Fortune Smiles: Stories

I read Johnson's short story, Nirvana, through Penguin Random House's Season of Stories promotion. I'd already added Fortune Smiles to my ever lengthening TBR list but Johnson's name didn't click for me when I received the first part of this short story in my email. I'm glad to see that Nirvana is a part of this collection, however. It's become a solid reason to move this higher up my list.

What do weed, a presidential persona, and Nirvana lyrics have in common? Nine months after Charlotte's Guillain-Barre syndrome diagnosis, they've become liferafts for a husband and wife that are struggling to cope with what their normal currently is and what it might become. In Nirvana, Johnson throws the reader into the midst of this tensely drawn show more dynamic set in the near-future tech Eden of Palo Alto. Whether other people understand it or not, whether you fully understand it or not, anything can look like a liferaft when you're drowning. When you're lucky enough to find something that works, all you know is to not let go.

I think Johnson was able to flesh out the desperation of adjusting to a painful situation and new normal very well in Nirvana. There were a couple tech bits that felt odd to me. Most of which were eventually resolved to some degree, the one part that wasn't resolved still remained interesting. But the thing that sold me on this particular story and what has me eager to read more is that the struggle to cope felt realistic. This definitely isn't a peppy, feel-good short. It doesn't offer snappy one-liners that highlight a sense of empowered and inspired zen in the face of struggle. It meets these characters where they are and it acknowledges that there's a whole hell of a lot that sucks about where they are right then. Johnson acknowledges how coping takes different forms for everyone and, in the end, it really doesn't matter whether we get what works for someone else. What matters is that we care enough about the people in our lives to respect what works for them. To do whatever we might be able to in order to support that person and reach out to them where they're at instead of where we think they should be.

Peppy fluff bits can be pretty easy to dash off and even easier to consume. Spotlighting the realities of this kind of situation to the degree Johnson has been able examples a range of empathy that feels very enticing. I'll definitely be picking up this book to read more of Johnson's work. show less

In the very near future, a tech professional creates a holographic image of the recently assassinated president to help cope with his wife’s debilitating illness. In the aftermath of two hurricanes, a Louisiana man searches for his former girlfriend, who has abandoned him with their young child. A woman dying of cancer tries to make sense of her life and how her family is moving on. The former warden of an East German political prison is forced to come to grips with the personal costs of the atrocities committed under his watch. A pedophile, who was himself abused as a child, struggles with the effort to control and change his nature. Two defectors from the tyranny of North Korea attempt to adjust to their new lives of freedom, with show more very different results.

Do those sound like the themes for a light-hearted, uplifting collection of stories? In fact, the ironically titled Fortune Smiles is anything but cheerful. What these tales are, however, is far more impressive: insightful, darkly humorous, occasionally brilliant, and deeply affecting. While the settings and time frames differ in each, these are all stories that deal with human pain—of loss, of regret, of denial, of fear. Throughout the volume, Adam Johnson does a masterful job of engaging the reader with powerful, direct language as well as dialogue that always feels real. This was my first exposure to this talented writer and I was very impressed, to say the least.

All of the stories are strong in their own way, but I would have to say that “Interesting Facts” made the biggest impression on me. I suspect that that story was clearly the most personal to the author: A woman suffering through the advanced stages of breast cancer must reconcile her illness with own failed literary career in the light of the success and adulation that her husband—who has recently published an acclaimed novel set in North Korea—is enjoying. On the other hand, “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine,” which is told from the perspective of the Stasi prison administrator, was perhaps the only story that fell a little short of mark set by the rest. While the concept of how destructive a man’s self-delusion can be on his family was poignantly rendered, the characterization seemed a little one-dimensional to be fully plausible.

