Emporium: Stories

I’m guessing that most readers will be coming to Emporium having enjoyed Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Orphan Master’s Son. Truly that was a magnificent novel.And Emporium starts well – a story about a teenage Police Sniper in a dystopian world that is possibly set in contemporary times. Our hero talks to us as though he is in a TV fly-on-the-wall documentary, telling us about the ins and outs of his job, revealing himself as he does so. We find a boy who has a black and white sense of justice, who has never really questioned the moral arguments that were presented to him when he took the job. He experiences teenage angst, especially with girls, and lacks the social skills to express his romantic feelings. However, if truth be told, the story is over-long and gets a bit repetitive. Plus, I’m not sure I ever quite believed in the character.Next up, we have a former policeman who gave up the force to save his son from playground taunts. He is a security guard at a zoo who has a sideline in euthanasing the surplus animals. He narrates to us as though he were in a TV fly-on-the-wall documentary, telling us the ins and outs of his job, revealing himself as he does so. However, if truth be told, the story is over-long and gets a bit repetitive. Plus, I’m not sure I ever quite believed in the character.Then we have a young chap driving a bus for a cancer charity, taking dying women on day trips. The charity was started by his mother. He has a bit of sexual frisson with his women. He narrates to us as though he were in a TV fly-on-the-wall documentary, telling us the ins and outs of his job, revealing himself as he does so. However, if truth be told, the story is over-long and gets a bit repetitive. Plus, I’m not sure I ever quite believed in the character.Do you see how irritating repetition can be? I’ve just done it three times. Adam Johnson does it several times in each story, and story after story is the same. I put up with five of them (there are nine in the book), and just the first paragraph of the sixth story told me it was more of the same. None of the stories tie up, they just meander aimlessly into psychobabble that aims to make profound observations about our own lives. Every single story has a slightly surreal take on a securocratic dystopia that might make the reader question our own governments’ current fascination with restricting freedoms in order to defeat terror. But after the first story or two, the point has been made.In the end, I gave up. Typically I give up one book every two years. In the same timeframe, I would finish over a hundred. Welcome, Adam Johnson, to by lowest percentile.

As many readers will already know from The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson is a Wizard. Period. He may write the sharpest, most magical sentences of any American writing today. He creates mad, quasi-futuristic dystopias and renders them plausibly, in detail. He seems an omnivorous sponge as well as an indefatigable researcher: no one could carry as much arcane knowledge - erecting and mortaring in a wall, police sniping MO, the technology of Kevlar vests, culling the collection at the local zoo, airplane pilot checkout and flight routines, and much more - swirling around in his head. Strange, widely varied stories but with many common threads - loneliness, an essential humanity, surreal implausible premises made plausible, guns, either used or hanging on a Chekov wall, orange peels and their very light weight when dried - all good. And then Johnson develops his tales, luring a reader in often through sheer strangenesss. (The sublime often has an element of strangeness about it, doesn't it?)One consistency that comes through loud and clear in a story collection but would imperceptible had you read each of these over a period of years in various literary periodicals is that the narrator of every story has essentially the same voice, Johnson's own elegant, observant one, be that narrator a horny teenager, a grounded pilot, a sniper, a physicist, a bricklayer, an office clerk, whatever. Is this a flaw? I compare Johnson to, say, literary shapeshifter David Mitchell, who gives unique voices, phrasing, idiosyncrasies to his unusual characters. But this is Johnson's first collection, and his own voice - uniquely powerful, uncommonly inventive, dryly funny, humor that pops up, almost invariably by surpise, in odd places and circumstances, a sad yet tenderly resigned sensibility - is captivating. Moreover, all but one of these stories resists closure: think of a typical New Yorker story, whose conventional critics - particularly in the 1970s-1980s - made the complaint that they read as through the concluding paragraph had been struck out. But Johnson never panders. He challenges his readers to think, as would a strong contemporary poet. The last paragraph may be for the reader to write.Add that's how Johnson's story structure and style work for me: very like poetry, and not only because his sentences are poetically beautiful. The stories make me pause throughout, and then at their conclusion, to think, relatively hard, with pages flipped back to and reread, about what I just experienced. This is apart from an odd sense of dislocation, but in a place with many familiar elements and motives. I could not go from one story directly to the next. I read the book over a period of some two weeks and found, for the most part, each story to be vaguely unsettling, and something I had to ponder, to satisfying, rewarding effect (There is one exception, "The Canadanaut," the only tale that comes to a conventional close and that is only unsettling until you grasp Johnson's project. Readers with a youthful addiction to Tom Swift, Jr. books will understand.)In any event, I'm most definitely a fan and believe, very emphatically, that Adam Johnson is a great voice in American fiction who should be read by anyone who loves great, imaginative writing.

