In a sense, Bertino’s Exit Zero is a master class in book structure. At its core are the small, quirky details we all either pick up or drop in the course of a day, rising to the struggles between and within ourselves that we depend on to stay vital, rising to our attempts to locate ourselves and our own trajectories within the grand trajectory of universal history — and in so doing, laying bare the process the mind goes through to organize a work and to show the actions of mind that went into making it. Grandiose, you say? Not really. The book deals in grand ideas masked as minuscule, even humble ones. The grace here derives from our marginal awareness of these ideas’ presences, as if they are camouflaged animals.
Within these stories is a deep understanding that the things we do to stave off the madness of life, which can come in forms ranging from violence to loneliness, might seem truly ersatz themselves, in the right light. This is what gives the stories their humor; there’s a Denis Johnsonesque deadpan lurking in them. And yet the book also has a spontaneous and intense energy that seems to come from no easily identifiable source. This will come as no surprise to readers of Bertino’s Safe As Houses (2012), the crowning story of which has a young woman bringing Bob Dylan to a family Thanksgiving dinner. The cumulative effect of reading the new stories, as with the earlier ones, is that you feel changed by them, intoxicated, as if you expect something very different from reality after having tasted Bertino’s version.
There’s a strain of Millhauser here, in the natural way in which Bertino measures out surrealism. Bettina doesn’t merely follow her premises to their conclusion, she makes herself comfortable and unfurls narratives like flags that signal intellectual life and its liveliness. It may be too easy to call these stories surreal. The events here begin to seem like the natural extension of what we would call “real” circumstances, as in the title story, in which a woman finds that her father has left her, as an inheritance, a grubby and not particularly sociable unicorn. The unicorn does not become any more mystical or magical as the story progresses, instead becoming more imperfect; the mystifying part of the story becomes the woman’s relationship with the animal.
This book seems to begin taking itself apart halfway through, as if it were asking itself what it is doing. If it were a film, we could say whatever lens filter was used for the first half was kept, but modified so that all the images and action are distorted, as though we ware going through a hallucinatory sequence. Did I mind this? No. I had been gearing up for an impressed but chill response, in which things like effability and ineffability could be discussed, with side notes on the changing face of suburbia, sentient animals, and the like. It’s hard to say when the change starts. We get whispers of a coming storm throughout. We have a hint in the early story “Edna in Rain.” At that story’s close, there is a moment that is best described as ineffable. Many readers have a complicated relationship with the ineffable, an element of a work that does not have a ready, or even not-ready, explanation. In a writing class, you might receive censure for things that do not appear to be “earned.” An unhappy reviewer might say you’re being willfully obscure. A casual reader might pause and never come back, viewing the book as too whimsical to have staying power. And then there are those other readers who embrace ineffability as a truer reflection of the way things are than the most tight-lipped realism. Consider this reader one of those. At the end of the story, after the protagonist has watched her ex-boyfriends fall from the sky repeatedly, she returns home to see a man, a stranger, sitting on her porch. If he is not a life partner, and the story has made clear she does not have one, then who is he? Is he dangerous? Is he a ghost? Nothing is clear, and yet the ending feels, somehow, right — rather than handing itself off easily, it arrives with a series of unanswered questions that become, paradoxically, the joists and beams of its explanation, a conclusion composed of its opposites.
Or the book might more likely begin to crack open when, in “The Ecstasy of Sam Malone,” a character becomes stuck in an episode of Cheers, hearing, in Groundhog Day fashion, the same jokes over and over. By the time the spell is broken and the character gets to clamber back into reality, you feel like you’ve been meditating. But on what? On the nature of plot deconstruction? On what it means that we might like certain sitcoms more than others? On the repetitive nature of urban life? All these things? None? Perhaps what’s important, here and elsewhere, is that we’re meditating.
As the collection progresses, Bertino’s approach to her stories becomes more radical, in the sense that whatever lies at the heart of the stories becomes less clear, though the stories don’t seem without hearts, or substantive cores that support expanded reach and subsequent meditativeness. It’s just that these cores seem to float throughout the stories, permeating them rather than anchoring them. In one of the most suspensefully deconstructed narratives, “The Night Gardener,” as a woman prepares for a local gardening contest, she weathers an onslaught of balloons bearing messages ranging from “HELLO” to “WE ARE SORRY YOU DO NOT LIKE YOUR LIFE” to “EMBRACE EMERGING EXPERIENCE.” Different explanations arise for the balloons, and none of them quite hold water. At the end of the story, nothing has been resolved, and we are simply left with the gardener and the balloons, suspended in a pointless but also somehow essential dialogue. In a later story, “Every Forest, Every Film,” a freelance critic attends a controversial performance piece and finds himself on a cab ride to … who knows? Bertino dodges telling us where the audience member is being taken in a sequence that recalls, strongly, one of the elusive, ineluctable passages in Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, in which geographical and biographical coordinates may change without warning.
At its base, surrealism of any kind is audacious. It asks the mind to make a connection it cannot make comfortably and hold that connection until the end of a work. Even more audacious than that, though, is the use of that disjunction to make a succinct statement about the way we muddle through daily life — which is what Bertino does here, most successfully.
[Published by Farrar, Straus on April 22.2025, 208 pages, $18.00 paperback]