Aerialists: Stories
By Mark Mayer

304 pages, Bloomsbury Publishing (February 19, 2019)

Reviewed by ROBERTA GATES
January, 2019

Mayer is especially skilled at rendering the lives of children, as four of his other stories demonstrate. In Strongwoman, Junior, an 11-year-old boy whose dad has split, is forced to make room for a new person in his mother's life - in this case Klara, a female bodybuilder who bungee jumps, makes her own hot sauce, and wears "a magnetic bracelet that balances her blood flow." She is almost more than Junior can handle.

In Solidarity Forever, Jacob, a nine-year-old boy being raised by his aunt and uncle, spends a disorienting summer immersed in the milieu of communism. During the day, he marches with his Aunt Rebecca outside a Coors brewery, protesting with workers who don't even have a union. Meanwhile, Uncle Bart - upset by the sight of Boris Yeltsin "on top of a tank, stamping his fists and ending the Soviet Union" - remains at home where he's sequestered himself in the basement, eschewing meals and trying to prove the merits of communism through math. Jacob, uncertain what to think, watches assiduously from the sidelines while seeking solace in whatever patterns he can discern in the world around him.

Twin, a story employing magical realism, is especially moving. In it, 11-year-old Maple is able to communicate "mind to mind" with her friend Sasha, an aphasic girl so disabled she's confined to a wheelchair and has to wear diapers. Though they're perfectly matched mentally if not physically, circumstances beyond their control threaten to separate them.

And in The April Thief, a junior high-aged boy named Parker tries to conjure his missing mother using a number of bizarre strategies, many of which involve his best friend, Javier, and Javier's smelly dog, Sid. "Your family is weird," Javier tells Parker one day, before immediately adding, "I love them."

The two final stories in the collection are real winners. In The Clown, a Lexus-driving realtor serves as the perfect example of the weirdness which lies just beneath the surface of everyday life, because, while he's good at his job, he's much more interested in his hobby - which is murder, always undertaken in full regalia (a wig the color of a "bruised strawberry," porcelain teeth filed to a point, and nails that he made himself from molded tin).

By contrast, The Ringmaster, which is the last story in the collection, is bittersweet, describing the efforts of an unmarried retiree to find a home for the massive train set which was his life's passion.

Meyer's use of both language and humor is nimble and surprising. A young girl's eyes are "green with little sunflowers," while a circus elephant smells like "a paper bag of crickets." And "Nope [is] a soapy bubble. Its denial floated there, casual, coolheaded, certain, then swallowed itself with a terminal pop."

And the humor, though gentle, is firmly rooted in close observations of the world around us: "Prairie dogs [on the trail] hustled half-heartedly for cover; they knew the humans didn't have teeth" or "It sounded like a VCR guzzling magnetic tape," but was actually "the squeaky mewing of gerbil babies blindly drawing milk.".

If you think that short stories are less satisfying than novels, give Aerialists a try and find out for yourself how delightful and gratifying a collection of well-told stories can be.