NORMAL RULES DON’T APPLY
by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, $37)
Kate Atkinson has followed up last year’s sparkling novel Shrines of Gaiety with this collection of 11 short stories. These stories sparkle, too, despite the feeling of impending doom that’s in every one of them.
It comes in many forms. In a sort of momentary darkness kills everyone who’s outside,a ghost watches over her own autopsy and discovers her cause of death, and in a fairy tale is woven into a story about family life with sinister repercussions for all concerned. All the story strands start to come together in the second-to-last story, in which Kitty, the sister of god (small “g”, not religious), is an advertising executive who finally gets a turn at creating when her idiot brother hands the god job over. Kitty starts the world again. And again. “She would have liked a grand denouement – aperfect world to end the task on – but she knew in her heart that that wasn’t about to happen. There were no happy endings, just endings.” Nevertheless, as her mother notes briskly, “You can’t stop trying. You’re a woman.”
