Creative Types by Tom Bissell

Publsihed by ‎ Pantheon on December 14, 2021

It is difficult to identify a unifying theme in this volume of Tom Bissell stories. That’s one of the pleasures of reading the seven diverse stories in the collection. No story is similar to any other story. If they have anything in common, it is the suggestion that the choices we make about living our lives always merit examination.

My favorite story, “The Fifth Category,” is rooted in recent history. A man named John wakes up on a flight and discovers he is the only person on board the darkened plane. The man is a former government lawyer who wrote memos justifying the torture of American prisoners who were arbitrarily classified as enemy combatants, a lawyer who refuses to acknowledge his role in crimes against humanity. We aren’t told his last name but the character is obviously modeled upon John Yoo. The flight forces him to confront a reality that he had only considered in the abstract. The story is nuanced and somewhat sympathetic to Yoo without whitewashing his willful failure to anticipate the foreseeably ugly consequences of his work.

Four of the stories are, like “The Fifth Category,” smart and provocative:

The Jewish women who want to worship in an Italian synagogue are allowed to sit in a cage “if there’s room.” A tourist protests religiously inspired social injustice by removing his yarmulke, provoking a confrontation with the tour guide.

A writer whose older brother was killed while trying to prevent a crime eventually writes a critical article about a New York City vigilante who calls himself the Avenger. When the Avenger agrees to be interviewed, it is the writer who must answer questions about his failure to engage with his brother’s death.

Two men who were high school bullies together in the Midwest reunite in New York City. One of the men, now working as an editor, has changed. His visiting friend is still an ignorant, bullying bigot, a fact that triggers the editor as he’s forced to remember the person he once was.

An American makes friends with a Greyhound that attacks him in Estonia, then invites the Greyhound’s owner (the wealthy daughter of a criminal) to do coke. The daughter expects to make out with the American, but he’s more interested in discussing the philosophy of existence, an interest that forces the woman to think about the emptiness of her life and encourages a non-sexual bond of friendship.

The final two stories were less interesting to me, although they might resonate with (in the first case) couples with young children or (in the second) fans of Hollywood celebrities:

A hooker talks about her life with a Hollywood couple that hires her to spice up their post-baby sex life. The reality of life intrudes on the fantasy of spice.

An assistant to James (obviously James Franco) ponders his life before and after he makes an innocent mistake as Seth (obviously Seth Rogen) and James wrestle with a Saturday Night Live monologue.

The diversity of subject matter and the qualify of Bissell’s writing assures that most readers will find something to like in this collection. I found nothing to dislike. Five of the seven appealed to me, a pretty good batting average for any writer.

RECOMMENDED

Her Second Death by Melinda Leigh

Published by Amazon Original Stories on December 7, 2021

“Her Second Death” is part of the Amazon original short story series. It is billed as a prequel to the Bree Taggert series. The story has the feel of something that was dashed off in a couple of hours.

Detective Bree Taggert, newly assigned to homicide, investigates a shooting death. The victim was found in his car. When she contacts the victim’s wife, she learns that the wife was living apart from the victim and that he had their daughter for an overnight visitation. The missing child is a little blonde girl because of course it is.

Bree has empathy for the little girl because she hid under the porch during her parents’ murder-suicide. Because of course she did.

The police perform a bit of obvious police work that leads them to an obvious conclusion. The story generates no suspense because of course a little blonde girl isn’t going to be harmed in a story like this. Melinda Leigh makes no effort to make the reader feel she’s even at risk.

Nor is Bree ever at much risk, although weapons are pulled on her a couple of times. Her complete absence of situational awareness would be distressing if she were a real cop.

Like most missing child stories, this is a lazy effort at storytelling. If you really want to read about a missing kid, check out the review before this one. Winter Water tells a clever story. “Her Second Death” just isn’t interesting.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Orgy by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Published digitally on Scribd on July 23, 2021

“Orgy” is the first true “pandemic story” I’ve encountered. I’m sure many more are on the way, but “Orgy” is a short story and presumably made it to market more quickly than the pandemic novels we’ll soon see.

Nessa is “closer to forty than girlhood.” She lives in Brooklyn with her roommate Laurie, a writer who specializes in essays about the microaggressions displayed by white women who wear yoga pants. Nessa is fed up with social distancing, although she understands its necessity. It is nevertheless interfering with a sex life that was once active and varied.

Nessa is bisexual and, when she plays the game of looking at subway passengers and asking herself whether she would sleep with them, searches for ways to say yes. Yet Nessa’s regular booty-call partners aren’t risking contact with her during the pandemic, presumably because they regard her as a “third-tier friend — not worth the risk of sharing a restaurant meal with. It is a cold reckoning at the end of the world.”

Nessa receives an email inviting her to an orgy. She believes the email is from members of the furry community and that the orgy will be a costume party, so she dons her pig nose and tail, rips some holes in her leotards, and sets out into the night over her roommate’s objection that she’s breaching the lockdown. The orgy isn’t quite what she expects, in part because she receives an unexpected reaction to a story she likes to tell, a story that is “one of the foundational myths of herself.”

The desire to scratch an itch after a pandemic-induced dry spell is an interesting concept for a story, but the story’s greater interest lies in the impact of the pandemic on New Yorkers. Nessa has recently delivered groceries to a 15-year-old girl who refused to wear a mask and became ill with COVID. As she ponders the girl’s decision to make “a potentially dumb choice just to feel something like free,” she wonders if that is exactly what she is doing by attending an orgy. Yet “the pure glory of having a body and being alive” is something she has felt since she arrived in New York.

The story’s closing paragraphs suggest that Nessa doesn’t need an orgy to understand that sexual freedom is still essential to her sense of self. “Orgy” thus not only delivers insight into the protagonist butoffers a larger view of how the pandemic has collectively affected the lives of people who have taken it seriously and those who have not.

