‘Better Living Though Plastic Explosives’ by Zsuzsi Gartner

Reviewed by Alex Merrill

With her second collection of short stories, Zsuzsi Gartner has delved far underground, taken its seismic measure, and returned to give us the report. And the report is this: the earth is quaking, evolution is askew, terrorists are next door, your children are disappearing, and the tsunami fast approacheth.

Dark, sinister, scary? Yes, but Gartner’s skill in the telling is thrilling.

I’m a new fan of Gartner. I really liked All the Anxious Girls on Earth, her first book of stories, with her dark, satiric voice expertly tackling the big themes of our times: apocalypse anxiety, urban decay, yuppie hypocrisy and moral decrepitude. But in Better Living Though Plastic Explosives, Gartner goes darker, deeper, and funnier. Her new stories are more trenchant, more satirical, more surreal. At the same time, Gartner still manages to evoke great empathy for characters and their sad, sad lives. Reading this book, I despaired (I’ll never write this well! Might as well quit now…). But I also felt exhilarated, the same exhilaration I felt when first reading Vonnegut and Barthelme and, more recently, George Saunders.

After the first couple of stories you’ll recognize her trademark plot twist. She starts plausibly enough, on a quiet suburban street, in a journalism class, on a film set, on Granville Island in Vancouver. Then quickly she takes us somewhere impossible—somewhere where aging is reversed, children become cranes, and mansions disappear into the earth without a trace—and from these fantastical premises emerge unsettling revelations. In “The Summer of the Flesh Eater,” for example, Gartner takes a hairy Harley driving BBQ loving carnivore and thrusts him onto a genteel cul de sac inhabited entirely by vegan locovore foodies who tend their lawns of draught resistant native grasses with a communal Lee Valley push mower. I won’t spoil the ending, but it does involve lamb popsicles, Darwinism and a very big old turtle.

Yearning is a common theme in many of these stories. Her characters are often desperate, anxious people, propelled by longing for something they can’t—or shouldn’t—have. In “Investment Results May Vary,” an Olympic mascot (a marmot) kidnaps a young boy from his parents, standing in a crowd of tourists. She intends no harm for the child, she only wants a child of her own, but once the deed is done it cannot be reversed. In the end she simply pleads for our understanding. “Is it so terrible to want what you can’t have? Can someone tell Nina that? Huh, huh, huh? …”

The same kind of wanting underlies “We Come in Peace,” narrated by angels who want to be human so that they can experience the sense of taste, who “were infected with (this) longing as if by a mighty plague.” And in “The Adopted Chinese Daughters’ Rebellion,” a heart-rending tale, everyone wants something they can’t have. Canadian families forcibly raise their adopted daughters as Chinese, foisting feng shui and Mao and Buddhism on them, while the Chinese Daughters want only to fit into Canadian life. Meanwhile, a Caucasian sister hides in the bathroom, Scotch-taping up the corners of her eyes, trying to look Chinese.

Gartner deftly strides the fine line between sending up and remaining soulful. The longest story, “Mister Kakami,” is a hypnotic and biting retelling of Heart of Darkness, with lots of shout-outs to Apocalypse Now. Patrick Kakami is a hugely successful, unhappy film director whose only desire is to make “a moving picture so sublime the intended viewer’s heart would fold in on itself in an origami of joy.” Kakami goes AWOL on a film shoot, disappearing into the dense fungal rain forest of Vancouver Island. Like Martin Sheen pursuing Marlon Brando, the film’s producer Syd goes looking for Kakami, starting out in a helicopter with the pilot playing Ride of the Valkyries and loving the smell of napalm in the morning. All this winking and nudging about Coppola could get to be too much, but not in Gartner’s hands. And the finale is positively transcendent.

Gartner has mastered the show, don’t tell dictum of storytelling. She assumes we’ll keep up with where she’s going, never patronizes by pausing to explain what we could look up on our iPods. She leaves us just enough crumbs to follow her. Film buffs may get all the cinematic references in “Mister Kakami.” For all others, there is Google, which is how I learned something new from “Patrick begins a tracking shot of this city of trees to rival the fetishized one in I Am Cuba.”

Gartner is also a fearless social commentator, and very funny. While visiting Vancouver, the producer Syd in “Mister Kakami” wryly notes that the activist squatters at the Woodward’s Building are “sponsored by Roots and equipped with the latest in leather backpacks and Che caps.” And in the title story, a recovering terrorist complains that “Girl terrorists all seem to have perky names—Squeaky, Patty, Julie—as if they can’t quite take themselves seriously enough.”

The unusual look and feel of this book—clothbound with textured cover and no dust jacket—will, sadly, be lost on ebook readers. The vines twisting across the black background promise tangled pleasures inside.

This is a book that I not only want to hold but to read again and again. There are many layers here and they’re all worth plumbing.