Fortune Smiles

Starred review from June 22, 2015
How do you follow a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel? For Johnson (The Orphan Master’s Son), the answer is a story collection, and the tales within are hefty and memorable. Johnson goes deep (and long—there are only six pieces in this 300 pager) into unknown worlds. In the title story, two North Korean criminals adjust to post-defection life in South Korea; in “Nirvana,” a man deals with his wife’s illness by creating an app that lets people talk to the (fictional) recently assassinated president. Johnson lets us spend time with an East German prison commander whose former office is a tour stop in a “museum of torture”; a man coping with hurricanes Katrina and Rita and an array of personal problems; and, in “Dark Meadow,” the highlight of a very strong collection, a pedophile trying to behave himself in the face of a variety of temptations. What these very different stories have in common is their assurance: the environments Johnson creates, along with the often problematic choices their inhabitants make, are totally believable. Escaping back to North Korea by balloon? Sure. Going to AA meetings because they offer child care? Makes sense if your ex has just dumped a toddler on you in post-Rita Lake Charles. Often funny, even when they’re wrenchingly sad, the stories provide one of the truest satisfactions of reading: the opportunity to sink into worlds we otherwise would know little or nothing about, ones we might even cross the street to avoid.

March 1, 2015

After making his mark in 2012 with The Orphan Master's Son, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a New York Times best seller, Johnson returns with a large-scale short story collection. In the title piece, a woman with cancer becomes distraught as she contemplates her family living on without her. Elsewhere, a young man and his girlfriend scour post-Katrina New Orleans for the mother of his son, and a former Stasi agent reconsiders his past.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 15, 2015
A half-dozen sometimes Carver-esque yarns that find more-or-less ordinary people facing extraordinary challenges and somehow holding up. Tragedy is always close to the surface in Johnson's work-with tragicomic layerings, sometimes, but it's tragedy all the same. So it is with the opening story of the six here, "Nirvana," which takes its title from the Kurt Cobain-led rock band but shares a spirit with near-future films like Her and Gattaca. A software engineer, desperate to do right by his paralyzed wife, reanimates people from the past: "After the doctor left," the narrator says matter-of-factly, "I went into the garage and started making the president." It's science fiction of a kind but with an extra element of disspiritment: people exist, but we long for simulacra instead of them, "like she's forgotten that her arms don't work and there's no him to embrace." With more than a nod to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Orphan Master's Son (2012), Johnson calls on two North Korean defectors who, now in the South, haven't quite got their new world sussed out but are starting to get an inkling of how things work: "Christian talk, when said in a non-Christian way, scares these Southerners to death." Their lessons in fitting in include essentials such as "handling money, hygiene, being pleasant, avoiding crime," but it's clear that no amount of instruction will make them feel at home. Safe houses, hospices, hospitals: these are the theaters where many of the stories take place, all enshrouded in a certain incomprehension-but, to Johnson's great credit, seldom in hopelessness, for his characters are inclined to endure against the odds: "You turn the ignition and drop the van in gear, and you know this is no ordinary event." Bittersweet, elegant, full of hard-won wisdom: this is no ordinary book, either.

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