New World Order

by Derek Green

In this wide-ranging collection of stories, Derek Green takes readers on a tour of the world as America’s military-industrial complex reels into a new century. Written with grace, masterful precision and brutal honesty, New World Order shows us characters stripped of the familiar and forced to face the world on its own harsh terms. By turns frightening and comical, fierce and suspenseful, these eleven stories turn our attention outward, to a world where our role as Americans is no longer as clear and secure as it once seemed.

Genres: Short Stories

180 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2008

Reviews

[Keith Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remember the New World Order? It was going to remake everything before those planes flew into those towers. For a short time it created its own kind of people, not necessarily good ones. Derek Green wrote a lovely book about them. Here's a thing I wrote about his short stories:

https://annarborobserver.com/articles...

[V · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Boston Public Library has a nifty page where you can request the library purchases materials. I like to suggest books that were written or edited by people I know; in this case I knew the editor. If they take my suggestion seriously, they automatically put the book on hold for me when it comes in, but sometimes I don’t really know if I actually want to read it. I was ambivalent about this one because I’ve been disappointed by short stories recently, but on the other hand this writer was tackling issues that literary fiction often ignores. And when I finished this book, I was also ambivalent.

I realize now that Green’s writing style is more similar to a popular novelist than what you typically find in a literary journal. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it just threw me off guard. He writes very straightforward with minimal description, which makes each story a quick read. They would probably appeal to people who are normally wary of short stories.

There are two characters in this book that stand out to me for the clarity of their voices: a foul-mouthed Kiwi truck driver in the story “Road Train,” and a loquacious working-class Mexican totally unaware of how annoying he is in “Javier’s Silence.” Unfortunately, characters like this were not across in the 11 stories in the book. With the exception of one, his female characters were all terrible sexist stereotypes. The main character in the story “Macho” was a particularly hilarious “strong female character” who growled goddammit a lot, but actually really wanted to be sexually submissive to a man.

Half-way through the book, I remembered an essay in Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House where he says that if everything in your story is working towards one idea, something is wrong. In this essay he describes a workshop piece by a young student, a series of vignettes where each vignette portrayed an alcoholic father's out of control behavior. Even though the student had talent as a writer, after the first couple vignettes, the story loses its steam. We already know everything. There's no point in reading more.

I supposed Green's problem isn't quite the same. A lot of his stories are so light on characterization and setting that each instance of foreshadowing stands out like a radio tower on the prairie. It seems he had an idea for the plot and then populated the story with cardboard cutouts that could get him from point A to point B without any detours. I'm not one of those people who believes that good characters "tell the writer" where the story should go, but it is the job the the writer to make them seem like they have a life outside the plot.

Overall though, there were a handful of memorable stories. In addition to the two I mentioned, I also really liked “The Dangerous Season,” which incorporated elements of magical realism into a story about hard-drinking race car drivers in South America. I’m not quite sure why the quality of stories was so uneven, but maybe Green had a deadline to make.