I’m really having a moment with the short story form! Reading Heads of the Colored People and Interpreter of Maladies back-to-back made me appreciate the depth and power possible when packed into the short story format. From the variety and range of these stories, to the vividness of the characters, to the strangeness and familiarity of their lives, to the humor and irony paired with social commentary—this collection achieves so much. It hit me hard as I read, and it will linger.
SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT
The prose gripped me immediately; goofy, dense, sharply observed. The first short story launches us into the mind and lived experience of a young Black man cosplaying as Tamaki Suoh, heading into the LA Convention Center. The voice—self-effacing, self-congratulatory, populated with nerd cultural refeprences—was so perfectly, humorously Riley. Pages later, Riley was dead. His death is told through the point of view of a local artist, Kevan, who saw the grainy cellphone footage of the police altercation outside the convention center. The quietness of this death, the “one more tragedy on social media” way that it creeps into this story, undercuts the humor, forcing a new kind of absurdity on the reader—the absurdity that death can and does just happen like this, the absurdity of young Black men struck down over and over again in America and nothing changes, nothing changes.
The George Saunders quote on the front of my copy of the book is fitting: “Vivid, fast, way-smart, and verbally inventive.” I can see the parallel between George Saunders’s work and Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s use of irony, overstatement, biting commentary on what is most stupidest and selfish in our communities and in our human natures. Like Saunders, Thompson-Spires’s caustic wit calls out individuals who are hypocritical and yet writes from a position of tremendous empathy for the systematically oppressed. I enjoy irony, and the many places of humor in this book, yet my sister wasn’t as much of a fan in our family book club discussion. She cited the places where real violence happens, from the death of the Facebook-addicted Jilly to the harm done to the child growing up with her cult-included (currently Fruitarian) mother. Both these examples existed for me in an absurd framework. Jilly’s death—after she has repeatedly contemplated committing suicide for attention—is an ironic fulfillment of what she thought that she wanted. Fruitarian Lisbeth is constantly undercut in her efforts by her husband Ryan who takes their daughter Inedia to Walmart and Mcdonald’s during the story. Lisbeth is a poignant commentary on reality TV, what makes it onto reality TV, the carcrash-like horrors of a human being’s choices…what makes other humans so fascinated with the horrifying? The extreme? The heart of this story is social commentary, but it felt to me like a key part of this commentary was the reader reacting with exasperated laughter to both these women’s circumstances. There is something deeply relatable about them both. But, irony can also seem unkind. This is the challenge of irony and it will land differently for different readers. Do we position ourselves close to Jilly and Lisbeth? See in their antics the echoes of ourselves? Or do we position ourselves distantly and hold judgment…or pity? Do we stand both close and far at the same time, both pitying and confused about the moments of dark humor in these stories? Irony is a tricky genre.
Strikingly, the first and final stories were the places where real pain took me fully out of the framework of absurdity and humor. The deaths of Riley and Brother Man knocked the wind out of me. And the final short story, “Wash Clean the Bones,” operates in a tonally different register than the rest of the book. The story of Alma, a wedding singer struggling with depression as she sings over and over at the funerals of young Black boys, arrives at such a point of despair about the mentally overlapping loss of her brother and the birth of her son that she comes terrifyingly close to ending her son’s life. What is the point, her story cries, if this is the world in which her young Black son will grow up? This affirmation at the end of this collection that all Alma can do is keep living, keep doing the thing immediately in front of her, is a point of gravitas and depth reached through direct narration. More often, this collection achieves introspection and commentary through situational humor, through levity that exposes the dark underbelly of exploitation, power dynamics, gender dynamics, and the bizarre distortions Capitalism works on all our brains.
Many of the stories in this collection center the lives of affluent, upper-middle class Black Americans. I found this really rewarding and important to read. Have I read fiction before that deals with that particular lived experience? So often, Black literature in America has centered—both through the choices of authors and the publishing industry—on tragedy and poverty. Instead, in these stories, girls struggle with being one of two black kids in their grade at their private school or in their hot yoga class at the gym. Fatima navigates having a white boy from her prep school and staying friends with Violet, an albino Black girl who attends public school and is infused in Black culture in a way that is foreign to Fatima. Fatima studies Black culture with her teacher Violet, learning to affect expressions and fashions that were not intuitive to her. She chooses to keep her world separate, for as long as she possibly can, sensing the impossibility of reconciling her two worlds. Thompson-Spires comments on the feelings of “Black exceptionalism,” the harms of tokenism, and the ways minorities are often pitted against each in white-dominanted spaces. Characteristically, she uses humor to do this. One of the most memorable stories in this collection is an epistolary tale told through notes two Black mothers keep exchanging stuffed into their children’s backpacks. Despite, or because of, being the only Black girls in their grade at their fancy private school, the daughters, Christina and Fatima, despise each other. And, by extension, their mothers’ conflict escalates. These two highly-educated women, who sign off their letters with their credentials (one a therapist, one a college professor), are at each others’ throats until—in facing the white education institution that connects them—they find themselves united at the end, seemingly bonding deeply once they meet each other in person. This pivot is funny, fun, and light, but it reveals the foundational challenges beneath it, the frustrations of highly-segregated educational spaces that are still spaced by the long legacies of inequality in America: Jim Crow laws, redlining, and busing routes and policies.
