Fortune Smiles is a collection of novella-like short stories by award-winning author Adam Johnson. An eclectic collection of unnerving tales, the book explores disturbing aspects of modern existence through characters experiencing tragedy, natural disasters, technological influences and political superstructure.

The characters are as haunting as each story; each one faces darkness from the past, present or future. Set in wildly disparate environments, in both time and geography, the themes of these stories are equally diverse. In the title story, Johnson depicts two defectors from Pyongyang, North Korea, who struggle to adapt to their new lives in Seoul — one cannot forget what and whom he left behind. ‘Nirvana’ portrays a programmer, whose wife has a rare disease, and who finds solace in a digital simulacrum of a recently assassinated president of the United States. In ‘Hurricanes Anonymous’, a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. ‘George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine’ traces a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany, who vehemently denies his past even as he relives it.

Spanning across Louisiana, Berlin and the Koreas, the characters are controversial and complex. There is a sense of urgency to the stories and the people inhabiting them, as moral dilemmas and circumstances drag them through an incomprehensible world. Characters are sick, dying or dead; homesick or lost; avoiding temptations that they must face; and in certain stories, facing moral dilemmas and compromising.

Adam Johnson’s latest collection of uneasy short stories presents characters struggling with a displaced and besieged sense of self

The moral dimension leaves the reader both sympathising with the protagonists, and feeling an aversion towards them. The stories are not easy to read; they leave you wading through the mental and emotional morass of characters you would rather not know quite so intimately, but the literary construction is masterful.

One of the richer veins running through the stories is that of coping with loss and dislocation. In ‘Nirvana’, the bedridden wife suffering from Guillain-Barré syndrome finds solace and escape in Kurt Cobain’s music — who is “some kind of proof of life to Charlotte” — while the programmer creates a portable projector able to create virtually real holograms of a recently assassinated president that he, and all other grieving citizens, converse with. When does technology cease to be a means of coping with loss and tragedy and become instead a tool to hold on to what was lost?

‘Hurricanes Anonymous’ is about Nonc, a UPS (United Parcel Service) driver in post-Katrina New Orleans, saddled with a two-year-old child who may or may not be his son. Nonc’s own father is on his deathbed and, according to those who know, his story is that “once upon a time, there was a man who lived only for himself. He used his family, making the most of them the way you’d make the most of a single square of toilet paper. He stole his son’s car, and finally, he was gone, which is the happy ending.” Nonc is caught between searching for the boy’s mother and planning a possible future with his son against the backdrop of a devastated state, and a girlfriend who may or may not be encouraging goodness in him. An ambiguous ending leaves the reader wondering whether Nonc will be a good father or abandon his son.

“Prinz gets frisky when he finishes his business. He scratches in the dirt and barks a sharp, taunting bark. This interests the empty-eyed students more than our conversation. ‘What your tour guide here doesn’t mention,’ I say to them, ‘is that I used to be in charge of this prison. So Klaus Wexler was more than a brass plaque to me. He was a real person, and when he confessed his true crime, I was there to hear it. Note that your tour guide didn’t dispute that the playwright was a sexual deviant, a drug addict and a thief. But what Klaus confessed to was much worse. It is something your tour guide probably doesn’t want you to hear.’ ‘On the contrary,’ the curator says. ‘This is a rare opportunity for us.’ ‘This time of year was confession season,’ I say. ‘It starts when the first frost arrives. The cold takes residence in the concrete walls and steel doors, and everyone knows that it is here to stay.” — Excerpt from ‘George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine’

A venomous jewel of a story follows — ‘Interesting Facts’ — in which a terminally ill woman dying of cancer resents life going on without her. Her bitterness escalates as she imagines her family carrying on. The story chronicles the blame and anger stages of coping with cancer through the disturbing thoughts of a patient’s mind.

In ‘George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine’ Johnson explores another psychological state — denial. The narrator of the story is Hans Bäcker, a prison administrator for the Stasi, the East German secret police agency that operated prior to Germany’s reunification. Almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former warden continues to live near the prison he managed, which was used by the Stasi to torture prisoners who had attempted to escape over the Wall. Since then it has become a museum and is open for tourists — students and former prisoners alike. Hans insists that the death rate at the prison was no higher than elsewhere, that no one was tortured and that anarchy would have resulted if order was not achieved by implementing the rules. He is at once an individual lost in a world that has changed around him, and a person unable to accept his role in a horrific political and social establishment. A young student captures the depth of his denial on video during a tour that adds an additional layer of the extent to which technology has invaded all aspects of life.

Technology continues to be a double-edged advancement in ‘Dark Meadow’ — a difficult read, written from the perspective of a reformed paedophile. The most morally controversial of the six stories, ‘Dark Meadow’ walks the reader through the choices the paedophile makes as he becomes the protector of two young girls who live across the street, practically alone as their neglectful mother leaves them to fend for themselves without food or money. Meanwhile, he finds a code that can be embedded in explicit imagery, which could allow the ‘good guys’ to make a real-time Google map of all child pornography viewers. The story resolves itself; he chooses to send the code to the police, while becoming the self-appointed caretaker of the little girls.

The title story, ‘Fortune Smiles’, features two North Korean defectors who find it difficult to assimilate into a new culture. The social, political and economic differences between the two Koreas make the culture shock entirely believable, if decidedly less intense, than previous stories.

A striking feature of the collection is that redemption is not guaranteed — even the most innocuous of protagonists struggle to survive, many have victimised others, and some have been or are victims. Hate, too, seems to feature almost consistently throughout the book — self-loathing, resentment of disease, contempt for systems past or present.

The entire collection leaves the reader with a sense that while the human spirit struggles and survives, in the process it is tainted, darkened and haunted. Adversity and challenges colour existence, and displacement is alarmingly easy — through disease and despair, abuse or disaster. The book however, is not easy. It is brilliantly written and thought provoking, but never easy.

The reviewer is a development consultant and freelance journalist in Islamabad. She is also a Director of the School of International Law.

Fortune Smiles
(SHORT STORIES)
By Adam Johnson
Knopf Doubleday, US
ISBN: 978-0857522986
320pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 5th, 2016