THE STRANGE MALADY OF ALESSANDRO’S UNCLE AND OTHER STORIES

Ten short stories convey the mixture of longing, duty, and general precarity that characterizes modern life.

Holtzman, who wrote The Bethune Murals (2018), writes in a pleasingly restrained, surrealist mode in the titular tale, which satirizes how the pharmaceutical industry generates profit by treating even the most benign human foibles. The author’s characters often hope to challenge capitalist structures but are flawed in their pursuit, such as Marvin in “The Umbrella,” who compares himself unfavorably to a hardscrabble acquaintance: “He had…given money to progressive causes, but it was fluff compared to Leslie’s existential involvement with capitalism.” “The Boyfriend” recalls classics such as Gabriel García Márquez’s 1992 story “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane” in the way its elderly protagonist, Jeff, harbors an unrequited yearning for a younger woman, but Holtzman fails to bring poignancy to its conclusion. “Brahms’ Fourth Symphony” is an engrossing story that occasionally features a lyrical voice, as when Joan, the protagonist, reflects, “Around a curve in the road, my headlights caught the trees laced with snow. How evanescent, I thought sadly. By morning, the wind will have left nothing but skeletal branches.” “A Cascading Failure,” however, is itself one—a concatenating series of unrealistic and apocalyptic predictions linked by a thin, unbelievable plot. Game theory’s intersection with romance is Holtzman’s material in “Only a Game,” a narrative rife with the kinds of entanglements that one typically finds in a campus novel. Throughout the collection, Holtzman flirts with moralism, and he addresses this tendency in the book’s introduction: “Unlike writers who dismiss making points as propaganda, I don’t think it a sin to expose my own beliefs….[I]f they get you angry, that’s great.” One can see this most clearly in “Last Days of Summer” and “See Jane Run”—two uninspiring attempts to address post-2016 political polarization in the United States. Likewise, “A Foot in the Door” is an unnecessary, tone-deaf #MeToo story written from a male abuser’s point of view.

Some of these short forays show real promise while others lamentably veer into the didactic.