Janelle Bassett’s debut short story collection, winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, is populated by lonely observers, not vibrating throngs as the title would suggest. However, a secondary meaning of riot is an extravaganza or elaborate display, which is a fitting description of Bassett’s sincere humor and playful imagination in these stories. The title expresses genuine gratitude for these characters’ ability to find beauty amid everyday impediments to their freedom and crushing disappointments.
Bassett’s skill at wordplay weaves throughout many of these stories. The narrator of “Perceptor Weekly” describes a proofreading robot, a Perceptor whom she names Tony, walking “like the Tin Man in a blizzard.” She is a human interest story reporter for a small town weekly paper, on assignment covering a new pita restaurant opening, which the robot will later have to line edit. Tony “thinks we’re like him, always seeking to better understand instead of avoiding all major truths.” The Perceptor provides the insight into small town life and news that we lack: We’re simple, we’re predictable, but our rules don’t follow logic because for no good reason that pita place offers a “kids eat free” special, drinks not included.
Offering a flash of whimsy, the world of “Bulk Trash is for Lovers” features a realty cooking competition where ovens have wheels and run away from bakers as they try to insert their dough. After watching the show, the unnamed narrator goes on a ruminative walk and expresses her love to bulk trash bins and a “communal” floral couch, a journey which reconciles her conflicting desires to be “completely alone and constantly adored.” The title story also refers to an imagined reality show about children who write and perform pop songs from instruments that were formerly ocean plastic; in this instance it’s an accordion fashioned from Mello Yello bottles.
Throughout the collection’s fifteen stories, girls and women are careful observers of a world that promises more than it can deliver. There are several explicit references to an audience, from the comedy couple in the cabin rented during the pandemic who do a zoom set, to the sloth online influencer Treatie who sells Delighticos while plotting her escape. The most explicit audience is in “Prove It” in which Candice lies to get a job as a group counselor at a nursing home. Her first assignment is to get the group to share, and when no one does she suggests a game of two truths and a lie. While on a piano bench in the middle of the circle, under the eyes of the other residents, no one is able to lie. They think of a lie, but their mouth tells a different story. The power of the observer is strong enough to change our intentions. (Or, it’s a magic piano bench.) Bassett’s power in crafting the shaggy dog tale is at its funniest as Marla, a care home resident, spins on and on telling her “lies.” The story also introduces the word “yesterminutes” which I think should be in the next Oxford Dictionary word of the year running.
In a world that is constantly disappointing, why not lower our expectations? In “Enviable Levels” Jeena decides to do just that. While another writer would approach this question with world-weariness or legitimate complaints, Bassett devises LoExa.org, a service which, after clients complete a grueling number of hypothetical questions on hundreds of forms, assesses the client’s expectations and then scrubs them clean away. Jeena overthinks nearly every question and later takes a turn into riotous spinning out of control describing the two-page-plus form about topics from an imaginary son’s half-hearted science fair project to picking up a new book release from the library which all culminates in an absurdist word pyramid on page three:
A cat walks into a room. Go.
You meet your birth mother.
Someone honks.
Polling place.
Swimwear.
Airplane.
OK?
Y?
N?
In another nod to audiences and playfulness with language (also a call back to the earlier story with the stand-up comedy husband and wife), Jeena notes: “[M]y right shoulder is now lower than my left shoulder from the burden of the forms. The ripple effect has had a nipple effect—my breasts are no longer a set or a pair; they’re now more like an opening act and a headliner.” After completing all the forms, the real punch line is delivered when Jeena asks her doctor how many men undergo LoExa and she tells her that men don’t. As in, men’s expectations are serving them just fine thanks for asking.
Closer to the world we live in, things have a way of not working out even when expectations are measured. “Full Stop,” a story in which an actual riot could reasonably take place, is about two women in a peaceful protest for the reinstatement of abortion rights, after a recent overturn of the law. Instead of an insurgence, it ends with the crowd taping posters to the walls of the capitol “like what we’d wanted to do all along was pass notes,” never getting the audience with the governor they were promised. The narrator, Candice, is a stay-at-home mom who signs up to carpool to the protest with Winona, who ends up being the keynote speaker. Utterly bereft, Candice can’t face the car ride back with someone she knew, however briefly, and chooses takes the bus in complete anonymity.
Bassett never writes a judgmental line—if you are looking for irony or eye rolls, they are not here. Her stories play in shadows without being dark or blindly optimistic. Accept that people and their flaws make a flawed world. There’s nothing to be gained by standing in the spotlight; make whimsey in the shade—it’s way more fun.
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication date: September 1, 2024
Reviewed by Jeannine Burgdorf
Jeannine Burgdorf is a writer and storyteller on stage in Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in TheSignal House Edition, New Reader Magazine, Orange Quarterly, the anthology WriterShed Stories Volume 2, and is forthcoming in The Bridge. Her nonfiction recently appeared in the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.