I’VE OFTEN THOUGHT short stories are structured more like jokes than like novels or poems. The short story reader anticipates the reveal, the turn, with the same eagerness that the audience at an open mic anticipates a punch line. It’s all about the timing. Tillman is a skilled comic, with an especially deft touch for skewering gender norms. She is also endlessly quotable, packing in a surplus of simple beauty (“Unexpected results from ordinary things are wonderful”) and pure wisecrack-ery (in a chat between two futuristic bots: “—Whoa@! Jokes@? —Extincto”) at the level of the line. Her intellect effervesces in the pun-spiked prose, like circus champagne.
Yet for all the humor, there’s also an unmistakable melancholy to the collection. The carnival is a place for life—“everything’s alive, vital,” chants an old man at the funhouse in “Thrilled to Death”—but it’s a morbid kind of vitality. Again and again, a story’s carnivalesque excesses—its digressions, jokes, dreams, and variety shows—are employed to elegiac ends. The most tender moments often arrive in the final lines. In “The Dead Live Longer,” our ambivalently mournful “I” responds to the death of a friend from whom she’s been estranged for years. The story concludes: “She was out of my life for many, many years, not yet dead, but dead to me figuratively. It’s very different, that kind of death. I learn that with each fresh death.” In “Madame Realism’s Torch Song,” the eponymous protagonist and her beau, a shifty figure named “Wiley,” are unable to come to terms with how to tell a ghost story. Instead, they walk off into the night “in search of shooting stars and other necessary irrelevancies.” Endings like these reveal that “oddly vulnerable” impulse that so often swells beneath Tillman’s clever charm. {read}