When comedy is applied to tragedy over and over, it can start to take on an element of defensiveness cumulatively, it can feel as if Johnson is holding the reader at arm’s length by how cheery his darkness can be. Each of these stories plants a small bomb in the reader’s head life after reading Fortune Smiles is a series of small explosions in which the reader - perhaps unwillingly - recognizes Adam Johnson’s gleefully bleak world in her own.
Despairing men are at the heart of each of these tales, most of them protagonists on the cusp of being antagonists. Unnerving, riveting, and written with a timeless quality, these stories confirm Johnson as one of America’s greatest writers and an indispensable guide to our new century.As with The Orphan Master’s Son, there’s a great deal of comedy to be found in Fortune Smiles, though the humor in this new book is offset by a darkness so pervasive I found it seeping into my daily life. And in the unforgettable title story, Johnson returns to his signature subject, North Korea, depicting two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind. In “Hurricanes Anonymous” – first included in the Best American Short Stories anthology – a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “Nirvana,” which won the prestigious Sunday Times short story prize, portrays a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finding solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States.
“George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine” follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. In six masterly stories, Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal.
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