Life Among the Terranauts by Caitlin Horrocks

The stories in Life Among the Terranauts by Caitlin Horrocks are filled with people puzzling over their lives in a world that holds more questions than answers; they don't even know what questions to ask; they try to master the words themselves. They hold onto the past; they try to escape; they risk going into the unknown; they make a new start. 

I lived in the aura of the first story, The Sleep, for days.

"Bounty was an assertion, an act of faith. It looked best when left unexamined." ~from Life Among the Terranauts by Caitlin Horrocks

"Our children came home and told us that we were the suckers of the last century," living in a town with no future and no prospects. Immigrants had come for the free land, and stayed out of pure persistence. 

One winter the Rasmussen family decide to hibernate until spring. Soon other families also hibernate, saving money on food and heat, children happy not to stand in freezing weather for a school bus. The town becomes a media sensation. How to explain why they stayed, why they slept? 

The story was unsettling, and yet, somehow comforting. The quotation from James Joyce's The Dead stayed in my head as I thought of a world sleeping under an eternal, gentle snowfall.

In Norwegian for Troll, Annika returns to the remote Keweenaw Peninsula to aid her elderly mother and stays on after her death, stuck in her family's past, until she remembers her immigrant ancestors had risked journeying into the future. 

While Rose sorts her mother's estate she wonders about her mother's enigmatic relationship with her roommate, Bev. 

A teacher realizes she can't save every disturbed child who comes through her classroom. 

A woman at a party decides to sleep with a man because he is going to jail. 

Teenage girls looking for guaranteed happiness turn to Magic- 8 Balls and Ouija boards. 

A divorced father helps his estranged son, wishing he had advice for living in an uncertain world. 

An elderly woman knows she is in her last days. She pities the priest. "How endless, the secrets of other. How endless, the reassurance they need,"she thinks.

A woman loses everything on the Oregon Trail, except her own life. 

A traveler abroad seeks answers to questions, dreaming of a new life before he is forced to return home. 

The tour guide at Paradise Lodge promises to show the 'real Peru,' but all he has are stories to fill the hungry tourists. When he gives them the real thing, he discovers their inability to comprehend what they are seeing. 

A woman realizes that her childhood memories are unreliable.

The last story, Life Among the Terranauts, is also about a retreat from the world, but is filled with sinister overtones. A group of volunteers are paid to live in a biodome. They had been chosen for their "fortitude, for pigheaded faith," but 542 days in, with 188 to go, food is scarce and things are falling apart. One man has embraced this life, proclaiming they are a new society, a new start for humanity, calling himself Adam and the narrator Eve. It is chilling. 

Fortitude and faith. It's what we all need in this life.

The writing is fantastic, with sentences that stuck in my head.

Seed hulls scatter dark across the sinking snow, punctuation marks without words.

Growing up had been so far a great un-knowing, an erosion of the facts that had once seemed very clear and precious to her. 

The silences that exist inside all stories. 

There is no blade that mends, they sing. Only the thread going forward. Only our readiness for the cut. 

I previously read Horrock's novel The Vexations.

I received an ARC in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Life Among the Terranauts: Stories
by Caitlin Horrocks
Little, Brown and Company
Publication: January 12, 2021
hardcover $27
ISBN-13: 9780316316972

from the publisher

From the author of the “enthralling” (New York Times Book Review) and “beautiful” (Washington Post) debut novel The Vexations comes an exciting new story collection that moves boldly between the real and the surreal

Following her “marvelous” (Wall Street Journal) first novel, Caitlin Horrocks returns with a much-anticipated collection of short stories. In her signature, genre-defying style, she explodes our notions of what a story can do and where it can take us.

Life Among the Terranauts demonstrates all the inventiveness that won admirers for Horrocks’s first collection. In “The Sleep,” reprinted in Best American Short Stories, residents of a town in the frigid Midwest decide to hibernate through the bitter winters. In the title story, half a dozen people move into an experimental biodome for a shot at a million dollars, if they can survive two years. And in “Sun City,” published in The New Yorker, a young woman meets her grandmother’s roommate in the wake of her death and attempts to solve the mystery of whether the two women were lovers.

As the Boston Globe noted of her first collection, Horrocks is a master of “wild yet delicately handled satire,” a “sprightly heartbreak” in which she is able to “mingle a note of tenderness in the desolation.” With its startling range—from Norwegian trolls to Peruvian tour guides—Life Among the Terranauts once again dazzles readers, cementing Horrocks’s reputation as one of the premier young writers of our time.

 

about the author

Caitlin Horrocks is the author of the story collection This Is Not Your City and the novel The Vexations, a Wall Street Journal Top Ten Book of the Year. She is a recipient of the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the Plimpton Prize. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Tin House, and One Story, among other magazines, and has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories. She lives with her family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.