What If We Were Somewhere Else
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
What If We Were Somewhere Else is the question everyone asks in these linked stories as they try to figure out how to move on from job losses, broken relationships, and fractured families. Following the employees of a nameless corporation and their loved ones, these stories examine the connections they forge and the choices they make as they try to make their lives mean something in the soulless, unforgiving hollowness of corporate life. Looking hard at the families to which we are born and the families we make, What If We Were Somewhere Else asks its own questions about what it means to work, love, and age against the uncertain backdrop of modern America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fox's diverting latest (following If the Ice Had Held) imagines the lives of the people working at an unnamed business in Denver, Colo. The office environment is dismal, routine, and tainted by a malfunctioning air conditioner, and each narrative manages to be both enthralling and discomfiting. In "Pivot, Table," Kate, the office supervisor, becomes increasingly unpleasant at work as her marriage deteriorates. In "Pivot, Feather," Melissa, the aloof recent hire, listens to nature sounds on headphones in an effort to recreate the ambience of her hippie, vaccine-free childhood spent in her family's commune. In "The Old Country," copywriter Laird regrets falling out of touch with a childhood friend. Christian, the chronic adulterer from IT, fails to learn much from either his personal or professional failings in "Not Me." Michael, in "The Crow," who is hired by and eventually fired by his stepfather, lusts after his office mate, Sabine, who in turn is reluctant to leave her loser artist boyfriend. Heather, the office financial analyst, breaks her foot walking home from work in "The Empathy Chart" and uses the resulting sick days to kindle an affair. For the most part, the stories are content to examine the quotidian, though the collection takes a bizarre turn toward the end, positing a dystopian, climate-destroyed future that includes moon colonists and regimented protein powder. Fox successfully delivers small dramas that can pack a powerful punch.
