THE FATE OF OTHERS

A strong collection by a veteran master of the short story.

Though Bausch has become a prolific novelist, his story collections are more than publishing stopgaps between longer works. Particularly this one, filled with fiction that is richly imagined, deeply felt, and filled with the sort of context that distinguishes it from minimalism. The “fate” of the title seems to be the one that awaits us all, as death—or the risk or fear of it—permeates these stories. So does literature, and there are many writers featured here—including Ernest Hemingway, in the opening “In That Time”—along with lovers of fiction and creative artists in other fields. Yet art doesn’t really help Bausch’s characters come to terms with the inevitable, or with the unexpected, the sort of out-of-the-blue crises around which so many of these stories pivot. Covid-19, politics, and religion serve to complicate some of the plots, but mainly the tales seem to focus on “How did we get here?" and “Where do we go from here?” In “Isolation,” a woman is quarantined with the husband she still loves, separated from the lover with whom she’d never intended to become involved. In “Forensics,” a “murder scene involving hoarders in a decaying old house” shows a detective the depths of depression into which he’s sunk. In the novella-length “Broken House” that closes the volume, another house in disrepair presents a lasting memory and metaphor for the narrator, a retired history professor who once contemplated becoming a priest but has since found his faith shaken. “A Memory, and Sorrow (An Interval)” reads like a rare foray into autofiction, but every one of these stories serves to render lives fully experienced.

Classic craftsmanship meets contemporary shell-shock.