The most telling symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone. It’s the chicken nugget. Chicken is already the most popular meat in the US, and is projected to be the planet’s favourite flesh by 2020. Future civilisations will find traces of humankind’s 50 billion bird-a-year habit in the fossil record, a marker for what we now call the Anthropocene. And yet responsibility for the dramatic change in our consumption lies not so much in general human activity, but capitalism. Although we’re taught to understand it as an economic system, capitalism doesn’t just organise hierarchies of human work. Capitalism is what happens when power and money combine to turn the natural world into a profit-making machine. Indeed, the way we understand nature owes a great deal to capitalism.
People ask me all the time what California cuisine is. I’m not complaining, by any means: My business partners and I are opening a restaurant that we identify as having “all sorts of California coastal soul.”
The answer is not obvious; there’s no catchy, two-sentence description that will convey California cuisine’s essence. For me, the story is about a first-generation Chinese immigrant finding her way in America through food. It’s a story about that woman settling in the American Midwest and teaching her son how to cook the flavors that she remembered from her childhood in Asia. And it’s a story about the yearning for California and the Pacific Ocean that is embedded in the American consciousness.
If we want to live in a world that recognizes and accepts differences in consciousness, then we must start by believing one another about our different lived experience and recognize that we must spend time working to understand these different kinds of minds — especially any minds and lives that have been oppressed, disregarded, and marginalized — because they will have developed knowledge and survival strategies to which we otherwise would not have access. If we don’t, not only are we going to be in recurrent danger of harming those who aren’t recognized as people, but we’ll also be more likely to miss recognizing those who experience life — and suffering — in ways not classified as legitimate.
Most readers expect short fiction to bring a singular character to life. In many creative writing workshops, we’re taught it’s the base requirement for a short story: place someone (or some sentient thing) in a predicament, and show us how they change.
One of the factors that makes Jamel Brinkley’s debut collection, A Lucky Man, truly exceptional is that each story goes far beyond this basic formula. In Brinkley’s work, no character is left untended, no aspect of identity is overlooked, and the results are well-inhabited worlds that feel infinite. A lot of short stories exist in a snow globe, but the nine stories presented here are each a big bang. They burst forth through space and time. They are larger than the sum of their components.
“The Mars Room” makes you share her frustration. It’s one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart, and in its passion for social justice you can finally discern a connection between all three of Kushner’s novels.