Imaginary Museums by Nicolette Polak

The mathematician moves into a glass condominium with fourteen doors and has nightmares about the rooms behind them switching places. Sometimes she opens them to find a rival mathematician sitting on a long velvet couch. The rival has a retentive memory and a svelte build, while the mathematician has neither.

I read an article last week about different types of story engines--plot, character, language, voice--and I've been thinking about it since. So when I picked up this slim collection and began reading it, I immediately started wondering what engine was driving these short stories. I decided on one not mentioned in the article: the concept engine.

All these stories--really, microfictions in the same general stream of Joy Williams' 99 Stories About God--have a concept, maybe two, which is riffed on over 2-3 pages before moving on to the next narrative. A woman who carries her own rope barrier with her, a bride-and-groom to be whose actions flout the story's narration, an old man who's being locomoted to a mysterious resort, a passenger plane that's hopelessly lost. Great hooks, but I was initially disappointed in the follow-through; many of the stories seemed to lack a late twist, revelation, epiphany. A couple, like Grocery Story, hardly seemed like narratives at all.

But as I read deeper and paid attention to the book's divisions--Catastrophes, Interiors, Sceneries, and Forgotten Things, I realized that I was approaching them wrongly. Although a number of these pieces stand alone just fine, by and large they serve the larger thematic purpose stated in the title, a series of scenes, objects, experiences, meant to be observed, interpreted, considered, like a walk through a gallery of tall tales. By the end, I'd been mostly won over by the concept, and the last story, Love Language, about a passenger plane that gets lost before heading into more abstract, unsettling territory.  I also enjoyed the pair of stories, Invitation and Sabbatical, that deal with creepy landlords ingratiating themselves to their tenants. The former is even quite creepy.

In the dedications, Polak ends with "And, completely, to God", a persona curiously absent from all but the last story. These characters don't pray, don't think of life after death, don't consider the metaphysical implications of the frequently absurd situations they find themselves in, and I wonder why. Maybe the absence of God is why the museum exists to begin with. God is dead, we have killed him, and all we got is this crummy museum full of beautiful, broken people. Who can say?