Ranking the Stories of EXIT ZERO by Marie-Helene Bertino by How Marie-Helene Bertino They Are [Teaser]
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All right. We've entertained ourselves for the last week with another one of our, let's see if we can figure out this Gordian knot of our own tying. And in this case, it is ranking the short stories in Marie Helene Bertino's new collection, Exit Zero, by how Marie Helene Bertino they are. And like with George Saunders, the short stories

specificities and vagueness and blurriness and vibes that we understand this author to be. This is our second one of these. I guess my first question is Bertino, for you Rebecca, for Bertino,

Did this kind of make sense? Did you have a, a kind of a divining rod sense of her that you could use or was it harder or more than you thought? You know, I, my Marie Helene Bertino sample size is smaller than yours. I have read 2am at the cast pajamas and beauty land and this, so I missed parakeet. I have not read the debut short story collection safe as houses. And you not only have read all of them, but you just read all of them in close succession to each other, prepping for that interview. My sense of her though, I,

I do feel like is pretty defined. Like there is a kind of, um, charmingness to some of the stories, a real insightful quality to how she observes characters and just beautiful sentences. Um,

I remember, you know, liking the writing in Beautyland and appreciate it. Like that was one of my favorite books of that year. But there's something about the short story form that really lets her shine. There are just some killer sentences in this book. And I felt like I saw her do all of the Marie Haliburtino things. So I think about like, there will be a little bit of weirdness, but it will happen in a way that everyone treats it as totally normal. There's no like,

like in one of the stories um it's literally raining men like this woman's ex-boyfriends are falling from the sky and there's no like oh my god then timmy fell in front of me it's just like and i was walking down fifth avenue and john came out can you believe this is happening this is right it's just like this is the world that we live in and i think that sensibility that like the world we live in is weird on its own and so that she builds in things that are

fictional, speculative, whatever you want to call it, to highlight the weirdness of humanity and the weirdness of reality. It's not ever weirdness for weirdness's own sake. It's always doing something. I think that's also why it works for me, that the weirdness is in service of, let's talk about humanity and relationships and connection and what it is to be a person. Right.

But it was tough. I moved mine around a whole lot. I ended up kind of doing a heat map situation where I just wrote a short description of a story and then I would write the short description of the next one and be like, does this one go higher or lower? And then do it the third time. Does this one go higher or lower? But also the one sentence slug lines for these stories is a great time. Yeah, I think one of the things, again, a very good writer of prose, plus you get the

reality twist and usually it's just a small twist. It's not too much. It's like one supernatural fantastical element and it doesn't result in, you know, maybe there's the earth is going to shatter to fall into a rift in the space-time continue. It's really what it means for these characters and even this particular moment and they kind of play themselves out. I think that's another thing that I didn't realize about the short story collections. And it happens in other books too is like

this is not a thing that the character is going to deal with forever. It kind of comes and goes like the weather or a flu or it just sort of around for a little while. And that her sense that the beauty and the terror of the world is, but a fingernail scratch on the paint job of our car away is like one of the things I like about it too, is like, this is not that the world isn't strange enough and we have to make something different.

fantastical to care about. It's like, no, the world is weird and strange and this is a way of seeing it and understanding it and dealing with it. And there's like a warmth to it, which is a quality that I think she has in common with Saunders. They express them really differently, but there is a real warmth and like an appreciation for the weirdness, for the humanity, like a tenderness maybe, not a word I use a lot with a writer,

Well, I think humanity is a good, I mean, their anthropology is pretty high. I mean, they're interested in people and ultimately care about people, but also know that some people are jerks and can be jerks. I think that her characters tend not to be sort of morality pigeonholed, where all the good characters are good and all the bad characters are bad. That's one thing I've come to appreciate about it as well. All right. So there's 11 short stories here.

11 to 1 has to be the way to go. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Do you want to lead off? Why don't you lead off? What did you find to be the least Bertino-y? The ecstasy of Sam Malone. Okay. Do you want me to give the pitch for that one? I'll give the pitch for that one. It is a woman. We don't know. She seems like younger, but we don't know how young. I would guess 20s maybe. Going out for a night.

She either falls asleep and has a weird dream or she's in like a drug trip or hallucination that puts her in a time loop of an episode of Cheers. Thanks so much for listening. Join us at patreon.com slash bookriotpodcast to hear the rest of this episode and get access to our full back catalog of premium content. That's patreon.com slash bookriotpodcast.