DR. KING'S REFRIGERATOR
And Other Bedtime Stories
By Charles Johnson. Scribner. 123 pp. $20
It's always important to read the small print first. Facing a tight deadline, I plunged right in and read the first two stories and was not impressed. Can this be the same Charles Johnson who was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant, and who won the 1990 National Book Award for Middle Passage? (I've always felt that should have gone to his fellow nominee Felipe Alfau for Chromos.) Only then did I notice the subtitle calling these "Bedtime Stories" and a note in the back explaining that these two stories and three others "were originally written for Humanities Washington, which commissions local Seattle writers to read new stories. The yearly readings have become a major Seattle literary event." Ah, the literary equivalent of a night at the Boston Pops, then. In that case, I guess the first two stories weren't so bad, and probably went over well with the rain-drenched crowd.
Graham Greene divided his published fictions into "novels" and "entertainments"; this collection clearly belongs to the latter category. Bedtime stories are usually simple tales ending in a moral, and that's mostly what we have here. The first, "Sweet Dreams," is a Kafka-lite story about a fellow who is audited for not paying his "Dream Tax," a government revenue scheme by which every citizen must pay for any and all dreams, including daydreams. The unnamed protagonist loves to dream and consequently hasn't reported them all. Kafka would have strapped him to a torture apparatus, but Johnson lets him off with a fine. The sympathetic auditor tells him, "I know, I know. Those who dream more always pay more," a comforting platitude for artists and other dreamers.
"Cultural Relativity" makes reference to the Eddie Murphy movie "Coming to America" and reworks its plot as a Grimm fairy tale. In "Dr. King's Refrigerator," a young Martin Luther King Jr. is stumped for the theme of his next sermon until a midnight visit to his well-stocked refrigerator reveals to him the Lord's bounty. "Better Than Counting Sheep" pokes fun at academic life, and "The Queen and the Philosopher" is an account by Descartes's valet of his master's fatal trip to Sweden to become Queen Christina's tutor. Those are the Seattle Pops stories, pleasant bedtime stories for the rest of us.
The remaining three are a little more challenging. "Executive Decision" employs second-person narration to engage the reader in making a tough decision regarding affirmative action: Given two equally qualified candidates for a job, do you choose the white woman or the black man? The narrator and his colleagues struggle with ideas of reparation and social justice in addition to more mundane considerations of increasing market share and shareholders' value. The story reads a little too much like a civics lesson, but readers can see if their choice matches the one given in the final sentence.
"The Gift of the Osuo" is the most carefully wrought story in the collection. This fairy tale is set in an Islamic African nation in the 17th century, ruled over by a "kind, large-bellied king" named Shabaka Malik al Muhammad. One day, two osuo (sorcerers) come before him to settle the same question Descartes wrestled with (as his valet tells us in "The Queen and the Philosopher"): whether Mind is superior to Matter, or the other way around. The king hasn't a clue, but in a moment of inspiration decides both are equally important. The sorcerers are delighted and reward him with a magic stick of charcoal: "Whatever you sketch with this shall leap hugely to life." The bored king reinvents himself as an artist, drawing/creating a lovely young wife to replace his old one and refurbishing his kingdom, though with disastrous results. "Reality can be beaten with enough imagination," says Mark Twain in one of the book's epigraphs, and in Shabaka's venture we have an allegory of the joys and sorrows of artistic creation. The language (except for one incongruous reference to Chagall) is tighter in this story than in any of the others, enriched by mentions of African terms, tribes and customs that aren't explained but simply there, as if Johnson is telling the tale straight from a 17th-century African's point of view. (The fable is quite engaging as well.)
The final story, "Kwoon," is probably the best -- written 15 years ago, it has been anthologized often -- but it feels out of place, a little too serious for a collection of "bedtime stories." It deals with the owner of a martial arts school (a kwoon) in Chicago and of the beating he takes from one of his older students, shaming him in front of the class; he invites the brutal student back for "a private lesson in budo" -- the spiritual side of martial-arts training -- and teaches him a lesson he'll never forget, and not the one the reader may expect. Its inclusion could be justified because it, too, is a didactic tale that provides a moral, but I suspect it was added to pad out this thin collection. It belongs with Johnson's literary works, not his entertainments.
The range of settings in this collection is impressive, from a kwoon on Chicago's South Side to a corporate boardroom in Seattle, from 17th-century Sweden and Africa to the pre-civil rights South, to a future where we pay taxes on dreams. "Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure" is another of the book's epigraphs (from philosopher Alfred North Whitehead), and Johnson's fans should enjoy these day-trip adventures until his next novel comes along. •
Steven Moore, a literary critic, is writing a history of the novel.
