Exit Zero
Marie-Helene Bertino
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025, $18
In her short stories, Marie-Helene Bertino transforms banalities into the breathtakingly surreal. Given such a compact format, it’s essential that the author engages the reader quickly. Each of the dozen stories in her new collection, Exit Zero, instantly sparks the imagination. Take for example the enticing lede of “Flowers and Their Meanings”: “The summer my mother has hernia surgery, a tiger escapes from our tiny shore-town zoo.”
The book’s title story centers around possessions left to Jo by her deceased father, from whom she was estranged. She is urged by the executor of the estate to take care of some “sensitive” items quickly—the next day, if possible. She drives to his house, cleaning up and finding not much except, curiously, apricot juice and zoo flyers. But she hears noises in the yard and discovers a silver unicorn, who promptly begins to chew up the kitchen after being brought inside. (“If it weren’t for the horn—the only pleasant thing about it, Jo thinks—navy-colored with flecks of glittery mineral issuing out from an active, spiraling core—it would look like a frustrated donkey.”) Jo can’t leave the unicorn alone, so she lowers the seats in her station wagon and the unicorn folds itself in, resting her muzzle on the console between the front seats, and they drive to the Econo Lodge where Jo’s staying. (Note the resonance of the motel as a netherworld refuge with that in Miranda July’s All Fours.)
Other stories concern ghosts trapped in a bag of farmers’ market peaches purchased on a drive home from Long Island; the buyers conclude that the only way to be rid of the ghosts is to eat all the fruit. In another, a woman finalizing a divorce (Lottie) shares a cab with an art dealer, and by default becomes caretaker to a diamond-dust portrait of Cher by Warhol after the cab crashes, the dealer dies, and Lottie is ignored at the potential buyer’s office. A woman spends an evening at the TV bar Cheers, interacting with Sam, Carla, Frasier, and Lilith. A boy who gains vision is taken by his father to Knightwatch, “an imaginative experience in a Gothic cathedral,” complete with peacocks.
As she did in her novel Beautyland, Bertino quietly injects magical realism into her writing, creating a vibration between daily tedium and a vast imagination. Her protagonists are regular people dealing with extraordinary situations. Rather than dramatizing the unreal phenomena, or drawing attention to how bizarre the situation is, she introduces the absurd in the same way she might describe making a pot of coffee. It provides a sort of delightful catharsis for the mind to come up with transportive scenarios without needing to justify their existence or mechanisms.
This article appears in June 2025.
