On Helen Phillips’ ‘Some Possible Solutions’

Phillips’ eccentric stories are profound for their blurred boundaries between characters, concepts of reality, desires, and conflicts.

Helen Phillips
Fiction | Short Stories
224 pages
5.2” x 8”
Perfectbound Trade Paperback
Also available in eBook formats
Review Format: Paperback
ISBN 978–1250132185
Reprint Edition
Henry Holt and Co.
New York, New York
Available HERE
$16.00

The world we live in can often seem confusing, even illogical. The characters in Some Possible Solutions: Stories exist in dystopias that take our fears of the unknown to the extreme. They search for love, understanding, and answers to the circumstances of their lives in this collection where each story is articulated in a fascinating mix of simplistic prose and complex imagination.

In “The Messy Joy of the Final Throes of a Dinner Party,” Eva retreats to the kitchen to scrape plates and rinse dishes, only to return to the dining room to find the hosts and other guests of the party frozen in time. In “The Joined,” an astronaut discovers an alternate world of creatures who appear human. In truth, they are the hermaphrodite halves of the people on Earth who — when joined together — form a full and complete being that achieves pure happiness. In “R,” a woman is separated from who she believes to be her twin and begins to deteriorate as her own identity cannot exist without her sister ever-present.

In each story, there is an underlying impression that the central characters are unreliable, though not to the reader. They are not trusted or not believed by the other characters in the story. The lack of trust creates a tone of isolation and cold indifference as the conflicts escalate without resolvability. In “Children,” the mother of a boy and a girl suspects her kids are not entirely human:

We’ve been through this a million times. He refuses to admit what they are. Though they never bleed, not even when they get their vaccination shots or skin their knees. A puncture dot, a raw spot, but never a drop of blood. ‘Why do they never bleed?’ I’ll ask him, and he’ll say, ‘They never bleed because they’re our kids and they’re tough as nails’

(p. 145).

The mother’s suspicion is confirmed, however, when the children run into the pathway of a category 5 tornado and remain unhurt. Her husband, Thomas, is nearly killed, yet the children remain ever-curious about the natural phenomenon. Surprisingly, the mother is also unscathed which leaves the reader wondering if she recognized something otherworldly in her children because she is more like them than she could have imagined.

The stories in the collection range from flash pieces to more extensive works. Many take traditional forms while others are more experimental in form. The variation in structure pulls the reader into each piece through fascination and wonder; the only expectation is to anticipate the unexpected.

“Things We Do” is organized into 36 short, punctuated sections in which a woman becomes obsessed with the possibility and hope of getting pregnant. However, the mental and emotional disconnect between her husband and her forms a barrier that begins to divide them physically, as well.

He says, ‘I desire you.’ He means, ‘Every night I dream of other women.’

She says, ‘I desire you.’ She means, ‘I want to get accidentally pregnant.’

(p. 107)

These stories are most profound for their blurred boundaries: between characters, between concepts of reality, between desires, between conflicts. While there is the ongoing impression of hope, there really are no solutions for individuals who cannot identify or understand the sources of their problems.

Relationships dissolve because people cannot communicate. People cannot communicate because they don’t have a precise shared language between them. Love is fleeting because it is misguided or simply not genuine. Regardless, there is a continuous current shared among the characters to survive. While they may not be able to heal their emotional pain, they are resilient and at least manage to endure it.