AT NIGHT HE LIFTS WEIGHTS

These stories about environmental and social failure remind us that the dystopian future we fear is already here.

Red dust settles on South Korea. Squeals escape from industrial pig farms. Toxic waste seeps into the water supply. Cities are “submerged in water the color of peanut butter.” Award-winning South Korean author Kang’s dystopian settings look a lot like our own. Her characters are being slowly suffocated by aimlessness and isolation, rising costs and ecological disasters. Protests pop up and then dissipate. In “Pripyat Storage,” a woman is convinced she will die of cancer from Chernobyl runoff, despite living in Seoul. When she inherits a storage facility from her mountain-climber mother, she is eager to preserve her imagined hometown, Pripyat. In “Greenland,” a group of male friends succeed in business together, then flee when it all comes crashing down, their wives left searching for them in “exercise bar” clubs. In the title story, an old woman struggles with living alone; she sits helpless as her toilet overflows again and again. Her long walks uncover the old man behind several young girls’ recent disappearances, and he becomes her obsession. The collection can be uneven—“Disaster Area Tour Bus,” a thinly veiled look at a post-Katrina New Orleans, adds little to our knowledge of that devastation. Furthermore, the collection’s prose can feel flat, dulling the emotional impact of its suspenseful plots. In “Radio and River,” the main character, looking at his immobile, couch-potato family, feels “like a child with a hammer who was told to strike either happiness or sadness, and he sensed the hammer in his hand starting to list to one side.” With Kang holding the hammer, this collection lists to the side of atomization and desolation.

A collection of pertinent, socially conscious stories is hindered by its flat prose.