Jem Calder's insightful, deeply intelligent stories are full of subtle humor and quiet sorrow. In "A Restaurant Somewhere Else," Julia, a sous chef at Cascine, is plagued with such habitual doubt that at one point, in the presence of her boss, Ellery, she "found herself self-consciously unable to remember the sound of her normal laugh, and so faked an alarmingly loud, theatrical laugh in its place."
Even as Julia gets the things she wants —–the job at Cascine; a relationship with Ellery — she is plagued by self-criticism, filtering the simplest actions through an imagined stranger's unrelenting critical gaze. When she is, indeed, criticized — Ellery spits out a bite of her cooking and tells her to make it again — Julia considers "whether she should try to continue feeling normal or if she should let herself get upset."
Later, Calder writes, "The worst part was, she was so good at pretending everything was fine, it actually started to seem like everything was fine."
In Calder's stories, everything is not fine. The prose style is often cool, detached, economical, none of which should be mistaken for disinterest in the potential noise and mess of emotion. This work is deeply interested in feelings, and in the ways people try to circumvent and ignore them. Uncertainty is a constant.
"Julia felt — or felt she felt," Calder writes. Ellery is "either the person she loved or the person who impersonated a person she loved."
In "Better Off Alone," Calder gives the reader a chance to see Julia through another narrator's eyes — her ex, Nick. Nick, too, suffers from self-consciousness. About to attend a party, he lingers on a strategy to "maximise [his] likeability," noting "that studies had shown authentic confidence could be reverse-engineered via its practiced imitation."
Nick is equally good at criticizing others; watching his friend Roos dance, he compares her to "a woman in an advert for probiotic yogurt." He spends plenty of time on his smartphone, looking at pictures of people who are standing nearby, at the same party.
As the collection proceeds, technology becomes more prominent, from a "no smartphones in the kitchen" rule (first story) to social media frequenting (the second). The third, "Distraction From Sadness Is Not the Same Thing as Happiness," is immersed, from its initial paragraph, in the algorithms of a dating app.
Calder delivers a painful accounting of an app-generated date: "the two users continued to drink and perform to each other the versions of themselves they hoped someday to be." When Nick and Julia reunite at a market in "Excuse Me, Don't I Know You?" the interpersonal contact is a relief; in "Search Engine Optimisation," office claustrophobia forces people together (Nick among them) with far less privacy than they might expect.
In the closing story, "The Forseeable," Calder returns to Julia and Nick, struggling to communicate over a weak connection, both back home with their parents in the early days of the pandemic. Nick hides his longing for Julia. When she asks him to expand on his thoughts, he tells her, laughably, "I never think." Thinking is the true work of each story here. The rich interiority of Calder's characters makes this collection a remarkable debut.
Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Narrative, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She held a 2014-2016 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.
Reward System
By: Jem Calder.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 287 pages, $27.
