Book review of The People Who Report More Stress

Alejandro Varela’s quick story assortment, The People Who Report More Stress, explores many of the identical themes as his debut novel, the National Book Award finalist The Town of Babylon (2022). With biting humor, a pointy eye for the bizarre particulars that outline locations and relationships, a pleasant sense of play and so much of coronary heart, he examines the intersecting lives of a gaggle of principally queer and Latinx New York City residents. And although many of these characters are preoccupied with related issues and anxieties—systemic racism, gentrification, alienation and loneliness, the challenges of long-term partnership, Twenty first-century parenting, financial injustice and extra—they’re all splendidly particular and react to life’s ups and downs in their very own methods. The result’s a group that feels cohesive, thematically advanced and frequently shocking all of sudden.

One of Varela’s many strengths is the best way he makes use of humor to chop by all of the static and get to the guts of a personality or scenario. He appears to have an limitless provide of this humor, which could be dry and witty, bleak and just a little unhappy, or biting and satirical. In one story, a United Nations worker describes the workplace politics and hookup tradition of the assorted ambassadors, politicians and aides he works with. It’s just a little ridiculous and appears downright absurd at instances, but it surely by no means suggestions over the sting into whole camp. In one other story, a nanny for a rich Swedish household ponders the (once more, typically absurd) happenings inside their co-op constructing. Varela performs with this edge, blurring the road between the on a regular basis and the extraordinary, heightening the contrasts and contradictions that exist in our stratified world in a approach that makes all the pieces he writes really feel charged.

Many of the tales are interconnected, and several other characteristic an interracial homosexual couple, Gus and Eduardo, as they navigate their altering relationship over time. The tales that middle on parenting, household dynamics and intimate home moments are particularly poignant, as are the hilarious however by no means flippant tales about web courting. 

The People Who Report More Stress blends humor and social commentary with the factor that drives the very best fiction: an sincere and weak exploration of messy human relationships. Fans of Varela’s first novel, in addition to newcomers to his work, will discover so much to like on this assortment.