Reviewed by David Brizer
Exit Zero
by Marie-Helene Bertino
FSG Originals
April 2025, 208 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0374616472
Marie-Helene Bertino’s most recent collection of short fiction, Exit Zero, is strictly off-limits for those who object to having their imaginations and funny bones tweaked beyond telling.
This is no ordinary collection. The Bertino omnibus features a Guignol-esque cast of characters readers will readily recognize because, flights of abstruse and absurd fancy aside, they abide and strive, hungry ducklings all, within each of us.
That last metaphor – ‘….hungry ducklings all…’ – is practically Bertino-esque. Through narrative sleight-of-hand, via compression (over-determined word play and downright silliness), this Garden of the Finzi-Bertinis is lush with novelty, invention, and the kind of energy that makes you regret having to turn the page.
In one tale, there is a steady and literal downpour of old boyfriends and girlfriends – it is raining memories. In another story – some of these escape the confines of conventional narrative, they stray boldly into the realm of prose poetry, in the manner of Lisa Robertson and Laurie Scheck – there is a ribbon, a thread, a huge reminder: in the words of one story, THE HEART OF A HUMMINGBIRD BEATS 1400 TIMES A MINUTE.
One surrealist delight follows hard and fast upon the other. A woman at emotional sea visits the remains of her deceased father’s bachelor pad, barely treading water: the man was a unicorn fancier…Not just any unicorn, but a matzos-fressing one:
“Despite her best efforts, she has pieced together an image of her father’s life: He lived in an impeccable cul-de-sac in an organized house, eating diet dinners, shaving regularly, exercising his bi- and triceps with products ordered from television, and ignoring advice from doctors and zookeepers, with a drawer of old photos and a flatulent, possibly kosher unicorn.”
Or, in another of these absurdist romps, a Woman shares a cab which gets totaled…she’s left holding the bag, an unopened package from her now dead co-passenger within which lies a treasure beyond reckoning, a portrait of Cher. More precious than the Shroud of Turin…
In one story an existentially fraught bar fly, female variety, rubs elbows with an equally fraught Tristan Tzara-type. In another, Claudia, who is minding her business, tending to her garden, becomes the unwilling recipient of eldritch messages, messages dri-marked on many colored balloons: DO YOU LIKE YOUR LIFE? and, WE ARE VERY SCARED. WE ARE UNDER ATTACK. YOU CANNOT HELP US IT WILL SOON BE OVER THANK YOU.
Bertino is a writer’s writer. Readers and writers among us will appreciate the mountain upon which these stories stand, the mountain variously built up and fortified by the likes of A.M. Homes, Rick Moody, Joy Williams.
In another Bertino juggernaut, a boy gets bullied during a Medieval Times sleepover…the boy gets short-sheeted in his sleeping bag, but it’s okay, no biggie, because peacocks roam the campgrounds…Then there’s the one about the tiger who escapes from the zoo of a tiny [Jersey] shore town, the same summer the narrator’s mother has hernia surgery. No worries; the tiger is probably safe, if it made it to the Pine Barrens.
…Catching Bertino’s drift? One good surrealist juxtaposition deserves another, and in the main, the author roundly and convincingly succeeds. Two of the stories in the collection lack the brio and animation of the others but succeed anyway by dint of language magic and sheer pyrotechnics.
Exit Zero is not Marie-Helene Bertino’s debut book, far from it. Bertino is the author of three previous novels, Beautyland (2024), Parakeet (2020), and 2 Am at the Cat’s Pajamas (2014), and one previous short story collectin, Safe as Houses (2012.) Bertino is a writer to be reckoned with.<
About the reviewer: David Brizer is a Bronx-based book critic and author, His most recent novel, The Secret Doctrine of V.H. Rand, was published by Fomite in 2024.