THE PEOPLE WHO REPORT MORE STRESS

Anxiety from daily encounters with racism and homophobia plague the transracial gay couple at the heart of this debut story collection.

Varela’s second book, after The Town of Babylon (2022), experiments with form and point of view—employing first-, second-, and third-person in various stories—but returns again and again to the New York City lives of Eduardo, a public health expert of Salvadorian and Colombian heritage, and his White husband, a coder named Gus. The Eduardos and Guses encountered throughout the collection are not from a singular timeline or moment in their histories, however. “Grand Openings” offers a litany of different life paths for the pair, including polyamory, separation, untimely deaths, and differing relationships with their children. Individual stories offer more subtle variations—naming a child Julio versus Jules, a marriage ended by opening the relationship versus a marriage ended by Eduardo’s frustrated retreat from a discriminatory world, a basil plant thriving or dying. The imagery may appear pedestrian (except in the standout “All the Bullets Were Made in My Country,” which includes the story of the mythic L’Ampara), but the prose shines throughout, with razor-sharp specificity about human nature and an entrancing rhythm. The stories are not constructed with equal precision, though, so the endings of some feel haphazard, and there are occasional instances of overly obvious moralizing. Nevertheless, the collection shows a writer of impressive imagination continuing to deepen his craft.

An unbalanced but still rewarding collection that paints a vivid picture of navigating a hostile world together and alone.