New Short Fiction, Including a National Book Foundation Honoree

HAPPY LIKE THIS
By Ashley Wurzbacher
209 pp. University of Iowa. Paper, $17.

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If there’s one truth that “Happy Like This” punches at, it’s that we’re all lab rats and life is a cage. The first story is about young women living in a college dorm for students with factitious disorders — they are referred to not by name, but by number — who become subjects of a sociological thesis. Life as Wurzbacher paints it feels less like the pursuit of happiness than the slow accumulation of random, pointless indignities.

These indignities rain down harder on some characters than others. One of the best stories is about a lonely woman who impersonates her happily engaged friend in an unusual pen-pal correspondence. Her ostensible excuse: The friend is a recovering drug addict. But it’s obvious the narrator is motivated not by a desire to help, but to be heard — she wonders of herself, “Was she nothing without someone to take care of?” Wurzbacher’s characters define themselves in relation to others, but they can’t seem to do it without making a mess.

Taking its title from “To the Lighthouse,” “Happy Like This” wrestles with the idea that a central struggle of humanity is to fit in while also standing out — to be normal, but not ordinary. This theme can be found on every page, though I wouldn’t say any two stories are alike. Wurzbacher, a debut author who was named as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honorees this year, deploys her encyclopedic command of various ideas, regions, professions and lexicons with the authority of seasoned masters like Adam Johnson. This is a writer at the top of her game; but hopefully she’s only just getting started.

LAST OF HER NAME
By Mimi Lok
221 pp. Kaya. Paper, $16.95.

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The centerpiece of “Last of Her Name” has to be the final story, “The Woman in the Closet,” a novella about an elderly homeless woman who takes up residence in a bachelor’s house, unbeknown to him. She lives in the back of a closet he rarely peruses, and comes out during the day to tidy for and eventually take care of him. “Granny Ng noticed that the young man often brought home takeout dinners or ate instant ramen in the evening,” Lok writes. “She wanted to cook for him, to encourage him to eat more, but the only feasible way of doing this was by using the cleaner as a cover.” For the bachelor, life is altered in ways he can feel but can’t quite put his finger on. He’s swept up in a current of change so gradual that he can’t even be sure it exists.

A lot of the stories in this collection are like that: The characters’ lives meander in directions not necessarily of their choosing, and they don’t even realize it until it’s already happened. A girl is sexually abused by a boy at school before she really understands what sex is. A man receives an email out of the blue from a woman he barely knows, which sets off an intimate, clandestine correspondence in the days leading up to his wedding. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re charting your own course, Lok might argue, just because you’re the one at the helm.

Lok has written the kind of understated book you catch yourself thinking about weeks after you finish it. Absorbing and deeply human, these characters — who either live in China or are of the Chinese diaspora — feel more like people you might’ve known than like fictitious renderings of Lok’s imagination. A pleasure to read and mull over for days.