Alejandro Varela’s quick story assortment, The Folks Who Report Extra Stress, explores lots of the identical themes as his debut novel, the Nationwide E book Award finalist The City of Babylon (2022). With biting humor, a pointy eye for the bizarre particulars that outline locations and relationships, a pleasant sense of play and numerous coronary heart, he examines the intersecting lives of a gaggle of largely queer and Latinx New York Metropolis residents. And although many of those characters are preoccupied with comparable issues and anxieties—systemic racism, gentrification, alienation and loneliness, the challenges of long-term partnership, Twenty first-century parenting, financial injustice and extra—they’re all splendidly particular and react to life’s ups and downs in their very own methods. The result’s a group that feels cohesive, thematically complicated and regularly stunning all of sudden.
Certainly one of Varela’s many strengths is the way in which he makes use of humor to chop by all of the static and get to the center of a personality or state of affairs. He appears to have an countless provide of this humor, which might be dry and witty, bleak and a little bit unhappy, or biting and satirical. In a single story, a United Nations worker describes the workplace politics and hookup tradition of the varied ambassadors, politicians and aides he works with. It’s a little bit ridiculous and appears downright absurd at instances, nevertheless it by no means suggestions over the sting into complete camp. In one other story, a nanny for a rich Swedish household ponders the (once more, usually absurd) happenings inside their co-op constructing. Varela performs with this edge, blurring the road between the on a regular basis and the extraordinary, heightening the contrasts and contradictions that exist in our stratified world in a method that makes all the pieces he writes really feel charged.
Most of the tales are interconnected, and a number of other characteristic an interracial homosexual couple, Gus and Eduardo, as they navigate their altering relationship through the years. The tales that middle on parenting, household dynamics and intimate home moments are particularly poignant, as are the hilarious however by no means flippant tales about web relationship.
The Folks Who Report Extra Stress blends humor and social commentary with the factor that drives one of the best fiction: an trustworthy and weak exploration of messy human relationships. Followers of Varela’s first novel, in addition to newcomers to his work, will discover lots to like on this assortment.
