American Book Review

The characters in Fire & Water face a reality that realism was not built for. The events that animate the collection—ice storms, storms, drought—were, until recently, deemed too over-the-top for "serious" literary fiction and were instead consigned to the domain of disaster movies and airport paperbacks. However, as climate collapse becomes an unavoidable everyday reality, that arrangement no longer works. Climate collapse, it has become clear, is the most urgent issue of our time. It must be addressed. If literary fiction, broadly defined, is to have any relevance, it must be able to engage with the reality of the world, and the reality of the world is one of devastating yet ever more routine ecological disasters. In a way, so-called literary fiction is late to the party. The vernacular of climate collapse has already been rendered by both genre work and the live feed of social media. Literary fiction, thus far, has only touched the subject obliquely, as if unsure how to proceed. So the question is, how does the short story proceed? Where does the literary short story fit into this new landscape? How can the short story writer write climate change? What can the form offer that is not available elsewhere?

The stories in Fire & Water largely try to answer that question by looking inward. They attempt to find their niche in the small scale, in the tight narratives and psychological portraits that defined literary short fiction long before the emergency of climate collapse. Countering the prevailing trends [End Page 95] for massive empty spectacle, the stories in this collection go small, offering glimpses into the human lives affected by climate crises. Nicole Walker states the aims of the project clearly in her introduction:

But as the writers in Fire & Water show us, it's the smaller objects, everyday stuff, that shows the earth's climate changes in our present-day lives, how very much we're going to miss the stuff of our regular world, and how the everyday will, for a lot of people, still be a day—but one fully transformed.

When the stories in the collection succeed, it is usually on those terms. The moments that hit the hardest are often built around an image of that "everyday stuff"—a photo on the mantel, a rain gauge. The sheer magnitude of climate change is difficult, if not impossible, to convey, but it can be reached through the smaller objects that make it up. In the face of the incomprehensible hyper object of climate collapse, it is these familiar objects that have the most power. This is best realized in J. D. Evans's "The Rain Diary," one of the strongest stories in the collection, which builds from a single image—a rain gauge—toward a global reckoning of the end of the world. The gauge, and the rain it fails to record, act on the one hand as an unavoidable reminder of the changing world and on the other as a hinge in the relationship between the protagonist, C, and her dying mother. The rain gauge issues as strong a psychic hold over C as the inherited bed that forces C to adopt her mother's sleeping positions issues a physical hold. It looms over C, who is filled with resentment toward the rain meter and a sense of guilt for not keeping up with it. The story succeeds as a complex psychological portrait as well as story of ecological change. "The Rain Diary" grounds itself in the tangibility of a simple, familiar, object. The rain gauge's symbolic nature is explicit, as is its effect on C's psyche. This grounding allows the story to open up into a wider, more complex reckoning with climate collapse—in this case continuous drought—one that wouldn't be possible without the recognizability of the simple object. This technique is also used successfully...