HOW THE WATER FEELS

Eggers (debut novel: Saviors, 1999) scores again, now with tales thick with plot and poetry.

The author’s time as a Peace Corps volunteer and UN relief worker, as well as a nationally ranked chess player, shows here. The title story depicts a cynical aid worker in a darker-than-M*A*S*H Malaysian relief camp where “At night you could shine your flashlight and see the beach shimmer with so many rats you thought you were looking at the ocean.” In “Substitutes,” a wife’s relationship with chess-player/husband Owen calls into question the nature of human relationships: “He was a child, he really was, and this obsession with chess was like an imaginary friend.” Owen returns later (“The Big Gift”) and, now wifeless, visits a chess room (“housed in an ancient storefront, set back into a concrete lot between apartments where all the women had bruises on their legs”) and searches for meaning in the wake of loss. The dark mysterious core of the Peace Corps is revealed in “Anything You Want, Please,” while another Malaysian relief worker (“Leo, Chained”) contemplates a time when “no one in town would buy lungfish or blue-striped angelgills because the bodies of drowned Vietnamese floated on the feeding grounds.” Character and story are lively and vivid throughout, though sometimes Eggers, instead of endings, settles for miscommunications that offer little sense of closure. The last piece (“Year Five”) is the heftiest and most significant: it’s 1980, five years after the fall of Saigon, and a refugee camp suicide triggers an investigation that serves as a tour of modern relief work—while the vivid abundance of rats proves that its closest analogue is The Plague: “He clutched his shirt in astonishment when he saw the border was not the seaweed he had always assumed, but a rim of spiky gray fur and stiffened tails from rats recently pressed by sheer numbers off the cusp of the garbage.”

Relief work might suffer from Kafka-class bureaucracy, but at least it gave us these stories.