Droll Tales exhibits many elements of absurdist fiction: daft humor, illogical juxtapositions, the philosophizing of the banal, an obsession with meaninglessness...Its tone, however, is far from droll; what’s remarkable about this book is its exuberance...In 'Medusa’s Garden,' in which a former ballerina becomes a living statue, or 'Shelves,' about a poet who writes corporate manuals, Smyles revels in the antics of her prose...It’s arguable whether a story written entirely in pig Latin, or another composed of sentence diagrams, makes any meaningful advance on its premise...Other times, Smyles’s habit of punning or cracking (deliberately?) lame jokes can make a reader suspect that someone else is having all the fun...And so what if she is?...No matter the outcome, Droll Tales is written in such a way that seems to announce its author very much enjoyed writing it.
The connected stories in Iris Smyles’s Droll Tales are innovative—filled with surrealistic imagery, dark comedy, and people unmoored in their lives...The characters are a creative lot...They encounter ridiculous external conflicts and fully embrace them...Their conversations, while often surreal and occasionally nonsensical, are nevertheless erudite and witty, full of references to art and history...Two characters, lost after having finished college, joke with each other, and with an increasing sense of gallows humor, that they will be celebrities or the president, just until they get back on their feet...Veins of irony run thick throughout the text...Slick and self-assured, the stories of Droll Tales balance the surreal and the fantastical with the vulnerability of a generation now through with college and at a loss as to what to do next.
Fourteen stories featuring deeply weird characters moving through surreal and droll circumstances...Smyles knows her humor tends toward the surreal; she explicitly invokes that school in stories like 'Exquisite Bachelor,' a nod to the exquisite corpse game favored by surrealists; the story itself imagines central figures of surrealism, from Dalí to Breton, competing on the reality show The Bachelor...The collection is bookended by two long stories: The opener, 'Medusa’s Garden,' concerns a love triangle among the Guild of the Living Statues...In the closer, 'O Lost,' a lovelorn professor meets a mysterious smuggler and her motley crew of friends who force the professor to question the very nature of reality...Smyles’ jokes miss their mark as often as they land, partly due to the long, sometimes nearly hallucinatory tangents that pervade the collection, which can feel like Smyles merely writing for her own amusement...But at their best, the stories are erudite, original, and surprisingly poignant...An entertainingly eclectic, if self-indulgent, journey through the odder corners of existence.
