills patients. Patients they expect to die. Medical equipment and the pain of kidney stones. Patients who are junkies. The scar a nurse earned in Iraq. Lonely roads and lonely people. Eventually, they talk about each other. All those topics, the reader realizes, are connected. Perhaps the smoking nurses aren’t all that different from the serial killer or junkies or doomed patients. Perhaps they can connect in ways that go beyond stories, beyond their common pain, to set their lives on a different path.

Grief and coping with loss, often manifesting in bitterness and incivility, are the subjects of “Stopping Distance.”  The reader might wonder how support groups that encourage parents to be stuck in a loop of loss, telling the same stories again and again, help anyone, yet a bereavement group allows two people to make a connection through mirrored pain. The story’s value lies in its insight about living with loss.

“The Red Dot” is a kayak in the distance that, as it nears shore, resolves into a kayak paddled by a Karl’s former wife, Debbie, who before she became an ex was afraid of the water. Karl talks about the argument they had when he saw her in the kayak. A character who knows Debbie wonders if the story is true because Debbie is an excellent swimmer. Did Karl make up the kayaking story or did Debbie tell Karl, for reasons of her own, that she was afraid of water? The narrator tries to unpack the truth as he considers the mystery of Karl’s life while attending his funeral and again years later. The story explores the concepts of trustworthiness and image as they apply to people we don’t really know.

“First Encounter” A man whose daughter saw him kissing another woman in a hospital parking lot is saved from exposure by the side effects of his daughter’s medication. The reprieve does not last because the truth never really goes away.

“Are You Experienced?” While cleaning their dope on the cover of a Hendrix album, Billy explains to Meg why he is justified stealing money from his uncle. Keeping money in the family isn’t really a crime and the money itself came from many years of farming, honest “money that came from sunlight and air and dirt, nothing else.” As they discuss the crime, Meg sees parallels between Billy and his uncle in their tendency to ramble about the past, traits that will one day make Billy just as vulnerable as his uncle. David Means illustrates the “what goes around, comes around” principle in a way that suggests the inevitability of karma.

“I am Andrew Wyeth!” is narrated by an artist who tries to become Andrew Wyeth. He requests a nondisclosure agreement from an assistant whose duty is to watch him work, record her observations in her head, and never tell anyone what she saw, all to create “the implicit secretiveness” of the artist’s endeavor. The agreement creates a sense of glamor and the impression that something interesting has been kept at bay, but it also shields the artist against his impulse to confess and the rumors that impulse might inspire.

The narrator of “Vows” looks back on his life and marriage and the lives and marriages of his friends through conversations and observations preserved in memory, “singular moments of astonishingly framed light.” “Lightning Speaks” is written as a series of fragmented paragraphs. The fragmentation might reflect the mental illness of characters who form connections and share memories or visions in an institution.

Nearly every paragraph of “Depletion Prompts” begins with the phrase “Write about,” followed a scenario — a kid confronted by a bully; wandering the woods to escape family drama; a baby born in a closet to a teenage girl afraid to disclose her pregnancy; your mother sneaking into a mental hospital to visit your sister — or a topic: toxic masculinity; the rage of feeling isolated during the pandemic. The paragraphs include notes about how the scene should be written, suggestions for happy and sad endings, how to connect the scene to others or “Use just the whispers, fragments of tense language, to build the fuzzy narrative that you carried.” The scenarios have whatever literary value a writer’s notebook might have, but the story works as a window into a writer’s mind.

My favorite story addresses the sadness of human existence through the eyes of a dog. Norman goes into the woods with a gun after his wife dies. He lets his dachshund off her leash and the dachshund gets lost chasing a rabbit. After a long adventure that includes a new family, we learn how losing his dog changed Norman’s life. The point of view is amazing and the story is heartening. “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog” is one of the coolest dog stories I’ve ever read. It’s worth the price of the volume.

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Terraform by Brian Merchant and Claire L. Evans (eds.)

