EXIT ZERO: Stories, by Marie-Helene Bertino
It is best to go into certain books — the ones that sit at the intersection of bizarre and stellar — knowing nothing about them, so as to undergo an experience that starts at enjoyment and escalates to conversion. It’s too bad that a person who writes about books professionally rarely gets the opportunity. It’s a critic’s duty (and often her privilege!) to read the back catalog of an author before toeing up to a new work. If the critic is lazy, there’s always a press packet to leaf through. If the critic is unforgivably derelict, she will at minimum scan the blurbs.
My copy of Marie-Helene Bertino’s new short story collection, “Exit Zero,” featured no blurbs and I read it while visiting a far Nordic country where her previous books — “Beautyland,” “Parakeet” and two others — were unavailable for immediate purchase. And so it was that, by a combination of poor preparation and good fortune, I was converted.
“Exit Zero” is a death-obsessed book. Sometimes death sets a story in motion, as when a woman’s estranged father dies and she discovers a unicorn living in his yard. Sometimes death is tangential, as when a fatal car crash leaves the survivor with an unlikely souvenir — a fine art portrait of Cher — that becomes a sort of religious icon in her wrecked life. The stories are dense with funeral homes, cancer, gravestones, emergency surgeries, war.
Dense, but not heavy. This is partly because Bertino is a very funny writer: She will describe a man’s facial hair as “erratic”; when an event planner is asked what she does for work, she replies, “I make God laugh.” It is also because, as the unicorn suggests, we are in the presence of whimsy. In one story, a woman’s ex-lovers fall from the sky like hailstones. In another, balloons float into a character’s garden carrying cryptic messages from who knows where (“YOU SEEM LONELY,” “WE ARE UNDER ATTACK”). These and other premises verge on precious, but the prose is photorealistic enough to neutralize the taste of sugar.
These stories frolic in the nether zone between fantasy and reality. Reality: The characters exist in concrete locations (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York) and in an era that is recognizably our own — a present infested with streaming television, emojis, Taylor Swift and promotional emails from J. Crew. But this terra firma is also home to saints, ghosts, vampires and unnameable but palpable emissaries from other realms.
Short stories submit to technical scrutiny far more readily than novels; their small scale makes the elements of craft — setups, incidents, reversals — easier to extract and examine than they are in a lengthier work. This vulnerability to dissection makes the form tricky to master and terrifying to write. But when a short story works, it can wield truly occult powers, exerting a force disproportionate to its dimensions. Through all of “Exit Zero” Bertino blurs the line between writer and magician.
Among the more dazzling spells is a story called “Kathleen in Light Colors,” which conflates the alienation of language with the alienation of love. The conflict is simple: A couple suffer from an unsatisfying sex life. Their lovemaking is “muted,” the contact between their flesh muffled by “an unseen body” that prevents them from truly feeling each other: “an invisible obfuscating blanket.”
The adventurous pair gamely try to “outsmart” this presence by fooling around in a pool, a vestibule, on a fire escape. No luck. They seek advice from a witchy woman who performs a kind of exorcism. The incompatibility abides. It is only a failed attempt at dirty talk that reveals the heart of the problem. “No matter how we tried to gain linguistic purchase,” the narrator says, “we were still wearing oven mitts.” The suggestion is this: A couple who fail to share an understanding of words cannot hope to please each other’s bodies.
True or not, it’s one of countless provocations served up in a style as lavish and strictly composed as a formal garden. And it is no accident that flowers, fruits and trees are abundant in these stories. A character pruning the dead ends of lilies in her garden considers herself to be “an assistant to unburdening,” as though the routines of gardening were acts of palliative care. How true! Few writers can revolve your mind in the space of four words. Bertino is one of them.
EXIT ZERO: Stories | By Marie-Helene Bertino | FSG Originals | 191 pp. | Paperback, $18
Molly Young is a book critic for The Times and a contributing writer for The Times Magazine.
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