The American Bourgeoisie Are the Revolutionaries

The dominant mode of American short fiction is a timeless portrait of a particular person in a particular milieu. After reading hundreds of these stories one begins to recognize the nods toward posterity, which deaden whatever effect the writer intended. Happily, the eleven pieces comprising Joseph O’Neill’s Good Trouble (Pantheon)— many of which first appeared in Harper’s and The New Yorker— succeed through an opposite approach. O’Neill writes with an urgent timeliness, as if these stories were written yesterday, with the politics and news you might have shared with your friends this very morning. The thrill of seeing the here and now transmuted into morally serious and comically rich prose is heightened once you realize its rarity.

O’Neill is the author of a memoir and four novels, most notably and . He is a living rebuke to Fitzgerald’s claim about second acts, having left a career as a barrister for one of writerly success (the PEN/Faulkner award; an Obama co-sign) and enviable teaching gigs (Bard College). He has a talent for dissecting the self-defeating and comic/tragic hypocrisies of the educated Western male. In “Pardon Edward Snowden,” a poet wrestles with a more famous colleague’s request to sign the titular poem-petition, which spirals out— O’Neill’s characters are forever spiraling— into a meditation on art’s ability to foment justice, and seesaws between