By Heidi Simmons
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Some Possible Solutions
by Helen Phillips
Stories
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Everyday life is filled with challenges. Too often we become jaded and our world is reduced to a simple routine with occasional drama now and then. Even with bumps in the road, we only want to quickly get back to “normal.” Some Possible Solutions by Helen Phillips (Henry Holt, 224 pages) shows how delicate life is, how crazy reality can be and a future of possibilities.
Many of you dear readers may know that I am a fanatic about the short story genre. There is something magical about reading an author’s story collection. Something happens as you read one story and go to the next. There is a shift that takes place and the world slips away as each story brings a new life and universe.
With a short story, there is often no way to predict what a character will do or how a plot might twist and turn. A story may suddenly end with no reason or it may be pages longer arriving in a place you could have never imagined.
In 18 stories, author Phillips takes the reader to places where relationships and timeless roles (spouse, mother, siblings, etc.) are explored through the lens of an outsider, or alien who finds the customs and rituals, unfamiliar and jarring. Sometimes the outsider is you in your own home.
The title story “Some Possible Solutions” explores the changing nature of roles in society but those changes are not what you might think. A well-off professional woman chooses a hi-tech male doll as her sexual partner instead of an actual guy. For her it’s easier and mostly hassle free. How about a second wife to do the chores you don’t like or have the time for? Wonder what that would be like? Admit it, it’s a “possible solution.”
In “The Beekeeper,” young women are disappearing in the city and a rich family hires a babysitter to take their nearly adult daughter to the country farm where it’s safer. It is a beautiful and magical place where the girl’s grandparents were raised, but for the babysitter, it is a strange and alien world. The babysitter slowly falls in love with the innocence of the girl and the pristine land.
“The Knowers” will make you think about how you spend your time on this earth, especially if you knew exactly how long you have to live. After all, aren’t all our days numbered?
Motherhood today is filled with important things to know and do for children. Everyone wants the best start for his or her kids. In “Doppelgänger,” one mother starts to see herself and all the other mothers as the same woman.
“Flesh and Blood” reveals a world where everyone has stepped out of his or her skin. This makes life even more of a challenge for the protagonist when she can’t stand the sight of blood or when someone masticates and swallows lunch.
Finding a mate is not always easy unless the world offers an opportunity to travel to a planet that can provide the perfect match in “The Joined.”
This collection is hyper-imaginative yet it is set in a familiar reality. Whether a story takes place in a dystopian future or in a yuppie neighborhood, the foibles of our basic human nature remain dominant.
Author Phillips takes the mundane elements of being a wife, mother, sister, woman, human and plays out these roles in settings and situations that are emotionally familiar yet often disturbing and disorienting.
Intelligent, witty, subversive and self-deprecating, Some Possible Solutions is about the angst of existence and the constant stress of surviving all that women are confronted with on a daily basis. Whether some of Phillip’s stories are allegorical or metaphorical is unclear, but it certainly makes them all more provocative.
More often then not, “some possible solutions” are whatever works best with the least amount of conflict.
This is a fun book to share with friends or a reading group. Each story holds a potential conversation and an interesting discussion.
