Book Report: Fortune Smiles

27. Adam Johnson, Fortune Smiles: Stories (2015) (10/2/18)

I took this National Book Award–winning collection of six longish stories slowly. Each one creates a world that is complex, sometimes very dark (none of these stories is light), with for the most part fully realized characters. Johnson's imagination is amazing: the situations he creates, the thoughts he explores, the feelings he plumbs.

First there is "Nirvana," about a man living with his bedridden wife who is losing hope of recovery. He relieves his stress by watching holograms of the recently assassinated American president, a technology that he transforms into something for his wife, who loves the music of Kurt Cobain. Seriously, where did that idea come from? Next up is "Hurricanes Anonymous," featuring a young man, Nonc, a UPS driver trying to navigate the aftermath of Katrina and Rita while juggling the surprise of his toddler son, who one day is left in his work truck without a note. "Interesting Facts" presents the thoughts of a woman dying of cancer, whose writer husband is appropriating her stories—as if she were already dead and forgotten. "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" is about a Stasi prison warden years after the fall of the Wall, a cruel man in deep denial. "Dark Meadow," about a child pornographer who himself suffered abuse as a boy ("I know there are those who are born. But what of those who are made? Do they also have a choice? Can they still choose?"), is the darkest, but also, perhaps, the richest of the stories. And finally there is "Fortune Smiles," about a pair of North Korean defectors in Seoul—harking back to Johnson's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Orphan Master's Son, a tour-de-force (so I understand) about that dark country.

Darkness seems to be the theme of Johnson's writing, but there is humor, connection, and meaning as well.

This is from "Hurricanes Anonymous":

Nonc opens his phone, finds a weak signal and scrolls to the doctor's number. He doesn't really know what he's going to say to the guy, but he calls. Just when it seems like no one's going to answer, the phone picks up, but no one's there. And then Nonc can hear the valve in his father's trach tube clicking. Nonc hears that thing in his sleep. The history of that sound, of its wet, wheezy rhythm, is like a country song, it's "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
 If that doctor's right, Nonc's dad is going to die for sure this time. But the truth is, it's just an event. Life's full of events—they occur and you adjust, you roll and move on. But at some point, like when your girlfriend Marnie tells you she's pregnant, you realize that some events are actually developments. You realize there's a big plan out there you know nothing about, and a development is a first step in that new direction. Somebody drops a kid in your lap—that's a development, you've just been clued in. Your ex‐old lady disappears—you can't shrug that off. It's a serious development. Sometimes things seem like big-time developments—you get your wages garnished, your old man takes your car when he leaves town, you get evicted, your possessions get seized—but in time you adjust, you find a new way and you realized they didn't throw you off course, they didn't change you. They were just events. The truth is, the hurricane didn't change Nonc's life one bit. Neither will the death of his father. The tricky part, Nonc has figured out, is telling the difference between the two.

Or this, from "Interesting Facts":

Maybe you've heard of an out-of-body experience. Well, standing in that hospital room, I had an in-the-body experience, a profound sensation that I was leaving the real world and entering that strange woman, just as her eyes lost focus and her lips went slack. Right away, I felt the morphine inside her, the way it traced everything with halos of neon-tetra light. I entered the dark tunnel of morphine time, where the past, the present and the future became simultaneously visible. I was a girl again, riding a yellow bicycle. I will soon be in Golden Gate Park, watching archers shoot arrows through the fog. I see that all week long, my parents have been visiting this woman and reading her my favorite Nancy Drew books. Their yellow colors fill my vision. The Hidden Staircase. The Whispering Status. The Clue in the Diary.
 You know that between-pulse pause when, for a fraction, your heart is stopped? I feel the resonating bass note of this nothingness. Vision is just a black vibration, and your mind is only that bottom-of-the-pool feeling when your air is spent. I suddenly see the insides of this woman's body, something cancer teaches you to do. Here is a lumpy chain of dye-blue lymph nodes, there are the endometrial tendrils of a thirsty tumor. Everywhere are the calcified Pop Rocks of scatter-growth. Your best friend, Kitty, silently appears. She took leave of this world from cancer twelve years earlier. She lifts a finger to her lips. Shh, she says. Then it really hits you that you're trapped inside a dying woman. You're being buried alive. Will be turns to is turns to was. You can no longer make out the Republican red of your mother's St. John jacket. You can no longer hear the tremors of your sister's breathing. Then there's nothing but the still, the gathering, surrounding still of this woman you're in.
 Then pop!—somehow, luckily, you make it out. You're free again, back in the land of Starbucks cups and pay-by-the-hour parking.

Yes. I'll be picking up The Orphan Master's Son soon. This guy can write.