COMPRESSION SCARS

This year’s Flannery O’Connor winner offers a range of tales orbiting consistent pop-culture themes.

A sentiment from “A. Wonderland,” a modern retelling of the obvious, captures the spirit of Wells’s debut collection: “She knows he’s too old for Alice but feels sex with a much older man is a small price to pay for a good nonsense poem.” But Wells’s rejection of straightforward plot in favor of nonsense is ultimately hit and miss: the random feel of “Blue Skin” simulates the disconnectedness felt by brother and sister as they struggle to grow up motherless in a helter-skelter world; a man whose sole job is changing lightbulbs (“Godlight”) is intended to shed light, as it were, on life in an apocryphal hotel; “Sherman and the Swan” is a meandering tale of a boy born to the world as a marrow donor (too late) who comes to think the sister he failed may be reincarnated as the cygnet in his care; the most experimental piece is “Secession, XX,” with a side-by-side newspaper-column structure meant to simulate the physiology of Siamese twins (left side of page, girl; right side, boy) whose point of view is shared, to say the least. The experiment is conducted mainly to explore plain old pedestrian feelings, which is what any experimental fiction should ultimately be about. Unfortunately, Wells doesn’t always deliver on this mark. Too often, she relies on puns, double-entendres, and the general raucousness of modern product placement, which, even though it’s her subject, dates her and gives her work the cultural penetration of bell-bottom jeans. And even as one admires the ideas, one wishes they weren’t quite so cute—the reader longs for inspiration from the mind rather than the headlines.

The choppiness here may be recognizable, but that doesn’t mean it’s good story. A vision still on its way.