The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans
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The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories
By Danielle Evans
Riverhead Books, 2020
Cecilia, one of the characters in The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories, has a tattoo with a quotation from William Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Author Danielle Evans drops this line casually: her character belonged to a college literary society where she and her fellow students “came up with the brilliant idea of tattooing ourselves with quotations from our favorite authors.” Cecelia’s chosen line is the backbone for Evans’s entire book. Just as Faulkner did, Evans tries to make sense of how history has shaped her characters. The past that matter most to them is both collective and personal. The characters grow up in a world shaped by America’s long history of racism and sexism, but many are also living with personal grief—often the specific grief of a young woman losing her mother to cancer. Their pasts echo through their presents as the characters come to understand both the importance of long-term friendships and the complicated movements toward forgiveness and redemption.
Despite the seriousness of these themes, Danielle Evans writes with a great deal of stylishness and wit. Her short stories feel expansive despite their few pages, often taking readers through a series of surprising revelations and major plot twists inserted in unexpected places. These shifts can leave readers gasping as they race to keep up with the prose. The volume’s concluding novella has a more thoughtful pace and a more conventional in its narrative structure, but it is equally stunning.
One of the strongest short stories in this knock-out collection is “Boys Go to Jupiter.” Claire’s summer boyfriend Jackson hands her a bikini—“three triangles and some string”—with Confederate flag imagery of “the stars and bars marking her tits and crotch,” and she agrees to wear it. Although neither bikinis nor Confederate flags are “Claire’s thing,” she puts on the bathing suit to please Jackson--and she annoy her “almost stepmother” who thinks it makes her “look like white trash.”
At the end of summer, Jackson posts a photograph of Claire wearing the bikini on social media. As she flies back to college, a Black girl from her dorm sees the photograph and responds with discomfort. Soon Claire’s inbox is filled with texts ranging “from hostile to bewildered.” Rather than apologizing, she responds defiance. “Claire is surprised by the level of interest, then annoyed by it,” writes the author. “She distrusts collective anger; Claire’s anger has always been her own.”
And then, at a moment when readers find Claire to be obnoxious and perhaps unredeemable, Evans gradually explains Claire’s history. When she was in secondary school, her best friend was a Black girl. The two girls’ mothers went through treatment for cancer at the same time, and only one died. The complex fallout of that death is a history that haunts Claire. Although we are never asked to fully sympathize with Claire, Evans helps readers begin to understand her, no matter how unsettling we might find her behavior.
The final story in Evan’s collection is the novella that lends the book its title. Cassie Jacobs, a former history professor, works in a federal office building as an investigator for the Institute of Public History. Designed to be “a new public works project for the intellectual class,” the Institute hired historians across the nation to correct inaccuracies on placards at monuments, museums, and even souvenir shops. Critics nicknamed the IPH everything from The Big Brother Institute to The Bureau of Whitewashing. The Office of Historical Corrections stuck.
After the Institute’s director asks Cassie to fix their “Genevieve problem,” she packs her bags for Wisconsin to investigate a complaint against her former colleague. Genevieve’s “most persistent and controversial grievance was the passive voice atrocity: wherever there was a memorial, she wanted to name not just the dead but the killers,” explains the author. “She thought the insistence on victims without wrongdoers was at the base of the whole American problem, the lie that supported all the others.” In an almost-exclusively white town northwest of Milwaukee, Genevieve had replaced a plaque memorializing a black man burned to death in an arson attack in order to name his attackers. A descendent of one of the arsonists questioned the accuracy of the plaque and requested a clarification from the IPH.
Cassie and Genevieve were more than colleagues. The two women had been friends and rivals since they were young, when they were among the only Black students at a predominantly white prep school in Washington, DC. Although they attended different colleges, they found themselves together again in graduate school and then at the IPH. Cassie’s assignment to reign Genevieve in sets off a mystery with revelations that cut to the heart of the nation’s racial imagination. By facing the truth of a past filled with desperate attempts for liberation—as well as saturated with their own personal history of division and sadness—Claire and Genevieve are able to bring about a kind of resolution and even reconciliation.
Danelle Evan’s book will leave readers with their hearts exposed, eager to see what she produces next.
Hannah Joyner is a book reviewer and independent scholar living in Washington, D.C. Her work includes Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson (with Susan Burch) and From Pity to Pride: Growing Up Deaf in the Old South. You can hear her talk about her bookish life at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.