10 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2020
THE DISCOURSEabout reading fiction
during the pandemic has followed two
broad tracks: There are those who take
comfort in the activity, and those who
have found reading impossibly difficult. I
belong to the latter camp, but I’m all the
more excited to share the following books,
which, while very different in genre and
mode, shook me out of listless distraction
with their originality.DANCE ON SATURDAY(Small Beer Press, 318
pp., paper, $17)is Elwin Cotman’s third
collection of short fiction. We tend to call
fiction “short” when it’s not a novel, but
the six stories in “Dance on Saturday” are
long, deep and rich, each so thoroughly
engrossing and distinctive in its style that
I had to take long breaks between them.
The stories I enjoyed least (“Among the
Zoologists,” “The Son’s War”) tend to
favor accumulation and excess in a way
that made me feel like the butt of an ob-
scure joke, while the ones I loved (all the
rest) favor depth of feeling and character,
foreground care more than swagger.
Rooted in contemporary cityscapes and
mythic pasts, with affects ranging from
melancholy optimism to humor to horror,
this collection is a sensuous, polyphonic
feast.
The title piece — and the longest, ac-
counting for about a third of the book —
packs in a novel’s worth of complexity. In
modern-day Pittsburgh live immortal
beings called the Fruit, ancient creatures
who can replace their aging body parts
with everything from berries to can-
taloupe so long as they’ve grown it them-
selves. Millenniums ago the Fruit took on
the appearance of Black people; today
there are 14 of them left, all part of thecongregation of the Fruit of Jehovah
Baptist Church, living among their human
brethren but under the auspices of a
mysterious Lord Decay. Focused on the
relationship between Teetee, a kind Fruit
elder, and Deja, a young mortal mother
and cancer survivor, the story is a micro-
cosm of intergenerational clashes and the
tension between desire for lineage and
resistance to it.
In “Seven Watsons” — far and away my
favorite story — a young man called Flexo
speaks compassionately of life in the
scrutinized confinement of the Pittsburgh
Job Corps, and of how the arrival of seven
strange brothers transformed his life
there. There came a point in the story, a
hinge, where I suddenly felt the way I did
the first time I heard jazz harp, or quarter
tones from an Arabic maqam played on
violin: hearing new music on old instru-
ments and vice versa, experiencing trans-
position as transformation. I still get
goose bumps recalling it.
Karen Russell’s cover blurb praises
Cotman as “a synthesizer... of lewd
dialect and high lyricism.” I’ll speak in-
stead of Cotman’s high dialect and lewd
lyricism, of how his fashioning of charac-
ter voices is superbly disciplined, lit from
within, while his lyricism is the realm of
bawdy jokes and opacity, a kind of literary
trolling. “She was tall and wide like a
sonnet,” one character notes — and you’ll
just have to trust me on the contrast with
the bawdy bits, none of which my editor
will let me cite.
The core of the book is a cleareyed
survey of the complexities of Black
American experience, distilled in a few
lines from the title story: “I hated the
powers for what they had done. But I
learned the pride. That I was of a people
who could take all the hate and poison of
this world, and laugh, and go dance on
Saturday.”THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS (Del Rey, 327
pp., $28)is Micaiah Johnson’s debut, but
that word is utterly insufficient for the
blazing, relentless power of this book,
suggesting ballroom manners where it
should conjure comet tails.
The multiverse is real, and Adam Bosch
has figured out how to move people
among 382 versions of Earth; his com-
pany, Eldridge, extracts information and
resources from those worlds. The only
catch: You can’t travel to an Earth on
which a version of you is still alive. The
only people who can become “traversers,”
then, are those whose existence is so
precarious that they’ve survived in just a
few worlds. “They needed trash people,”
says Cara, our protagonist, gripping my
heart and squeezing. In all the hundreds
of Earths Eldridge can access, Cara’s alive
in only eight.
Cara is a resident of Wiley City, a walled
compound in a postapocalyptic world
ground down by numerous wars. In the
comfort of its controlled atmosphere and
artificial sunlight, citizens and residents
enjoy the benefits of a robust social con-
tract, have access to housing and medi-
cine, and enjoy a prosperity bolstered by
resources stolen from alternate worlds.
Cara’s originally from Ashtown, beyond
Wiley City’s gates: a loosely knit commu-
nity of laborers, scavengers, religious
commune members and sex workers,
leading hardscrabble lives in an unforgiv-
ing desert ruled by an onyx-toothed Blood
Emperor and his runners. It takes 10
years of residency in Wiley City before
one can apply for citizenship; Cara’s been
there for six. But once Eldridge develops
the technology to extract information
across worlds remotely, traversers will be
obsolete and Cara will be banished back
to Ashtown. Unless she can make herself
indispensable first.
As a metaphor for neoliberal imperi-
alism, this tale is profoundly satisfying; as
a work of art, it’s even better. Cara is so
mesmerizing a character that I was help-
less before every twist and turn of plot,
riveted by her pain, love and secrets. The
book remained two steps ahead of my
imagination, rattling it out of complacency
and flooding it with color and heat.
Everything is hard. The news vacillates
between horror novel and undisciplined
television drama from one hour to the
next. But “The Space Between Worlds”
and “Dance on Saturday” make me feel
profoundly grateful to exist in the same
world and at the same time as their au-
thors — to bear witness to the furious
compassion and generosity of their
power. 0Power and Passage
AMAL EL-MOHTARis a Hugo Award-winning
writer and a co-author, with Max Gladstone,
of “This Is How You Lose the Time War.”OTHERWORLDLY/SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY/BY AMAL EL-MOHTAR
JING WEIstore.nytimes.com
800.671.Historic
Headlines.
Page reprints from
the Store frame the most
significant news in a
polished, modern design.