AUTOCORRECT: Stories, by Etgar Keret; translated by Jessica Cohen and Sandra Silverston
Many people don’t realize that short story collections often take years to complete, so it’s hard for us fiction writers to remain topical when the cultural terra firma is shifting so rapidly beneath our feet. For example, most of the 33 stories in “Autocorrect,” the most recent book by the celebrated Israeli author Etgar Keret, were written before the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — which, in internet time, is maybe a decade or more ago. It’s a problem, particularly for the satirically inclined. The outrageous things you imagined as dark hypotheticals have come true. Each news cycle requires a suspension of disbelief.
Keret is famous for his dry, winsome comic sketches, often using fantastical or science-fictional settings, with clever hooks and twists and a melancholic aftertaste. A number of the tentpole stories in “Autocorrect” have that wry dystopian flavor. In “A World Without Selfie Sticks,” a man encounters an alternate-reality version of his ex-girlfriend, who is traveling across parallel worlds as a part of a bizarre game-show scavenger hunt.
“Soulo” is about A.I. friends who are offered up as cures for loneliness, while in “The Future Is Not What It Used to Be,” the discovery of time travel is purchased by SpaceX, then monetized and run into the ground. “Guided Tour” has the last surviving humans make their living as Earth’s docents for alien tourists. “Director’s Cut,” meanwhile, is a mash-up of “The Truman Show” and “Boyhood”: A man’s life is recorded continuously from beginning to end, which results in a 73-year-long film that few survive long enough to watch all the way through.
At times, Keret can seem like that hip, cynical Gen X guy who’s down at the end of the bar doling out hot takes about the doomed future of our species. Human extinction features in a number of these tales, delivered with a “what did you expect?” wink. But the targets here (cruel game shows and people lost in virtual reality and A.I. companionship and time-travel conundrums and so forth) feel a bit played out, as though we’ve kind of already seen them in an episode of “Black Mirror.”
My favorite stories in the collection are the ones that — despite whatever tomfoolery is going on in the global monoculture — focus on the singular strangeness of being a living person in the world. The tense and moving “A Dog for a Dog” features a group of Jewish children questing into an Arab neighborhood to seek revenge for the killing of their dog by a reckless driver — a quietly devastating tale of ethnic resentment and empathy. It’s this story that suffers most from the rapid changes in world history after it was written, though you may feel that the opposite is true, that it lands with the extra heft of real-life tragedy.
In another piece, the peculiar and brilliant “Mitzvah,” a guy tripping on ecstasy in Tel Aviv is waylaid outside a synagogue and persuaded to join a group of elderly men praying for their recently deceased friend. The story has a druggy, digressive structure that continually surprises.
Others hew to the universal and timeless. The touching title story is an attempt to rewrite the last words we say to someone — in this case, a son reliving and revising his final conversation with his father. And in the lovely “Cherry Garcia Memories With M&Ms on Top” a man who is caring for his dementia-fogged mother asks her if she remembers who he is.
“‘Not exactly,’ she says with a sigh. ‘I know that you love me and I love you. Isn’t that enough?’”
And isn’t that the timeliest revelation?
AUTOCORRECT: Stories | By Dan Chaon | Riverhead | 196 pp. | $28
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