Hovering on the edge
The title story of Fortune Smiles, Adam Johnson’s stunning new collection, returns him to North Korea, the subject matter of his 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son. The difference, however, is that here it’s not the horrors of life in DPRK that take precedence, but the strange new world of “women in plastic surgery masks and little dogs wearing dresses” encountered by those who flee the Hermit Kingdom.
Like defectors, Johnson’s characters hover on the periphery. Their want to fit in is stymied by their inability or unwillingness to bend to the whims and accepted norms of the societies that hold them at bay. As is the case in “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine,” in which the former warden of a notorious East German prison refuses to admit, even in the face of mounting evidence, his complicity in the torture of inmates under his care.
The emotional depth of these stories is startling. From the desperate attempts of a wayward young father in “Hurricanes Anonymous” to remake his life in postKatrina New Orleans to the harrowing — and remarkably brave — “Dark Meadows” that chronicles the struggle of a man, sexually abused as a child, to understand and suppress his pedophilic urges. Johnson imbues his characters with a humanity that is shattering.
But the most affecting stories in this collection are those that are more obviously autobiographical. “Nirvana,” winner of the prestigious Sunday Times Short Story Award, follows a data-programmer husband dealing with his chronically ill wife by seeking advice from a computer-generated hologram of the recently assassinated president.
Johnson is a writer of uncanny insight and compassion and Fortune Smiles is a wise, poignant and important book. It should not be missed. Stephen Finucan is a novelist and short story writer. He lives in Toronto.