Scan barcode
A review by vegantrav
Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson
4.0
Fortune Smiles won the 2015 National Book Award for fiction, which is the only reason I was motivated to read it. In my estimation, A Little Life was more deserving of that award, but I still enjoyed Fortune Smiles.
Two of the six short stories in this collection made the whole book worth reading. Of the remaining four, one ("Hurricanes Anonymous") I did not really care for at all, and the other three I thought were good but not anything especially great.
The two that I was most moved by were "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" and "Dark Meadow."
"George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" is set in Germany around two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it tells the story of the former warden of a Stasi prison. The warden is convinced that he was a great warden and that nothing untoward ever occurred at his prison. It is remarkable to watch him try to justify himself--in part by intentionally blinding himself--to former prisoners and to his daughter and even to himself.
"Dark Meadow" presents a character from whose perspective stories are almost never told (Lolita being a prominent exception): a pedophile. The protagonist is man who was raped multiple times as a boy and who has grown up to be a pedophile himself. He is a non-practicing pedophile in that he does not rape or physically abuse children, but he does, to help quell his desires, utilize child pornography. What is truly amazing about this story is that Adam Johnson takes a person that we would expect to find vile and loathsome and makes him a man whom we can understand and who, although we don't condone his desires, we even sympathize with. Johnson's deft touch and humane approach in addressing such a controversial topic as well as the story itself and the portrait he paints of the protagonist show the depth of his literary talent.
These two short stories made reading the entire collection worthwhile to me. I also appreciated the fact that it was a very quick read: though it is in excess of 300 pages, Fortune Smiles is a very easy read, and I was able to finish it in a single day. Finally, having still not gotten around to reading Adam Johnson's Pulitzer winner, The Orphan Master's Son, the talent I have seen in this collection of short stories has convinced me to put The Orphan Master's Son on my to-read list.
Two of the six short stories in this collection made the whole book worth reading. Of the remaining four, one ("Hurricanes Anonymous") I did not really care for at all, and the other three I thought were good but not anything especially great.
The two that I was most moved by were "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" and "Dark Meadow."
"George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" is set in Germany around two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it tells the story of the former warden of a Stasi prison. The warden is convinced that he was a great warden and that nothing untoward ever occurred at his prison. It is remarkable to watch him try to justify himself--in part by intentionally blinding himself--to former prisoners and to his daughter and even to himself.
"Dark Meadow" presents a character from whose perspective stories are almost never told (Lolita being a prominent exception): a pedophile. The protagonist is man who was raped multiple times as a boy and who has grown up to be a pedophile himself. He is a non-practicing pedophile in that he does not rape or physically abuse children, but he does, to help quell his desires, utilize child pornography. What is truly amazing about this story is that Adam Johnson takes a person that we would expect to find vile and loathsome and makes him a man whom we can understand and who, although we don't condone his desires, we even sympathize with. Johnson's deft touch and humane approach in addressing such a controversial topic as well as the story itself and the portrait he paints of the protagonist show the depth of his literary talent.
These two short stories made reading the entire collection worthwhile to me. I also appreciated the fact that it was a very quick read: though it is in excess of 300 pages, Fortune Smiles is a very easy read, and I was able to finish it in a single day. Finally, having still not gotten around to reading Adam Johnson's Pulitzer winner, The Orphan Master's Son, the talent I have seen in this collection of short stories has convinced me to put The Orphan Master's Son on my to-read list.