We Midwesterners might be better known for our politeness than our sense of humor, but I like to think we can be pretty funny. Take St. Louis-based Janelle Bassett, author of the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize-winning short story collection, Thanks for This Riot. The book is many things: smart, tender, astute — but as the title implies, humor is the heartbeat of this remarkable collection dealing with family and femininity.
The humor isn’t necessarily laugh-out-loud, yet still a total — forgive me for this — riot. It’s often understated and witty, and Bassett delivers humor in a variety of ways: the premise of some stories (one is about an unidentified animal who posts on social media — maybe our quest for likes is primal?), titles (“No Space is Too Small When Your Head is Detachable”), sentences (“When she felt she had no one, she took a walk and proposed marriage to all the big bulk trash left out on the curb”), and even on Bassett’s website, where you can find the funniest author photo I’ve ever seen — in it, she’s attempting to climb into (or out of?) a window. The photo isn’t just funny, but delightfully on brand since Bassett’s work deals so much with the performance of womanhood. Over and over the stories feature narrators seeking solitude or independence from their roles as daughters, wives, girlfriends and caretakers. These characters, who, like us, live in a gendered society, are seeking autonomy and freedom.
While Thanks for This Riot might not be overtly political, at a time when certain bodies are both weaponized and under attack, a few of the stories speak to current concerns; most obviously, “Full Stop,” which is about a mother who travels to Jefferson City to protest Missouri’s latest abortion ban. She rides with a stranger, a female voice actor, who offers an impassioned speech to the crowd — meanwhile, the narrator is struck by the futility of the protest as she places her sign by others that say, “TRUST WOMEN,” noting “in our present circumstances [that] seemed like an advanced directive. Perhaps we should have started with “SEE WOMEN” and worked upward from there.” And in the opening story, “More Restrictive Than Supportive,” Lydia’s overprotective parents finally allow her to hang out with her friends unsupervised and she decides to wear a strapless bra for the first time. The girls go to an entertainment complex, where Lydia only has enough money to do one activity with her friends. As her friends play laser tag, Lydia wanders the complex, ending up in the bumper car track, and finally understands her mother: “She was only genuinely concerned about my soul, but my body was the part of me she could boss around. She hyped up the world’s danger in order to control me, used fear as a weapon against the lure of ungodly influences and against the forward momentum I was born with.” With such cutting astuteness in the very first story, I knew I’d found a solid collection I’d tear through before revisiting.
But not all the stories are so hyper-realistic and intimate; some are strange and speculative. In “Enviable Levels,” the narrator is fascinated by an experimental “Lowered Expectations” procedure (LoExa) that manipulates one’s expectations so their desire for things is lessened — and going extra low, like one social media sensation, means the person will need assistance to do things like brushing their teeth. In “Perceptor Weekly,” a newspaper writer meets a perceptor, who knows things about her he shouldn’t. Some readers might find the placement of a story like “Full Stop” immediately after one like “Enviable Levels” a bit jarring, but this reader found it as amusing as Bassett’s humor. Reading this collection can feel like Lydia does in the bumper car track: the jolts show us what it means to be alive.
Bassett gives herself permission to push boundaries throughout the stories in this collection. Yet it’s not like Thanks for This Riot lacks cohesion or organization — it’s divided into three kinds of riots: external, internal and laughter. Each story, then section, builds off the next, each having its own tone. The laugh riots are, arguably, the lightest — though, that’s where “Full Stop,” the story about fighting for reproductive justice, is found. Can we laugh when our rights are under attack? Thanks for This Riot suggests why not; maybe the key to social resistance is learning how to laugh as we fight.