There is one aspect of the book that I am still trying to work out. In “Interesting Facts,” the husband steals an idea for a character—a pedophile named Mr. Roses—from his wife and later publishes a story of his own called “Dark Meadow.” Of course, Fortune Smiles contains this very story toward the end of the collection. While I am not averse to this sort of post-modern trickery, it did present a dilemma. I read the book from front to back over a few days, just as one might read a novel. However, this approach created more of a connection between the stories than was probably warranted, or maybe even intended. In retrospect, I think I would have been better served treating every tale as a one-off experience and considering each in isolation from the others. Still, this is a minor quibble for what was really a very satisfying reading experience. This is a book that definitely merits wide-spread attention as well as the accolades it has garnered. show less

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son offers up some outstanding short stories of people on the edge of tragedy. In Fortune Smiles: Stories, Adam Johnson’s six stories do not share much in the way of settings, but the tone is always right on the lip of heartbreak, a sort of last kiss with hope.

There’s a former Stasi officer who can’t forget his past when pieces of it are being delivered to his doorstep (“George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine”). Of course, he doesn’t really think he did anything wrong, which leads us to the question of what in the world do we do with true believers?

And in a return in tone if not content to The Orphan Master’s Son, in the title story a pair of North Korean defectors show more are having a really hard time adjusting to life in the south–and it’s even harder for the guy who never meant to defect in the first place.

And, in “Interesting Facts,” one of Johnson’s most remarkable stories, a woman struggles with the effect her cancer is having on both her and her family. Then—perhaps just because he can—Johnson moves onto “Dark Eden,” a story that takes its premise from a story mentioned in passing in “Interesting Facts.” This one is particularly hard to take: It’s a first-person account of a pedophile who really, really doesn’t want to hurt anyone.

Running through the stories is a weird sort of humor, the kind that makes a broken heart only slightly less unbearable; it’s easy to see why Fortune Smiles has already been long-listed for the National Book Award.

(Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com) show less

( I haven't received this book from the August "Early Reviewers" batch. I was able to check it out of my public library, thank god.) Adam Johnson is now firmly ensconced in my 'top five contemporary authors' list. The Orphan Master was a fantastic novel (and a Pulitzer winner) and now I'm here to sing the praises of his superb short stories in 'Fortune Smiles'. This book received the 2015 National Book Award for fiction, an especially big deal for a short story collection. It's hoped that this kind of hoopla will help bring more and more readers to his writing.

Johnson is an intelligent, graceful, dark, and gorgeous writer. He's willing to go to places that are funny, scary, futuristic, violent, or elegant, and it works due to his show more skillful use of language and imagination. He has been quoted as saying that he believes writers must often place themselves entirely outside of their own experience to gain a more truthful outcome. Storytelling contributed to his own self-awareness and "the distance of fiction" allowed him "to get to know the stranger of myself." Yep, there is some strange stuff but it is fascinating.

Of these six stories, several stood out for me and won't be forgotten anytime soon. "Nirvana," is about a computer programmer whose wife who suffers from a terrible paralyzing disease. She escapes into Kurt Cobain's music and he (and other people) escape by conversing with a hologram of an assassinated American president. "Dark Meadows" is an insanely well-written, dark story about a computer hacker/repairman with pedophilic tendencies. "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine," is about a former East German prison warden who remembers things in his own unique way. "Fortune Smiles" is about two North Koreans who have defected to the south in body but not in mind.

Johnson is the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford. Lucky students! He teaches courses in fiction and creative nonfiction and he founded the Stanford Graphic Novel Project. The project's goal is getting students "to tell real-world stories and give voice to those who might otherwise go unheard in the hopes of doing good, seeking justice and bringing about change." Good news for the future of writing. And I, for one, am looking forward to the next thing that Adam Johnson does and continue to be grateful for the true power of fiction. show less

Ok, from a literary standpoint, I get why this is a National Book Award winner... but wow. Never have I felt so beat up after reading a book of short stories. Each one of these pulls you into the life of an incredibly hard and tragic situation: a husband who's wife is in a coma, a dad who's toddler child was dumped in his UPS truck when the custodian mom is incarcerated, a mom dying of breast cancer, the administrator of WWII's Hohenschonhausen prison facing contemporary attitudes toward his life's work, an abused boy turned child-pornographer trying to self-rehab, and an accidental defector from North Korea struggling with life in Seoul. The writing and research behind each of these stories is incredibly impressive to have created such show more absorbing and realistic environments, but now I need to move on to something much lighter! show less

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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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.

