“Language is pitiable when weighed against experience,” wrote Adina Giorno, the protagonist of Marie-Helene Bertino’s quietly stunning Beautyland (2024); perhaps true, but equally true is the transportive weight of Bertino’s writing, which allows us brief, but vital, glimpses of what it’s like to be in the shoes of the people she brings into existence in her stories. This was evident in Beautyland, and remains all the more so in Exit Zero, her first collection of short stories since her award-winning debut Safe as Houses (2012).

Incidentally, the story “Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours” from that collection expanded to become Beautyland. In it, Adina is an alien in the human body of a baby born to a Sicilian American working-class single mother in northeastern Philadelphia in 1977. She is sent from a planet 300,000 light-years away to “take notes” about Planet Earth and human existence. She passes along her observations to her superiors via an old repurposed fax machine her mother fishes out of their neighbour’s trash.

The characters populating each of the twelve stories in Exit Zero—though diverse in age, background, location, and experience—all figuratively share Adina’s alienation (“I am always ever-so-slightly out of reach”), and experience emotional, narrative, and physical distances that are cracked open by unique—and, more pertinently to Bertino’s work, strange and humorous—situations. They are all searching for something, often not knowing what; sometimes finding it but not always, and even then not in ways you’d expect.

There is a girl who wakes from a night out to find herself trapped in endless reruns of one specific Cheers episode; another who walks to get coffee from her friend’s cafe amid a literal deluge of ex-boyfriends who fall from the sky all around her; a septuagenarian divorcée who, in the aftermath of a vehicular accident, steals a huge portrait of Cher in a first act of post-divorce defiance; and an ageless woman, whose longevity is also her curse, on a quest to live a meaningful life. These are stories in which the strange is never questioned, only interacted with; sometimes embraced, and often initially ignored until it cannot be shunned anymore. The whimsical is the vehicle that propels the initial plot, but it is what these devices reveal about the true natures of and relationships between the characters that drives the narrative. The fantastical is used to explore existence, connectivity, loss, love, loneliness, joy, grief, and more.

In an interview with The Believer in 2021, Bertino discusses how she doesn’t believe in characters changing over the course of a story, and how—like one of her lodestars, Yoko Ogawa—she believes in being honest about a character, so that, instead of them changing, it is the world around them that is revealed in a new way: a change that perhaps was already present, just invisible until that moment of revelation. Reading this remark after finishing the collection made me return to the stories with a different eye, trying to connect the dots, and I realised that Bertino manages these often surprising revelations about the worlds her characters inhabit by making the familiar strange and the strange familiar—that is, by revealing the often delightful ways in which strange and familiar interact in and under our lives. This is what, in an old 2013 interview with the Paris Review, she describes as “enhanced realism.”

But, as she adds, all this works only if it serves the story and its characters. I can honestly say that she succeeds in each of the twelve stories here (even the ones, as there are in every collection, that didn’t quite land for me). It is a style that works so consistently because Bertino has a knack for infusing even her most uncanny and surreal of stories—and in this collection, every story contains an inherent unnerving, even the most upbeat and wholesome ones—with an at-times almost bludgeoning emotional heft (one that is often all the more potent because of an element of surprise).

In the opening visual of the first story, “Marry the Sea” (one of my favourites), a cargo ship unloading in New York Harbor drops a crate that explodes, letting loose thousands of pink and yellow parakeets. Despite the lone opening line stating “This never happened,” you’re immediately captivated by the series of fast-paced, sharply written vignettes that unfold, slowly knitting into one very satisfying narrative about a waitress who isn’t really meant to be one—“why is it impossible to hold the feeling of happiness inside me?”

These birds (which seem like a nod to Bertino’s 2020 FSG novel Parakeet) traverse the length and breadth of New York and its boroughs even as we meet a woman who lives aboard a ship emblazoned with the words I AM DYING on one side and AND YOU ARE TOO on the other; even as our narrator’s brother teaches her how to make a fist and how to fight; even as six-year-old James has a surgery to restore his eyesight and our narrator promises him that, while he’s in surgery, she will use his directions—make a left at Brooklyn, 95 south, fly over this cloud then that cloud, out through the atmosphere, quick left—to visit Saturn, so that she can tell him how it is. (I grew very fond of young James, so imagine my happiness at him being the protagonist of the later story “In the Basement of Saint John the Divine,” in which there is a strained parent relationship, but also knights and sleepovers in Gothic cathedrals, peacocks, and a tightrope walker.)

Another of my favourites here, “Flowers and their Meanings,” opens: “The summer my mother had hernia surgery, a tiger escapes from our tiny shore-town zoo.” What I particularly loved about this one, which takes place over a single summer, was the way it focused not on any of the more dramatic and bizarre occurrences that dot those months, but on the small, quiet things that the narrator reflects they will miss once they go off to college in the fall. For example, the seemingly simple and unmemorable mistake of getting into the wrong car in a parking lot morphs into an indelible, summer-defining memory. A welcome epiphany follows: It is possible to have a private relationship with time.

In “The Night Gardener,” meanwhile, Bertino uses an interesting narrative device to reveal the narrator’s existential concerns: What does a life with purpose look like, how do you go about finding that purpose, do we even need it? Claudia is a lonely woman hard at work on her entry to a local garden competition only to start receiving balloons from a mysterious, seemingly omnipresent sender with increasingly insistent notes addressed to her. In “Can Only Houses Be Haunted,” the uneasy, tenuous relationship between the narrator and her husband is parcelled out in unexpected morsels. This feeling of unease builds and overtakes the narrative—the haunted peaches that they buy from a farm stand when driving home from a weekend away simply the absurd scaffolding.

Part of Bertino’s allure is her fresh way of looking at the world and the way this perspective translates into how she uses language. In the titular story, one of the collection’s longest, we get a particular chance to truly immerse ourselves in one of the surreal worlds crafted by the author (“Exit Zero on the Parkway” are directions to the marshland town where her estranged father had lived). Jo is called to sort through her late father’s possessions at the house that now belongs to her—and which, she is startled to discover, also comes with a strong-willed, flatulent unicorn she will go on to name Jasmine. Bertino’s voice often offers this sort of poetic and playful bent, which transforms the ordinary into the unexpected. It is full of slanted metaphors and inventive turns of phrase—a dry wit, a sharp, expertly paced sparseness that never feels without.

She couples this with a skill in immediately establishing characters, scenes, and stakes that pull you in. And all of this is fuelled by a curiosity for exploring the crannies of our minds and hearts, bringing them out to the jagged light. We read that “an expression of glass fell over her in waves” or “the idea placed a crackle of energy into my elbows and knees.” Characters are “laminated in rain” or admire another “to the point of nausea”; we learn that “a forest is a verb.” And in “Marry the Sea,” the narrator rescues a dragonfly from a spider’s web using a car key, only for the web to shrink-wrap its left wing—“I bear witness. Is life very fragile or very resilient? This dragonfly’s struggle scores one for both.”

This collection of transitions evokes both fragility and resilience, too—as a whole, and individually. Each story offers moments of shift within the plot and characters; but the collection is also about the transitional nature of life. Feelings of fraying tethers, along with a simultaneous and deep sense of being rooted in our current, tumultuous present, means that Exit Zero is strewn with spectres of all shapes, forms, and realities—after all, “anything can be haunted as long as there is a residual memory and a location.” But there is something wondrous in each story, a reverence for life, death, everything in between and beyond. Each reminds us to “pay attention! and look alive!”