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux /MCD x FSG Originals on August 16, 2022

Terraform is an anthology of science fiction stories that were published digitally on VICE’s “digital speculative story destination” of the same name. Corey Doctorow’s introduction to this collection suggests the value of Luddites, defined not as people who oppose technology but as people who oppose the use of technology to benefit owners at the expense of workers. He embarks on a riff about the gutting of antitrust law before he talks about the need for science fiction that imagines alternative technologies, or uses of technology, in ways that benefit people rather than capital.

In a preface, the editors of this anthology are less ambitious. Boiled down, they explain that Terraform publishes stories by new or unheralded sf writers. An unacknowledged risk of focusing on new writers is that prose will unpolished and ideas will be insufficiently developed. Many stories in the volume suffer from those flaws. When an anthology collects a large number of sf stories from newer writers, the quality will inevitably be uneven.

The stories in the first section focus on technology. An online service streams cute animals without disclosing the ways in which the animals (and the people who work for the service) are abused. Archived records of personal activity are deleted by drastic means. A kid explains to her school why she’s opting out of technology that enhances her sensory experiences. Letters smuggled across the border are the only way for deported migrants to keep in touch with relatives in the US because they are not allowed to communicate over wires or wirelessly. A male prostitute whose body is occupied by other men is asked to allow an artificial intelligence to use his body. A ghost who looks like Ernest Borgnine becomes a guest on Jimmy Kimmel’s show in an effort to obtain justice.

The best story in the first section is “The End of Big Data” by James Bridle. A data crash made all private information available for the taking. Governments responded by criminalizing the electronic storage of data. The UN monitors compliance with satellites that seek out evidence of server farms. The UN’s response to its discovery of illegal data storage is drastic.

The stories in the second section are set in the future. An archivist talks about maintaining biobots in the form of moths. A girl’s life is influenced by a talking head she finds floating down a stream after it was separated from its organically grown body. An artificial womb permits external gestation. Sentient drones enforcing agricultural rules that regulate all of society are offered a safe haven in a cooperative community that gives freedom to humans and drones. A dog that receives an intelligence enhancement yearns for a simpler time. The failure of technology portends a devolution of humanity that inspires philosophers to ask whether humanity really matters.

I have a couple of favorite stories in this section. Robin Sloan’s “The Counselor” addresses society’s response to the public expense of caring for the aging as medicine finds new ways to prolong life. The solution: assign an AI counselor whose job is to encourage older people to end their lives. In Lincoln Michel’s “Duchy of the Toe Adam,” all that is left of a religious colony has devolved into worshippers of the toe who are at war with worshippers of the nose (having defeated worshippers of other sacrilegious body parts).

The third section is devoted to dystopian stories. The rebooted dead are plotting a revolution. Revolutionary elephants have taken over Phuket. Space alien refugees are treated just as poorly as refugees from Earth’s nations. A school transport drone mistakenly returns a refugee to her original home in Mexico. A band member wakes up on the tour bus and discovers that everyone on the bus, and perhaps everyone in Texas or the world, has disappeared. Zombie capitalists. All green card holders are deported. A corporation has been gaming carbon credits by storing all its carbon emissions.

The first of my three favorites in this section is Russell Nichols’ “U Won’t Remember Dying.” A kid who was shot by the police texts his future self as he waits for his consciousness to be transferred to a cloned body. The story is a powerful and timely. The second is Bruce Sterling’s “The Brain Dump.” Oppressed Ukrainian hackers suddenly become moguls in Sterling’s 2014 commentary on the difficulty of maintaining anarchy in a pure form. My favorite story in the collection is Jeff VanderMeer’s “Always Home.” The New People were originally machines. Now they are everything. They oversee the planet’s restoration to a natural state. One of the few remaining Old People wonders why the New People brought back nature but not humans. A battle for the future ensues.

Sterling and VanderMeer are the only writers in this anthology whose work I am certain I’ve read, although I recognize the names of a few other contributors: Tobias Buckell, Meg Elison, Sam J. Miller, Tochi Onyebuchi, E. Lily Yu. Doctorow’s introduction is interesting but, sadly, he did not contribute a story to the collection. Too many of these stories are insubstantial, more ideas for stories than stories given flesh, but more than half are entertaining.

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