WHAT'S FORTUNE SMILES ABOUT?
This is a collection of short stories—longer than most short stories I end up talking about here, but not novella length by any means. I'm not remotely sure how to describe the book or the themes as a whole...I show more guess I could steal that line from Semisonic, "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." These stories occupy the overlap of the new beginning and the end of the other beginnings.

NIRVANA
Loss. Personal Grief. Dealing with disease, AI, and national grief. It was funny and gut-wrenching at the same time. I didn't expect effective and affecting speculative fiction to start this collection (I honestly didn't know what to expect, but definitely not that), but it was a dynamite start and raised my expectations for the rest.

HURRICANES ANONYMOUS
This is not your typical post-natural disaster story. I don't know what to say beyond that. I mean, I guess you could say there are somethings that are worse than the devastation a hurricane leaves in its wake—and we see at least one example of it here.

Other than to note the above quotation, the only thing I wrote about this was "I really don't know what to think of it, but I'm glad I read it." That kind of applies to the collection as a whole, but it really describes my reaction to this story.

INTERESTING FACTS
This was hard to read—the emotions are so raw. This story is about the collapse of a marriage and the damage cancer wreaks—on the lives of the person with it and those around them.

GEORGE ORWELL WAS A FRIEND OF MINE
Years after the fall of the Berlin Wall—and everything that went with that—we spend some time watching the former Warden of a Stasi prison. His wife has left him, his adult daughter is having questions about him, and he's still trying to adjust to the world he finds himself in and what the world thinks of his former career.

This was powerful stuff. I don't know what else to say—for the longest time, you find yourself pulling for a guy you'd typically think was a monster (thankfully, while never thinking he was a stand-up guy). And then...well, maybe your perspective shifts a bit.

DARKNESS FALLS
I could not finish this one—I'm willing to believe that there's a decent ending to this, and there was a compelling reason to deal with this amount of darkness. But, I just couldn't finish it because of the subject matter.

FORTUNE SMILES
This story is about a couple of North Korean men who defected to the South (one willingly, the other possibly less-so). Culture shock isn't the right way to describe what they're going through. I hope this doesn't come across as dismissive—but it's almost like Brooks Hatlen's time after being paroled in The Shawshank Redemption, that's the quickest way I have to describe their adjustment.

This story is just stunningly good, and it makes sense that the collection is named for it.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT FORTUNE SMILES?
This wasn't a collection I could sit down and read back-to-back stories in. Frequently I had to take a day or more off between them (and sometimes I ended up taking more for other reasons)—Allyson Johnson's recent WWW Wednesday comments* indicate that I'm not the only one who reacts this way.

* I'm expecting her to tell me how wrong I am about "Darkness Falls," incidentally.

The stories, the points of view, the characters, circumstances, etc., etc., etc. are so varied from story to story that it's hard to consider them as a collection. But here's a few takeaways:

Adam Johnson can write. Seriously great stuff.
Adam Johnson will make you think. Particularly about things you haven't spent (much?) time on before or actively try to stay away from.
Adam Johnson will make you feel all sorts of things that you didn't expect.
Adam Johnson will not take a story where you expect or necessarily want him to. Until it's over and you'll regret your earlier dissension.
Did I mention that this man can write?

I don't know what else to say beyond that I'm glad Allyson put this on my radar, and I'm definitely recommending 5/6 of this to you all. show less

Everyone of the stories is this collection is quirky, unique and disturbing. There are little bits of hope sprinkled throughout, but mostly things are grim. (Probably best to read this book when you have some emotional reserves, and aren't going to fall into despair at the state of humanity.)

So, I was going to read this slowly, and spread the stories out over the month. But every time my eyes fell on the first sentence, I had to keep reading until the end. It's genius.