Fans of Karen Russell’s short fiction and readers who enjoyed the suburban drama of Tom Perrotta’s Little Children (2004), Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (2017), or the tight-knit community explored in Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008) will savor Acampora’s latest. Wielding scalpel-sharp wit and a cool aloofness, Acampora brings her unique perspective on the American suburb to The Animal Room.
While stories like “Proxy” and “Tank” are unsettling, strange, and provocative, Acampora is not working at her best here. Perhaps the collection never reaches an incisive level of satire because it’s difficult to write from political and social positions one disdains. The point of view tends to flatten characters rather than illuminate inner lives that are rich and three-dimensional. Then again, at a time when major media outlets regularly publish stylish profiles of “alt-right” figureheads, one of Acampora’s points may be that it’s dangerous to imbue shallow or even hateful politics with too much credibility. Either way, the social commentary of this collection doesn’t land as successfully as in her older work, which navigates the political and the uncanny with more nuance and depth. An uneven collection with the occasional gem.
Acampora imagines a small town and its memorably conflicted inhabitants as indelibly as Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge stories and as intricately woven as Jennifer Egan’s 'Goon Squad' cycle.
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