Fortune Smiles

The title story follows two North Korean defectors sharing a cramped Seoul apartment, adjusting at wildly different speeds to a South Korea that offers them freedom without any instructions for using it: one grows fluent fast in the city's consumer abundance while the other, still loyal to habits of mind the regime spent a lifetime installing, can't stop weighing whether defection was worth what it cost him. George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine gives the same displacement to a former Stasi prison guard turned tour docent at his old facility, now a museum, who spends the story trying to correct the museum's account of what actually happened there using the only skill his old job gave him, close, patient surveillance, this time turned on the historians he suspects of getting the record wrong.

Elsewhere in the collection, a widowed father immerses himself in a virtual reconstruction of his dead wife built from her old emails, voicemails, and messages, rather than let a single detail of the real woman go. Across all six stories, technology keeps offering Johnson's characters not connection but a more sophisticated way to avoid the loss in front of them, a hologram, an archive, a museum tour standing in for the harder, slower work of actually grieving.

Johnson refuses to let either man's adjustment stand as the right one, the more fluent defector's ease reads as its own kind of loss, an old self discarded almost too easily, while the more homesick one's loyalty to the regime that starved him reads as its own kind of self-betrayal, and the story ends without choosing between them.

The former guard applies his old surveillance instincts to catching tour guides in small factual errors, a former instrument of the state now aimed at preserving an accurate record of that same state's cruelty, and Johnson lets the irony sit without comment, a man who once watched prisoners now watching historians instead.