Day Care: Stories
Lange is a chronicler of all that is strange and secret about people, mining that strangeness for comedy and pathos ... Has a fondness for autodidacts and obsessives and is adept at blending esoteric references (ranging, in this story, from the Bible to contemporary art to ancient myth to Lydia Millet to the work of the Center for Land Use Interpretation) seamlessly into her own idiosyncratic worldview ... Lange often writes in this mode, a kind of funhouse mirror of ecofeminist criticism; her women tend to be deadpan wits in a dying world ... This reads as commentary on capitalism and control, but also, perhaps, as a description of storytelling.
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Lange gives the banality of day-to-day life a second, louder heartbeat ... Collectively, these stories balance on the line that separates the mundane from the profound when it comes to a monotonous American existence ... Lange does a remarkable job capturing the interim background noise of a floating memory, a passing daydream, a theory, an observation—and then just as quickly as that thought came, moving onto something else, as normal people do ... Lange is a realistic writer, a feel and don’t tell writer. She asks readers to be objective, leave room for many things to be true at once, and sometimes, question whether a line was intended to be poetry, or bullshit—such is life.
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After reading Nora Lange’s debut collection of short stories, Day Care, along with her debut novel, Us Fools (2024) – both newly available in the UK via the adventurous indie press Seven Stories – one comes away with a sense of a Great American Talent about to become much better known ... In the stories – most of which are very short, while not quite qualifying as flash fiction – much is going on beneath the smooth verbal surface. The savvy yet vulnerable satires of Mary Gaitskill come to mind ... Lange is probably at her best in realist mode, and a couple of SFF and magic realist experiments do not quite come off. But the bulk of the eighteen stories in this collection are transfixingly strange and raggedly moving.
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