RECOMMENDED

The Museum of Rain by Dave Eggers

Published by ‎ McSweeney's Publishing on June 15, 2021

Humans are motivated to act for many reasons. We want to make a profit. We want to create a legacy. We want to impress others. But might there be motivations that are less easily understood? Might we do something just for the sake of doing it? Because we had an idea, no matter how pointless or silly, and transformed the idea to reality for the simple satisfaction of contributing to the human story?

Oisín is 72 years old. When he was young, he began to collect jars of rain from the places he visited them. He placed them on a shelf in the shade of a manzanita tree. He even engraved the words Museum of Rain on a piece of wood to mark the spot. And then, as he got older, he left the project behind. How many projects have we all started and abandoned as our lives moved forward?

Patrick Mahoney has turned 75. On the second day of a family reunion to mark the occasion, the Mahoney adults are hungover and the kids are bored. Patrick suggests that Oisín take the kids to see the Museum of Rain, a three-mile hike that will give the adults time to recover. It takes Oisín some time to remember the museum and a bit more time to be persuaded to take the kids there, but he eventually teaches the kids to make walking sticks and leads them on an adventure to find the lost museum.

Patrick told one of the kids that the Museum of Rain was Oisín’s monument to tears, but Oisín explains that he made the museum because he had the idea and followed it to its completion — or at least, he gave the museum a start as a work in progress before he abandoned it. If we insist on a “dramatic origin story” for every human endeavor, Oisín tells the child, “we deprive our species of the ability to simply conjure an idea. To just make stuff and do things.”

Eggers creates a sense of wonder in the ending, after building tension with Oisín’s fear that, after all these years, the shelf will have rotted and the jars will be broken or long gone. Even if the museum is still there, he suspects that the kids will be underwhelmed by a collection of labeled jars of ordinary water. Without resorting to the supernatural, Eggers infuses the ending with maagic, exploring the miracle that is an idea and how one person’s idea can endure by being shared with people its creator never met. Given the story’s simplicity, the story’s ending is surprisingly profound and moving.

“The Museum of Rain” is a short story. Given the dreariness of most stories collected in annual “Best Short Stories” anthologies, "The Museum of Rain" will certainly merit inclusion. Maybe Eggers won’t allow it to be anthologized since McSweeney’s is publishing it as a pocket book. Whatever a reader must do to acquire it, “The Museum of Rain” is worth finding.

RECOMMENDED

Robot Artists and Black Swans by Bruce Sterling

Published in an illustrated edition by Tachyon Publications on April 27, 2021

Seven Bruce Sterling stories are collected in Robot Artists and Black Swans. I liked a couple of them, was amused by a couple more, and didn’t understand the rest. That’s consistent with my experience of Sterling’s work.

A forward explains that these stories of “fantascienza” are written by Bruno Argento, a Turinese writer whose pen name is Bruce Sterling. The stories are linked by their connection to Italy. Neal Stephenson contributes an introduction that extols the virtues of cyberpunk, which some of these stories might be.

The robot artist in the collection’s title is a wheelchair that once belonged to a Japanese artist. Now it roams around the world, making art in various ways, assembling “mosaics of pebbles” or weaving “great lattices from twigs and dry grass, creations like fantastic bird’s nests.”  The wheelchair is followed by Ghost Club intellectuals who document its creations for the appreciation of the Beau Monde. Its current follower is Wolfgang, who defends it from those who view science as being at war with the humanities. Wolfgang is convinced that the wheelchair is producing important art, but he is struggling to find a “clear line of critical attack” to explain to the world exactly why the wheelchair must be valued. He likens the robot artist to beautiful cities like Verona, “authentic entities, growing from landscapes,” loved for their beauty despite (like the robot artist) not being alive or intelligent. A scientist who accuses Wolfgang of belonging to a cult wonders why he would “walk the Earth making up weird artsy bullshit about a cheap parlor trick,” prompting the retort that science is “notoriously useless for seeking metaphysical truth or establishing ethical values.” Both arguments have merit. The story dramatizes culture wars, asks whether there might be artistry in computer code, ponders the role of art, science, and critics in life, considers whether there is a “third state of being,” and asks whether art can be good if we don’t understand it. Add a post-anthropologist who considers herself to be superhuman and you’ve got quite a story. While it sometimes drags in its exploration of plot tangents, “Robot in Roses” showcases Sterling’s far-ranging imagination.

The other story that grabbed me is “Esoteric City,” a tongue-in-cheek tale of the supernatural. A necromancer named Achille Occhietti conjures a demon mummy as his guide to the dark spirits. The mummy leads Occhietti down a spiral staircase to Hell, a “keenly tourist-friendly” path with glossy signs “that urged the abandonment of all hope in fourteen official European Union languages.” Dead Italian journalists and literary critics make the most noise in Hell. Occhietti is fated to return to the world of the living to meet Satan, who has rejected “Cold War-style metaphysics.” To make a deal for souls now, he offers global solutions to climate change — at a price.

“Black Swan” is about a tech journalist whose source, Massimo Montaldo, hacks “chip secrets” to manipulate the industry. Montaldo wants to release his hack of a revolutionary memristor to an Italian company so that Italy will no longer be a second-rate tech power. When the journalist insists on learning the source of the technology, Montaldo explains his knowledge of 64 Italys that exist in 64 universes. In one of them, the tech writer made more of himself than he did in the universe he occupies.

“Kill the Moon” is a cute story about Italians who followed American astronauts to the moon. Instead of sending scientists, Italy sent a billionaire and “his busty actress girlfriend.” Because Italy.

Three other stories did nothing for me at all, so I can only recommend half the collection.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS