Fortune Smiles
by Adam Johnson
Summary
Six long stories, each built on a premise most writers would flinch from, each carried to its human conclusion with unnerving tenderness.
In Nirvana, a Palo Alto programmer whose wife is paralyzed and losing the will to live builds a hologram of a recently assassinated president to talk to at night, while she falls asleep to Nirvana bootlegs; the gimmick dissolves into one of the best stories anywhere about marriage and illness. Hurricanes Anonymous follows a UPS driver through post Katrina Louisiana with a toddler son deposited in his cab, delivering packages through a drowned civilisation while working out what fatherhood will cost. Interesting Facts is narrated by a dying woman watching her novelist husband, transparently Johnson himself, already converting her death into material, jealousy, love and posthumousness in one voice. George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine spends a day with the retired warden of a Stasi prison, now a museum, who takes the audio tour of his own institution and disputes it exhibit by exhibit. Dark Meadow inhabits, with appalling control, a pedophile fighting his own nature. And the title story follows two North Korean defectors loose in Seoul's abundance, homesick for the worst place on earth.
The collection's constant is Johnson's refusal to supply the comfortable distance: every monster gets an inner life, every griever gets jokes, and each story runs long enough, forty and fifty pages, to earn the turns a premise this loaded needs.
Around three hundred and ten pages.
Best for readers who want the contemporary story at maximum difficulty, compassion deployed where it costs the most.
Historical Context & Significance
Fortune Smiles won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2015 and The Story Prize, arriving two years after The Orphan Master's Son had won Adam Johnson the Pulitzer, and confirming the oddest specialization in American letters: Johnson as the laureate of extremity, North Korea, the Stasi, catastrophe zones, engineered from research trips and rendered with a fabulist's freedom.
A story collection beating the year's novels remains rare for the prize, and the win consolidated the form's revival decade, alongside Klay's the year before.
Johnson teaches at Stanford, and the stories' laboratories are visible: he had travelled in North Korea for the Pulitzer novel, toured Berlin's Hohenschönhausen prison with its former inmates, and driven post Katrina Louisiana. Dark Meadow drew the expected controversy, defended on the grounds the collection itself argues, that fiction's work is precisely the interiors nobody wants. The title's irony, fortune smiling on the escaped, the spared and the guilty alike, is the book's thesis in two words.