Why Visit America
Stories
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Equal parts speculative and satirical, the stories in Why Visit America form an exegesis of our current political predicament, while offering an eloquent plea for connection and hope.
The citizens of Plainfield, Texas, have had it with the broke-down United States. So they vote to secede, rename themselves America in memory of their former country, and happily set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbor: America. Couldn’t happen? Well, it might, and so it goes in the thirteen stories in Matthew Baker’s brilliantly illuminating, incisive, and heartbreaking collection Why Visit America.
The book opens with a seemingly traditional story in which the speculative element is extremely minimal—the narrator has a job that doesn’t actually exist—a story that wouldn’t seem much out of place in a collection of literary realism. From there the stories get progressively stranger: a young man breaks the news to his family that he is going to transition—from an analog body to a digital existence. A young woman abducts a child—her own—from a government-run childcare facility. A man returns home after committing a great crime, his sentence being that his memory—his entire life—is wiped clean.
As the book moves from universe to universe, the stories cross between different American genres: from bildungsroman to rom com, western to dystopian, including fantasy, horror, erotica, and a noir detective mystery. Read together, these parallel-universe stories create a composite portrait of the true nature of the United States and a Through the Looking-Glass reflection of who we are as a country.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Baker's sophomore collection (after Hybrid Creatures), the mundane details of everyday life are tweaked in subtle but surprising, fantastical ways. "Rites" follows a Minnesota family's frustration with their ornery Uncle Orson, who refuses to perform his "last rites," which are expected of all people over the age of 70 and are essentially a suicide ceremony. In "Life Sentence," a felon is sent home for "reintroduction" after a procedure that permanently erased his memory of everything but his family's faces, his punishment for a terrible, unknown crime. And in the title story, a libertarian town in Texas votes to secede from the United States in protest against government corruption, renaming itself America. America's first town hall is surprisingly progressive, passing such reforms as the abolition of gendered titles and conversion to the metric system. With such a voluminous collection, there will inevitably be writerly flourishes that begin to grate, like Baker's reliance on the first person plural or his love of a list, but there are plenty of strong stories, the best of which are rooted in specific political or cultural critiques. Despite its flaws, this is a smart, imaginative, and thoughtful collection.
