From politics to public health, the past few years have furnished us with countless reminders that life is strange and volatile. The bizarre, droll stories in Kate Folk’s first book would be satisfying to read in any era, but they’re particularly well suited to this one.
在“有”中,民间的主角——年轻女性,mostly — are beset by ambulatory chatbots, anthropomorphic buildings and apocalyptic emergencies. It’s not hard to understand why Hulu is adapting her stories for the screen. Toggling between pathos and farce, Folk, who lives in San Francisco and was a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, writes witty, cinematic fiction that merges familiar scenarios with uncanny menace.
“The Void Wife,” maybe the book’s funniest story, focuses on Elise, a Midwesterner who flees to the Bay Area as an unexplained force lays waste to the planet. The recently discovered “void” is a “belt around the globe” that widens by the hour, extinguishing all life and leaving behind, well, nothing at all. Humans can’t stop it, so millions have embraced the notion that the void is, as one character says, “a straight chute to heaven.” Elise doesn’t believe this, but she can’t persuade her flinty mother to take evasive measures. When her mother likens it to a bad storm, Elise matter-of-factly replies, “It’s not a tornado, Mom. It’s a curtain of absence that negates everything it touches.”
In San Francisco, Elise meets a man who promises her a spot on the cruise ship he purportedly owns. At sea, Robert says, they’ll be able to dodge the void. But Robert promises way more than he can deliver. A wry character study of a woman who keeps it together in exceedingly tough times, “The Void Wife” is also a deft satire that takes aim at religion, COVID truthers and Silicon Valley bluster.
The stories that bookend the collection — “Out There” and “Big Sur” — are about Bay Area women who, in this bewildering era of artificial intelligence, don’t know whether they’re dating people or “biomorphic humanoids” known as “blots.” Flummoxed by awkward, suspiciously polite might-be blots — one of them gives his dinner date a 3-foot-tall sunflower — Folk’s protagonists begin to see sketchy behavior as evidence they’re dating actual men. One guy asks his new girlfriend to sleep over but “pretend (she doesn’t) exist” because his roommates might hear her. “It was a little degrading,” she says, “which I took as another promising sign.”
In three stories, houses take on disturbingly human characteristics. One place has walls that crack open unless they’re constantly treated with expensive lotion; another’s floorboards have sprouted “a man’s head.” Showcasing Folk’s ear for halting, deadpan dialogue — “It seems like now there’s the matter of like. Human rights,” a character says of the floor head — these are skillful parodies of smart-home technology and real-estate fetishization.
Once or twice, in her effort to foreground wild scenarios, Folk builds her narratives around relatively forgettable protagonists, sidelining her most promising characters. The lotion-craving-house story centers on a philanderer who has destroyed his marriage. His mother, based on a few brief mentions, sounds more interesting. A onetime Berkeley “radical,” she “now lived in Argentina with her younger boyfriend, a retired soccer star who modeled in billboard ads.” Alas, she’s only alluded to, never a presence in the story.
Will this iconoclastic cougar make an appearance in the novel that, per her website, Folk is writing? We can hope. For now, let’s savor Folk’s winning debut, a book that capably captures the lunacy of the moment we’re living through.
Out There: Stories
By Kate Folk
(Random House; 256 pages; $27)
Author event
The Booksmith presents Kate Folk in conversation with Ploi Pirapokin:7 p.m. April 7. Free; RSVP required. 1727 Haight St., S.F. 415-863-8688.www.booksmith.com