A Review of “We Want What We Want” by Alix Ohlin, Reviewed by Kayla Wiltfong

A Review of “we want what we want”

by Alix ohlin

Reviewed by KaylaWiltfong

We Want What We Want is Alex Ohlin’s latest collection of short stories, thirteen in all. Uniting the stories in this collection is a heavy helping of dramatic family dynamics—dynamics which are pushed to the extreme by unlikely situations, or simply the short story format in itself, yet which are recognizable to anyone who’s been part of a family, themselves.

Some of these stories take risks and venture into the speculative, and the risks fall flat. The book opens with one of these stories, “The Point of No Return,” about a notquite friendship between two women, Brigit and Angela. The narrative follows them from the time they meet each other in Barcelona while jet-setting in their twenties, to their domestic lives back in Canada once they have formed families. At the end of the story, Angela has developed some sort of illness— though whether it’s the physical illness she claims, or a mental illness driving her to delusion, is left up to the reader. Angela believes that she has a contagious illness, maybe one caused by electricity, and alienates herself from her family. Brigit can’t believe that she is somehow still the once-bubbly Angela’s best friend, as they haven’t kept in touch. The story pits Angela against her ex-husband and her son, and foils Brigit and Angela against each other, with a vague sense of camaraderie fostered between them. By the end, this newfound connection still isn’t

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enough for Brigit to maintain contact—she doesn’t stay in touch.

Brigit goes back to her own family, and the story ends with her considering how easily her life could have ended up differently.

Although the story is fairly short, it moves slowly. The most interesting part, Angela’s electricity-related disease, takes up such a small part of the story that the reader barely has room to digest what’s happening or what the development of this illness symbolizes. The story has the opportunity to commit to manifesting an otherworldly disease, but it falls short.

“Taxonomy,” the other story that relies heavily on the unexplainable, also flops. Ed, father to scientist Meredith, is driving to meet her half-brother. Meredith is in Madagascar and doesn’t know her biological mother walked out on her as a child. We never meet Meredith; we only get to know her through Ed’s eyes. When Ed arrives at his ex’s old family property, he discovers that Mordecai, the half-brother he’s been communicating with, is almost forty and not his ex’s child.

Instead, Mordecai is half-brother to Meredith’s actual halfbrother, a little boy named Magick, who he’s been taking care of. Mordecai wants Meredith to meet Magick, but Ed doesn’t want to distract Meredith from her studies. Magick, near the end of the piece, performs a real Magick trick, and then Ed leaves, certain that he will never tell Meredith about the family he has hidden from her.

In “Taxonomy,” there is no question that Magick is actually magical—his trick would be impossible otherwise. However, the meaning of the story is difficult too apprehend. Ed comes away from his experience with the two half-brothers with the same resolve he had going in. His perception of his ex doesn’t change after meeting her other children. And Meredith, who the story is centered around, isn’t an active character in the story. It feels as if something was left out, and if the story had sat with the

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characters a little bit longer, it could actually say what it set out to say.

This pattern continues in “Taxonomy” and “The Point of No Return,” continues throughout the remaining twelve stories in the book, many of which feel like they’ve ended early or have key details left out. By the end of the collection, the reader is left wanting just one more symbol or situation to signal what the point of each story was supposed to be.

The best stories in this collection remain in the realm of the possible. These stories illustrate family dramas playing out in interesting situations. In “Money, Geography, Youth,” a daughter comes home from a year on a mission trip in Africa to find her best friend and her father engaged, and herself lost. In “Something About Love,” a husband deals with his guilt over his previous marriage by staying up at night to make sure his new wife is breathing. In “Service Intelligence,” a college dropout and her aunt find common ground, and deal with sexual assault while working as mystery shoppers. In “Nights Back Then,” a woman goes through several relationships while dealing with a miscarriage and one artist boyfriend’s refusal to take his seizure preventative pills. While the situations in these stories may be unusual, they perfectly explore universal human experiences. If you decide to pick up We Want What We Want, these four stories are absolute must reads.

The other seven stories in the collection vary in effectiveness and memorability, bringing about the same feeling of: This could have been so good—where’s the rest?

We Want What We Want may not be afraid to take risks, but it is afraid to commit to them. In the end, this means that some of the collection’s most memorable pieces, ones with speculative premises, leave the reader unsatisfied. At the same time, some of the collection’s more realistic pieces fail to make an influence on

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the reader at all. The best stories in the collection take rare but still possible situations and focus on the characters who found themselves there—a resounding balance of reality and risk.