[the book rat project] Week 12: Plenty of signs, not much wonder

It's time for another installment of the Book Rat Project, the sustained experiment in which a book critic (my Phoenix colleague Eugenia Williamson) attempts to act as a human algorithm for a willing subject (me).

After another strong selection last week Eugenia went out on a limb and handed me Signs and Wonders, Alix Ohlin’s newest collection of 16 stories. I wish I could say the risk worked out better.

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Ohlin has nearly mastered the art of economy, but not quite. Highly adept at placing deeply imagined individuals in stressful situations, Ohlin teases out uncomfortable, recognizable truths. To be certain there are repetitions—as there are in most collections—but these memes are obscured by Ohlin’s steady command of plot and language. A couple desperate for a child destroys and rediscovers their relationship; a man is forced to reconnect with his teenaged son; a stepmother has a precognitive experience that saves a child—these high-concept distillations fail to capture Ohlin's persuasive verve, but I think they get the idea across: these are stories about the unexpected ways that people, and our relationships, can suddenly shift and evolve without warning.

Unfortunately all good things must end, and in Signs and Wonders the endings are the problem. It’s hard to expand on this criticism without including some spoilers, but I’ll try. In one story a woman watches her second marriage unexpectedly implode, and dies; we’re only left to guess how, or even if, her death affects the other characters; an unlikely relationship is born, and ends silently. Two other pieces revolve around coma patients and the people that care for them; both stories end with weak-tea codas. I wish I could say these were the exceptions, but they’re not.

While her emotional intelligence is admirable, and her knack for surprise enviable, Ohlin’s apparently capacity for the pitch-perfect ending left the bulk of these skits feeling hollow, as though they were questionably--if admirably--connected bits.

The Book Rat Letter Grade: C

From Eugenia:

Last week, you read some (unintentionally) mediocre literary fiction. This week, you’ll be reading Dirt, the third book from David Vann, whom the Economist calls “a man to watch carefully.” (Why do we need to watch him so carefully? Is he going to shoot people from the top of a clock tower?) I chose this book on the basis of back-cover blurbs, one that called his last book “disturbing” (NPR), “darker…than the daylight world (NYT) and “full of our darkest currents.” Literary horror, if it works, is super fun.

So tune in next week Book Rat fans, and we'll see if Eugenia has managed to pick a winner!