There is someone here every reader will know: teenagers struggling to define themselves in worlds that have already defined them, lovers who are brought together by every type of force except love, dysfunctional families functioning. Conell invites us into our own world with new eyes that capture\u00a0the extraordinary details of the everyday and experience\u00a0the extraordinary as merely mundane, like the young woman prostituted by her doctor-lover as part of his experimental \u201ctreatment\u201d for homosexuality. She observes that the doctor\u2019s \u201ctears were large and shiny and reminded me of glistening fat\u201d when unsurprisingly, the web of relationships and experiments go\u00a0woefully wrong.<\/p>\n
\u201cShort story\u201d is a deceptive label for these works, as they contain multitudes: the stories frequently layer one atop another multiple perspectives and multiple decades. Conell traces shame, apathy, pleasure, loneliness, the slow erosion of capitalism on the psyche, delight, disappointment, tenderness, uncertainty, and the complex lattice of relationships that make up our lives. After one character’s suicide attempt, Conell\u00a0describes the walls of a psychiatric hospital as \u201cpainted a pastel pinkish shade seen primarily in Easter egg dye and women\u2019s cotton underwear\u201d and then high school girls who agree their dead peers were stupid \u201cas if \u2018stupid\u2019 was the right answer to the question of death, of grief.\u201d<\/p>\n
Conell\u2019s stories are elbow-patch-professor intelligent but never pretentious. They are nerdy in the best way, integrating complex theoretical concepts and hyper-specific science into the ordinary parts of these characters lives, things as normal as doing homework or commuting. The stories are also built around these nerdy obsessions: the crystallographer tracing the patterns in her life and her identical twin sister\u2019s, the absurdity of a pretentious grandchild and a mid-century science-fiction movie bringing out the monstrosity of Ruth\u2019s early career at an atomic bomb facility, cow gastrology, and conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n
Like many people\u2019s experiences, the stories live not-quite in the genre of science fiction and magical realism but in the realm of curiosities, the unexplainable, and the crackling space between magic and science\u2014there\u2019s Cooper\u2019s unlikely alliance with Frank, the ghost of an apartment\u2019s previous tenant, and a myth come to life when turtles send Mallory signs of her missing uncle. Then there\u2019s the unsettling return of Joan\u2019s invisible childhood playmate at her dying mother\u2019s hospital.<\/p>\n
Conell hits the economic nerve of our time; critiquing the subtle and not-not-so-subtle ways that financial insecurities poison society. We laugh at the men who make money off tourists as Elmo in Times Square, but see how enticing such an identity change could be for a man who lost his job in the recession. One of Carly\u2019s many teenage mistakes in \u201cFour Stomachs\u201d is coming home from a failed attempt at college with \u201ca mess of student loans.\u201d In\u201cThe Sextrology Women\u201d a boyfriend tries to bridge the socioeconomic gap: \u201cChloe\u2019s dad was in finance. Aaron\u2019s dad was in mold.\u201d He fails.<\/p>\n
While not a bleak book, Conell isn\u2019t offering a varnished glorification of the past or a saccharine hope for the future. These stories ask the reader to look closely at our present moment, to uncover its wonders and marvels. These stories are a reflection rather than a solution.They\u2019ll do better than break your heart\u2014they\u2019ll shake it up and set the pieces cascading like snow in a globe, settling eventually in a familiar but different arrangement.<\/p>\n
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