The liveliness of this collection of stories will stay with me. The range of characters will hang around in my brain for a very long time. I’ll think of the complexity of Raina, navigating her enjoyment with her online popularity as an ASMR artist and her confusion at the sexualization she experiences in this space. In brilliant fashion, this short story reveals how a young woman making online content, particularly a young Black woman, cannot escape the male gaze that objectifies her. At the same time, this kind of attention can be thrilling. Without fully understanding it, Raina plays into this at times, leaving cuts in the videos that show off her cleavage. She does this while also deeply fearing the bullying of a boy at her school, Kevin, and his friends. She senses the real threat these white boys pose to her bodily safety and security. Yet, she doesn’t seem to sense the threat of her “older” boyfriend Dom who lives across the country and who found her through these videos. Her primary target, in the moments she chooses to display her body in the videos, is her own mother, and the reaction she knows she will get from a mother who tries to police her behavior. Of course her mother is right to be afraid for her daughter. Yet, in the way of many teachers, Raina wants to push at a boundary she senses. Her mother Carmen shuts her down, scolds her, and doesn’t explain things to her. It’s so, so hard to be a parent of a teen. Raina’s seemingly simple and innocuous videos become a spider web of complexity, allowing this story to point out the overlapping regions of sexism, racism, teenage self-exploration, agency, developing sense of self, parenting, and how online media only heightens and charges all these existing tensions.
The structure of this collection cleverly interweaves these narratives; frequently, the protagonist of a particular story appeared as a side character in the previous story. This waterfall effect adds layers and textures: Violet’s teenage boyfriend Mike grew up into the gay reality TV show producer in Lisbeth’s tale, while the mothers Lucinda and Monica become friends, Fatima is still processing the harm of Christina’s bullying decades later. Marjorie’s story will also stay with me. This was one of the stories on the more serious end of the spectrum, for me. While there are moments of humor and levity here, Marjorie’s story is primarily an empathetic insight into the mind of a woman struggling with anger management, stress, depression, and anxiety. She clearly desires connection with others, yet she also repeatedly does the very things that sabotage connection and push other people away: she sleeps with her foster sister’s husband for years, she recognizes her friend Jessica pulling away because of her negativity yet can’t seem to stop her flow of negative words and emotions. The arc of this story is sad, as we see her finally give into her anger and frustration in an outburst at the DMV (of course it’s at the DMV! Who among us hasn’t been at our worst at the DMV? Which is a layer of humor here). There is also hope here. We see Marjorie in therapy working with a woman who clearly does not judge her. We see that, while she has lost her connection with her foster sister, she has also ended her relationship with a man who she was entrenched with for years as a mistress.
The paired stories of the woman fixated on men missing limbs and the story of one of these men, Brian, who has switched his grad program because of his ongoing lawsuit with her, will also stay with me. “This Todd” is a masterful “villain point of view” short story. Kim is more clearly problematic than some of the other complex narrators who center these stories yet, contained in her point of view, we need to sort this out for ourselves, arriving at the same conclusion as Brian and her friend Chelsea that her fixation with dating handicapped men is both fetishizing and tied to her need to be in control. The haunting ending (she sleeps in the bed with the fake legs she made for Todd) feels like a thrilling moment from a modern Edgar Allen Poe. The variety offered by this short story complexifies some of the others (where are we supposed to empathize with these narrators? How much empathy are we supposed to feel?) but I appreciated how this story, and the collection as a whole, resisted easy answers. Brian’s story “A Conversation About Bread” is the most “meta-commentary” of this collection, directly talking about anthropologists studying cultures external to themselves and focusing on a conversation between Black men about who is entitled to tell what kind of story and how to tell it. The opportunity to comment on registers in narrative and point of view doesn’t arrive at any particular conclusion, I felt, other than how difficult it is to do this well, how common it is to think from within our framework and not be able to break out of that. I appreciated that this collection wanted to ask us to pay attention to the point of view as we engaged with these stories, layering in even more complexity about the act of storytelling itself. Like the title of this collection, which draws its name from a set of sketches of Black people done in the 19th Century, these stories seek range, to show the variety of lived Black experiences, to resist reduction and simplification, to present range, to observe and depict, to criticize and question, to empathize and understand.