Joyce Carol Oates on a Mesmerizing New Story Collection

GOOD AND EVIL AND OTHER STORIES, by Samanta Schweblin; translated by Megan McDowell

One of the pleasures of reading a collection of thematically linked short stories is that while each story may be independent of the others, depicting unrelated characters, set in very different places, the reader cumulatively experiences something of the emotional wallop of a novel.

If Samanta Schweblin’s much-acclaimed short novel “Fever Dream” (2014) unfolds with the accelerating drama of a tightly constructed short story, beginning in medias res as if in mid-dream, the six stories of the Argentine author’s latest collection quickly establish the gravitas of condensed novels. We are dropped into the middle of lives that have surely existed before the occasion of the story and will continue after its conclusion, irrevocably altered.

“Good and Evil” is an unexpectedly generic title for a collection so imbued with the ambiguities and ironies of domestic life, in which the absolutes of “good” and “evil” scarcely figure. It is not moral conflict but the overwhelming pressure of family life that drives the characters — mothers, wives, daughters — to existential breakdowns. A middle-aged woman in “A Visit From the Chief,” while reflecting on her estranged daughter and infirm mother, struggles to keep her bearings:

She wondered what it was all about; that is, what this whole business of living a life was even for. … She wasn’t expecting any fantastic revelation. But if … there had been no sign thus far that would say to her, “This is why you are here,” “This is what must be understood,” then was she really moving in the right direction?

Even farther adrift is the narrator of “Welcome to the Club,” a young wife and mother who, between preparing breakfast and lunch for her family, coolly rehearses drowning herself in the lake behind her house. Sinking to the mossy bottom, she feels “like an astronaut landing on the moon.” The prospect of death is eerily seductive, mesmerizing:

I’m struck by the liquid feeling where there was always air before, but above all I’m struck by how lucid I feel. How calm. … And it’s then, at that moment, when I remember thinking, What if this is it? To float and wonder for the rest of eternity: the first real fear I had that day. To be unable to move forward or backward, ever again, in any direction.

The narrator has left two letters — one for her husband, the other for her daughters — on the kitchen table: She may not see a way ahead, but she hasn’t lost sight of what she’s leaving behind. As with “Fever Dream,” an all-too-realistic eco-horror tale set in an environmental disaster zone, Schweblin builds suspense in these stories by highlighting the vulnerability of children and the need to protect them, a responsibility that weighs particularly heavily upon mothers.

“Do you want to stay on this side of the world?” a neighbor asks the narrator of “Welcome to the Club,” after pointing out that it’s her daughters who will suffer. “Do you want to save them from the damage of losing their mother?” Neither joy in life nor even fear of death will deter this unhappy woman from drowning, but perhaps another force can: “If the guilt is strong enough, you’ll need to stay,” the neighbor says. Later, the narrator realizes “exactly what guilt does; it enters like the air through the sliding glass door and flows into my lungs.”

Our attachments to others save us and they destroy us. “William in the Window,” identified in Schweblin’s afterword as “perhaps the most autobiographical story I’ve written,” portrays the extreme anxiety that a young woman writer has about her lover, who has been diagnosed with a serious illness:

The only thing I had done conscientiously in Buenos Aires … was wait in horror for the moment when I would find him dead. When I’d come home and find him stiff on the sofa, or turn over at night in bed and brush his leg with my foot and feel his cold, rigid skin. … But above all I was frightened by the suspicion that if Andrés died, I might die with him.

The women protagonists of these stories sometimes alienate themselves from those closest to them, only to be confronted by men who speak to them with the intimate audacity of dream figures or shamans. The armor that protects these women from familial feeling is pierced by strangers who intervene dramatically in their lives. One even seems to threaten violence: “He takes my hand by the wrist and forces it palm-down on the table,” the narrator of “Welcome to the Club” recounts. “Now he’s going to cut off my fingers, I think, he’s going to skin me.”

A similarly bold male figure in the final story, “A Visit From the Chief,” enters the protagonist’s home and reveals that he has a gun, terrifying her but also, oddly, assuring her: “You are much stronger than you think. … And I’m here to prove that to you.”

Both stories move toward tentative resolutions. Though the family is the nexus of terrible anxiety and guilt for the women, liberation of a kind — emotional, erotic — is possible by way of male strangers who overwhelm them, seemingly fulfilling a need that family members and spouses cannot provide.

Some readers may recall Carl Jung’s theory of dreams, in which visions come to us as mysterious figures saturated with meaning — in women, the figure is the “animus”; in men, “anima.” These dream figures represent our alternative selves, our potential for spiritual growth. They speak to us with a mysterious authority, like the gun-bearing stranger in “A Visit From the Chief”: “Even if you need me, don’t try to find me. The best thing for someone like you is to never hear from me again.”

Beautifully translated by Megan McDowell, in prose that shimmers with a sort of menacing lyricism, the stories of “Good and Evil” are powerfully evocative and unsettling. They seem to hover, indeed like fever dreams, between the reassuring familiarities of domestic life and the stark, unpredictable, visionary flights of the unconscious. Everything exists in a state of tension, charged with contradictions. The protagonist of the final story discovers in herself an unexpected appetite for the breakfast her mysterious animus-stranger has prepared for her as a parting gift: “She picked up the fork and took a bite, and then another, and another. She had to finish the plate before she grasped just how hungry she was.”

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