Short Story Review Assignment-- “Orientation” by Daniel Orozco

[Pages:6]Short Story Review Assignment-- "Orientation" by Daniel Orozco

Outline your review using this worksheet and then write or type a formal review of the story. Identify the following: Protagonist Narrator Point of View Setting Meaning or Message behind the story

Craft/Style/Structure of the story

Your opinions of the story

REVIEW: Orientation by Daniel Orozco

editor May 24, 2011

"Orientation" by Daniel Orozco is a short story so good it was published and anthologized a full decade before headlining its author's debut collection.

But I had never heard of the story, last year, when my creative writing class and I decided to read it aloud together. There was no way I could've known how good it would be--the kind of good that makes you giddy, the kind of good that reminds you what fiction is capable of in the hands of an author who's tuned to the crackpot voices in his head but is also able to finetune and tame those voices--the kind of author, who, like you, detects the teeming schizo wavelengths humming under every civilized effort to control ourselves, to behave, to be sensible.

Innocuously enough, the story begins: "Those are the offices and these are the cubicles. That's my cubicle there, and this is your cubicle. This is your phone. Never answer your phone. Let the Voicemail System answer it." It's more or less the kind of thing you would expect from an office orientation. But less than a page later, cracks appear in the surface of Orozco's cubiclecrammed reality: Ask too many questions and you may be let go. Receptionists always leave. John LaFountaine from time to time "accidentally" uses the women's restroom. Russell Nash is in love with Amanda Pierce... And as the orientation continues, cracks widen into fissures: we learn of Amanda Pierce's husband, a lawyer who "subjects her to an escalating array of

painful and humiliating sex games, to which Amanda Pierce reluctantly submits. She comes to work exhausted and freshly wounded each morning, wincing from the abrasions on her breasts, or the bruises on her abdomen, or the seconddegree burns on the backs of her thighs."

At this point my class and I, taking turns reading the story, begin to split into two camps: those who get it, and those who do not. I am in the prior camp. I get it. My throat constricts with suppressed laughter when I try to make it through a passage about a quarterly meeting during which Anika Bloom's left palm begins to bleed, causing her to go into a trance and predict how and when Barry Hacker's wife will die:

"We laughed it off. She was, after all, a new employee. But Barry Hacker's wife is dead. So unless you want to know exactly when and how you'll die, never talk to Anika Bloom."

It gets weirder from there.

Anyone with a taste for the absurd will find Orozco's deadpan KafkacumBarthelme shortcircuiting of reality hard to resist. Nonetheless, Orozco doesn't seem like the kind of guy to experiment merely for experiment's sake. Like the best artists, he is concerned more with ends than means. If his ends demand unconventional means, he'll use them he'll write a story from a police blotter's point of view if he has to.

But the real magic isn't Orozco's surprising story structure. Rather, it's his ability to convince us that these characters exist, that they are just like us, and that if we could dip from consciousness to consciousness to view each one from the inside--the way a god's eye might in one quick flash behold an entire life in an instant--then we might know better than to fume over a botched office romance, or pull a trigger and kill a man for no good reason, or spend a life grieving over some sad thing we wish we had never seen.

Orientation, by Daniel Orozco After waiting impatiently for Daniel Orozco's debut story collection, J.T. Bushnell finds that it exceeds all expectations. Bushnell calls these stories "full of satire and absurdity and insight."

In many stories, the objective nature of the form enhances this conflict. The point of view is often distant and impersonal, even as the action dives into deeply personal arenas. No story demonstrates this better than "Orientation," which takes the form of a monologue, a supervisor introducing a new employee to the building: "Those are the offices and these are the cubicles. That's my cubicle there, and this is your cubicle." He goes on to describe telephone policy, forms processing, kitchenette protocol. Like in "Officers Weep," the form emphasizes regulation and procedure, uniformity and bureaucracy, and it gives Orozco the chance to lampoon those things. The supervisor explains, for example, that breaks are a privilege that can be revoked, but that lunch is a right. "If you abuse the lunch policy, our hands will be tied and we will be forced to look the other way. We will not enjoy that."

But again, the story goes much deeper than simple satire. In the course of these impersonal introductions, the supervisor begins to drift into personal territory, describing the lives of other workers:

The men's room is over there. The women's room is over there. John LaFountaine, who sits over there, uses the women's room occasionally. He says it is accidental. We know better, but we let it pass. John LaFountaine is harmless, his forays into the forbidden territory of the women's room simply a benign thrill, a faint blip on the dull, flat line of his life.

The results are funny, but they're also disturbing, because the detachment of the narrator highlights the separation that office bureaucracy imposes on its workers. The secrets become darker and more personal--love circles, sexual humiliation, stigmata, even a serial killer--and they are juxtaposed with explanations of the Mr. Coffee and the supplies cabinet, creating a strange combination of intimacy and detachment. Just after the narrator describes the hauntings performed by Barry Hacker's dead wife and unborn child, for example, he says, "We have four Barrys in this office. Isn't that a coincidence?" One woman, Gwendolyn Stitch, decorates her cubicle with penguins, organizes social functions, offers professional and emotional support, but none of it breaks her isolation, or the bleak objectivity of the narrator:

Because her door is always open, she hides and cries in a stall in the women's room. John LaFountaine--who, enthralled when a woman enters, sits quietly in his stall with his knees to his chest--John LaFountaine has heard her vomiting in there. We have come upon Gwendolyn Stitch huddled in the stairwell, shivering in the updraft, sipping a Diet Mr. Pibb and hugging her

knees. She does not let any of this interfere with her work. If it interfered with her work, she might have to be let go.

In other words, the personal does not matter; only the work output does. Here are these people in close proximity, spending their time together, knowing the private details of one another's lives and yet ignoring them, and thereby ignoring each other, retaining their isolation even within a crush of human need and longing. For them, personal intimacy creates separation rather than connection--the more intimately the characters know each other, the greater their alienation.

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