THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS BY DANIELLE EVANS
Danielle Evans takes on both the vagaries of time and the inescapability of history in The Office of Historical Corrections, a thematically-linked collection of a novella and six short stories. The settings and backgrounds of Evans’ tales lean into the more surreal side of the realistic—a not-quite-life-sized replica of the Titanic, an art installation consisting entirely of apologies—while the plots follow happenings that feel all-too everyday. A white girl thoughtlessly dons a Confederate flag bikini and is unwilling to face the consequences. A family deals with the multi-generational fallout of racism and unjust imprisonment. Two Black historians are forced into simultaneous companionship and competition. As the denizens of The Office of Historical Corrections wind their way through a series of repeating images—gift shops, estranged families, cancer-stricken mothers—they are confronted time and again with “the sometimes brutality and sometimes banality of anti-Blackness, the loop of history that was always a noose if you looked at it long enough.”
One of the many stand-out skills of Evans’s writing is the flexibility of her narrative voice, drawing in the reader with close, self-aware first-person speakers as well as ironically detached third-person reports. These engaging narrators, coupled with the finely-balanced juxtaposition of the very serious with the seemingly absurd, make for a mesmerizing collection that it is easy to get lost in. Structurally, the stories in The Office of Historical Corrections have a fascinating tendency to end in the middle of a moment, without coming to a complete or entirely comfortable resolution. Such is the cyclical nature of history, Evans seems to say. No moment is ever truly over.
—Review by Lily Buday
