After his 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson's highly anticipated follow-up is the wildly diverse and stiflingly intense short story collection Fortune Smiles. The title is baldly ironic: not a single protagonist in the six long stories that make up the collection is living an enviable life. Two stories--"Nirvana" and "Interesting Facts"--depict the difficulty of maintaining relationships in the face of debilitating illness. "Hurricanes Anonymous" covers the fallout from the one-two punch of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in Louisiana. "Dark Meadows" offers a brutal deep-dive into the psychology of a pedophile. And, finally, "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" and "Fortune Smiles" both return to the theme of totalitarian regimes, and the psychological wreckage they leave behind, so skillfully explored in Johnson's previous novel.
Fortune Smiles is no laugh-riot, but thankfully, Johnson peppers his stories with emotional release valves in the form of pitch-black humor and the same slightly absurdist streak that helped to leaven The Orphan Master's Son. In "Nirvana," a programmer creates a virtual simulacrum of a dead president to give him advice. "Fortune Smiles" features a surprisingly poignant scene where a North Korean defector attempts to airlift himself back over the DMZ by attaching balloons to a plastic chair. Johnson applies a familiar theme--institutional cruelty transmuting itself into absurdity (see: Kafka, anything Russian)--to life itself, implying that the human experience is just another exercise in institutional cruelty. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books