Thanks for This Riot – Janelle Bassett

[University of Nebraska Press; 2024]

There are no riots in Janelle Bassett’s debut collection of short stories, Thanks for this Riot. The title comes from a text received by Leona, one of Bassett’s many anxiety-ridden narrators. After a day spent training a new coworker, a task she’s proud to have been assigned, Leona finds herself reflecting on how she might’ve come off. Out of nowhere, she decides to send the new hire a series of texts that culminate in an elaborate mea culpa:

I worked hard to achieve a narrow focus. I was once concerned about everything! The income gap, police brutality, climate change, fascism, unwanted pets, diet culture, Amazon.com, the narrow confinements of gender, institutional racism, rising anti-intellectualism, YOU KNOW THE LIST.

Leona goes on to explain the process by which she compresses her many anxieties, texting more and more, until the new hire finally responds: “Thanks for this riot. I GET YOU now. Hilarious.” Leona is perplexed. Though not entirely devoid of humor, she has yet to grasp “the joke that is me.”

The women and girls in Bassett’s fifteen stories are in various stages of grasping their inner absurdity. Against the absurd expectations of womanhood, their many quirks are difficult to fault, and sometimes extremely funny. Some, like Leona, struggle with basic social cues. Others, like Melinda—the new girlfriend of a father with three children—seem to snap right into roles they’ve been assigned. But each senses the need for greater self-awareness. Leona’s conflation of institutional racism and unwanted pets, for example, isn’t just cringey—it betrays the danger of centering one’s personal anxiety while trying to do the right thing.

In an interview with Jezebel, Bassett describes the Christian conservatism of rural Missouri, where she grew up, as a soup in which one is cooked: “I don’t think I could have articulated what, exactly, I was reacting to . . . It’s more of a gut-level resistance than an intellectual one.” Fittingly, when her characters experience growth, it never feels forced, or overly miraculous. Most are deep in the soup, and there’s no leaping out unscathed. In “Full Stop,” an introvert decides to step out of her comfort zone for an abortion rights rally at the state capitol. She is moved by the speaker with whom she carpooled, but her excitement is short-lived. As she realizes that the protest signs they’re taping up in the statehouse will be torn down in minutes, and that the governor will leave the building as comfortably as he arrived, she reverts to questioning her own motives. “We were taping up signs,” she observes, “like what we’d wanted to do all along was pass notes.” By failing to instigate any real confrontation, the rally’s organizers keep the protesters, and those in power, as comfortable as possible, easing the transition into a deeper ring of patriarchy.

The innumerable threats of the Trump era hang over Thanks for this Riot. One senses an audit of white feminism as Bassett probes the inner lives of those who would otherwise disappear into their own anxiety. In “Prove It,” a possibly supernatural piano bench compels anyone who sits on it to tell the truth. One woman takes a seat and recalls an excruciating dinner party in the 60s during which she felt so stifled that she pinched the hostess’s ass cheek just to see what would happen. When this elicited no reaction, she was distraught. She returned to her dessert feeling more invisible than ever: “I began to seriously doubt that I existed at all, and yet the pie on my plate was getting smaller and smaller and had to be going somewhere, down into something.”

Rather than boasting any urgent new things to say about the power structures stifling women, Bassett focuses on the importance of identifying that something, and learning how to more fully embody it. “Safe Distance,” which depicts a woman’s interrogation by her teenage niece, is a particularly poignant case. Gia wants to hear all of her Aunt Tina’s secrets. Craving Gia’s approval, Tina does her best to deliver. But when she tells too much, and Gia cries uncle, the spell is broken: Tina recalls that the girl she’s talking to is in fact her daughter, and that pretending otherwise is the only way she’s found to cope with the fear of “burdening her with my many manic regrets.”

Bassett excels at depicting the uneven burden of intimacy borne by women. It strains her characters’ relationships with their children, their partners, and themselves. For one narrator, the solution is a tryst with bulk trash. For another, it’s elective surgery to better manage her expectations. Love is a matter of discipline, explains one of the women who sits on the truth-telling piano bench: “My love only goes where I tell it. I send it toward control and order, doled out neatly when I have the time, when I’m up for it, when it’s safe to come out.”

Bassett’s earnest, straightforward diction suits her subjects’ desire to be taken seriously. Though packed with glib turns of phrase, the collection rarely seems droll for the sake of it—every statement feels too true to the character who utters it. When asked if she identifies as a humorist, Bassett said she feels “more like an unfortunate clown lady . . . humorists set out to tell funny stories, which is never my initial intention.”

In “No Space Is Too Small When Your Head Is Detachable,” a shut-in spends her days surveilling her neighbors. When she says, “It’s possible that I’m lonely, but not for anyone I’ve met so far,” one doubts she would appreciate us laughing.

Though often generalized, the anxiety that permeates the collection is no less informed by tangible danger. In “Babies Don’t Keep,” two young girls are followed through a store by their grandmother’s abusive ex. “Hey you!” he says, upon spotting the seven-year-old narrator. “You’re my grandbaby. Ain’t you my little grandbaby?” “I felt like he could do whatever he wanted,” the narrator says. “He’d claimed me as his grandbaby.” Bassett draws a persuasive line between moments like these and the reclusive lives that her adult characters tend to embrace. Connections, too often, mean relinquishing control, and none of the women in Thanks for This Riot have enough to spare.

Still, Bassett refuses to exempt them from the pursuit of self-awareness. She knows they can handle it. For all their fears, the fear of being wrong—or of being seen in the wrong light—rarely takes precedence. Even Leona’s mea culpa, with all its buzzwords, comes from a place of earnest principle, far removed from the ego-saturated world of social media. It’s the life of private rituals—the life that has protected so many of Bassett’s characters—that threatens to disconnect them from themselves. They sense the discomfort that avoiding such a fate will entail, and they are not amused. But to laugh at oneself is to reset one’s perception, and as Bassett reminds us, that can be enough to reveal the way forward.

Mike Nees is a case manager for people living with HIV. He hosts the Atlantic City Story Slam series. His recent stories appear or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The Greensboro Review, and Hunger Mountain Review. He lives in Philadelphia. mikenees.com