Better Living Through Plastic Explosives
Single Story Taken From Better Living Through Plastic Explosives
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From an emerging master of short fiction and one of Canada's most distinctive voices, a collection of stories as heartbreaking as those of Lorrie Moore and as hilariously off-kilter as something out of McSweeney's.
In Better Living through Plastic Explosives, Zsuzsi Gartner delivers a powerful second dose of the lacerating satire that marked her acclaimed debut, All the Anxious Girls on Earth, but with even greater depth and darker humour. Whether she casts her eye on evolution and modern manhood when an upscale cul-de-sac is thrown into chaos after a redneck moves into the neighbourhood, international adoption, war photography, real estate, the movie industry, motivational speakers, or terrorism, Gartner filets the righteous and the ridiculous with dexterity in equal, glorious measure. These stories ruthlessly expose our most secret desires, and allow us to snort with laughter at the grotesque world we'd live in if we all got what we wanted.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the stories of Gartner's dexterous second collection (after All the Anxious Girls on Earth), set in or near Vancouver, Canada, the author turns her clever eye on a certain type of upper-class person: the food-snobbing, eco-obsessive, million-dollar-real-estate-negotiating, self-help-seeking yuppie. Two stories feature the collective voices of a suburban cul-de-sac's residents as they witness how new people change their behavior. In "Summer of the Flesh Eater," the presence of a crass, low-class, meat-loving man whose truck decays in the front yard pulls the entire town down a Darwinian rabbit hole. And the white parents of "The Adopted Chinese Daughters' Rebellion" impose archaic Chinese customs, such as foot-binding, on their young, adopted daughters. These stories exemplify one of Gartner's strengths: her fiction walks an ice pond's thin skim between sadness and satire. Both begin with a tug of depression, a foreshadowing lament, and then delve into the rigidity of people's "progressive" beliefs. The stories do not languish here, but rollick into the depths of dark humor and absurdity. Gartner's themes are topical but never preachy, and she accents the ambiguities found in black-and-white arguments. Gartner delights in a little DeLilloesque postmodern trickery, imbuing new life and meaning to the everyday. It's a sharp voice in this collection. Handle carefully.
