The Office of Historical Corrections
Danielle Evans
Reviewed by Lily Buday
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.