This involving family memoir will particularly appeal to those who eat their breakfast with fingers smudged by printer’s ink from an actual physical newspaper.After a lifetime writing for newspapers, I can’t decide if the drawbacks of the hard-boiled lifestyle outweigh the benefits of getting closer to the truth of things. In “After Visiting Friends” Michael Hainey approaches this conundrum by investigating the mysterious death of his journalist father decades earlier. Fearing what he might discover, he delays his inquiry until he is about the same age, 35, as his father was when he died “after visiting friends,” according to his obituary in the Chicago papers where he worked as a chief copy editor (slotman). Digging after the lapse of so many years to find out what really happened, Hainey goes through his family memories, resurrecting such long-distant characters as his quirky grandmother and reconnecting in a more intimate way with his mother. Hainey loved his father, whom he lost while in grade school, and he learns why so many others also loved him, and why they shielded his family from the details of his death.

I'm not normally a reader of stories. I prefer to sink my teeth into a full-length novel. I'd tackle WAR AND PEACE again before picking up almost any collection of stories. The failing is mine, I'm sure, but there it is. Obviously, I made an exception. I can now say with some satisfaction that I have read every book Adam Johnson has published, and in reverse order to boot. THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON (my best read of the year so far) led me to his first novel, PARASITES LIKE US (which was offbeat and provided many moments of pleasure, but did not reach the heights of his second novel), which in turn sent me in search of this collection of stories, his first book. Sure, it's only three books so far, but I hope "so far" means there will be more to come, because although this one is not the book of his that I will recommend to people, Johnson is a major talent. It's a sign of his skill that even when I wasn't particularly enjoying a story, I still appreciated the ease, clarity, and depth of the writing. Whatever the story is about, whether it's a teenage police sniper, a space race with disastrous consequences, or adolescents navigating the borderlands between id and a frequently dysfunctional super-ego, Johnson manages to plumb deeper truths of the human soul than the quirky storylines might suggest. The stories in this collection will not be to everyone's liking, and not all of them were to my liking, but man, this guy can write. So 3 stars for the stories themselves, but 5 stars for the writing. It works out to 4 stars, which seems about right. I want his next novel. Now.

Well-written debut collection by Adam Johnson. Had not read any of his books before, but on the basis of a good review I ordered it.The stories are a bit longer than average (10 stories, 246 pages), but well-paced and written.A couple of the story lines seem to have similar "details" maybe reflecting autobiographical issues, but overall quite good.Pity it's not on kindle.I've ordered two of his other works (for my Kindle)

Item received as expected

Interesting, quirky stories from an author who has gone on to win a Pulitzer Prize. His recent novel about North Korea sounds fascinating.

Great stories by a master.

Not as good as I expected.

I read a story and started another only to decide not to go on. Adam Johnson is really a talented author but this work did not appeal to me.

I so much looked forward to this book, having just completed the Orphan Master's book. That one was great. Here I read the first story and couldn't see the point of it. Never moved on to the other stories. Maybe some day I will.

If you read just one of these it may seem fresh and quirky, but the same immature first-person narrator coping with various gimmickry wearied me by the third piece. The rest is just more of the same. Merely "clever" at best.