There is a strange quiet to the stories in this collection. They wade through an environmentally devastated dystopian future and give off whispered warnings rather than roaring doom. They are uncomfortable, uneasy, but in a way that emulates the fairy tale, chock full of timeless mythic secrets, shrouded in mystery.
This collection of stories follows a fantastic (in all senses of the word) novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat and it feels very thematically and stylistically linked.
The genius of Phillips is the way she constructs a premise and sees it through. You never really seize the meaning until the end of the piece and even then you will doubt whatever it is you think you have understood. We never really distinguish what is metaphor and what is plot. (All are both, but let’s leave it at that…) To each strange circumstance there is in the background a kind of hanging “It’s as if…” that we hope we will see realized when we reach the end of the story. No, it’s not a story about bearing and raising extraterrestrial children, the story is about a woman who feels “as if” she has born alien children. It is not a story about young girls disappearing into thin air but only about a world that feels “as if” young girls are disappearing into thin air. The whole collection is haunted by this ghost simile, moaning like or as…
Rebecca Solnit’s prolific and varied career as a woman of letters is remarkable in its scope. Though I believe she is most often thought of as an essayist, she is in fact many different people, depending on who you ask. To feminists and women in general she is the brilliant champion who introduced the concept of mansplaining in her Men Explain Things to Me. To art historians she is the author of As Eve Said to the Serpent, a meditation on harsh landscapes and the feminine sublime. Sociologists read her reflections on disaster areas, most particularly Hurricane Katrina, in her Hope in the Dark and A Paradise Built in Hell.