You Must Be This Happy to Enter

October 22, 2007
The two most successful stories of Crane’s third collection (following All This Heavenly Glory) are also the most intimate: “The Most Everything in the World” listens in on a husband and wife playing the what-would-you-take-to-a-deserted-island game, while “Donovan’s Closet,” about a girl with a fetish involving her boyfriend’s lemon-scented closet, turns into an optimistic tale of a seemingly doomed relationship’s survival. Other characters in Crane’s lineup include a suburban zombie turned reality TV star (“Betty the Zombie”), a time-traveling photographer who gets arrested for being happy (the title story) and a handful of other victims and survivors of not-so-everyday life. Because of Crane’s repetitive narration the book is best read piecemeal rather than straight through: “I don’t mean literally everything. Literally most things, but not everything.” In “Promise,” a story about a woman waiting for the arrival of her adopted child, which closes the collection, Crane quips, “I will feed you sugar.” And that might as well be Crane’s promise for the collection as a whole.

February 1, 2008
A woman experiences either a spiritual transformation in her new lovers closet or the onset of a weird new addiction. A time-traveling photographer is jailed for being happy. The citizens in Clearview wake up one morning and discover that everything has become transparent. A woman gets bitten in a fabric store, turnsinto a zombie, and seeks help on a reality TV show. Welcome to Cranes loony universe, which actually is not much stranger than theworld etchedso crisplyin Varieties of Loudness in Chicago, a droll tale about afashionistain a new condoobsessed withher unhip neighbors, a family living in an old house with a big garden. In her third collection of inventive shortstories, Crane continues to ingeniously satirize our muddled quest for meaning in all the wrong places. Her canny pivots from realistic trivia to outer-limits bizarreness, caustic humor, andunderlying belief in goodness make for magnetizing, pleasingly barbed tales of the ever-shifting zeitgeist and the unchanging nature of the human heart.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)