As much as I enjoyed reading Jonathan Papernick’s latest short story collection, There Is No Other, I worried, at first, that I wasn’t the right person to review it. Most of Papernick’s characters are Jews, concerned with questions of Jewish theology and philosophy—and I am, to put it delicately, a recovering Catholic. What do I know about being part of “an unlucky persecuted tribe,” as one of Papernick’s narrators calls it?

But the “Jewish questions” of these stories aren’t so unlike the questions anyone with a religious background must ask in the face of a relentlessly secular culture: Is it possible for a thinking person to align herself with organized religion when religious sentiment in our public discourse seems to be more about choosing sides than about spiritual potential? If so, how do we decide what part of our faith is meaningless ritual and what part has relevance to our actual lives?

In Papernick’s best stories, the spiritual and the mundane overlap in a kind of mythical realism. “The Miracle Birth” actually contains two unlikely labors: that of Shira Bavli, a middle-aged woman living in Kibbutz Yizhar, who has had to endure watching her neighbors “pushing forth an heir and a spare in rapid succession,” while she remains infertile until just shy of her fortieth birthday; and that of her unlikely daughter, Vered, who seems to have been born pregnant, but who won’t actually give birth until she’s a teenager. This story plays with the myth of the “Sabbath Bride,” the idea that every generation of Jews contains a virgin who will give birth to a potential messiah. And while it’s the mystery of Vered’s pregnancy—and her mother’s skepticism about its origins— that drive the plot, what’s most impressive is how Papernick grounds the story in the grittiness of everyday life on the kibbutz. Alongside divine births and questions of metaphysical time, we get asides about the gossipy “henna-rinsed bitches” who laugh at Shira when she slips in “mud and shit and yolk” after collecting eggs in the chicken house. But a story that takes on such mythical subject matter can’t stay grounded forever, and “The Miracle Birth” slowly, inexorably takes flight until birth and death become indistinguishable, the circle of life revealed in a way that feels both impossible and true.

Jonathan Papernick

Although “A Kiss for Mrs. Fisch” begins, literally, with a plane lifting off the earth, this story is even more grounded in everyday life. Gesh has just turned forty, and his parents have decided to pack him off to Israel after selling the family business and moving from New York City to Florida. “Maybe you’ll marry a nice Jewish girl,” his mother says. Once ensconced at his cousin Marty’s house in Jerusalem, Gesh refuses to leave his room for three days—his bed is too small, and “the tap water tasted funny, of rusted metal or worse, but he refused the bottled water that was offered him, thinking, God forbid I ever get that fancy.” Gesh is bewildered by the Israelis, who seem “so confident, so willful, as they spoke their gibberish.”

When Marty finally shames Gesh into visiting the Wailing Wall (“It’s your heritage, schmuck, your history”), he can’t even admit to himself that he’s praying: he’s just “asking a favor.” Gesh winds up finding his way into the weirdest brothel you’ll ever encounter on the page, and later passing through the Jaffa Gate into the “new city.” Once out there, he seems to be leaving behind all that a Jew “should” be, finding his way into the arms of a mother who lost her only son years ago.

If all this talk of mothers and sons and virgin births begins to sound, well, Catholic, Papernick is well aware of this overlap, addressing it in “The Madonna of Temple Beth Elohim,” in which a vision of the Virgin Mother appears in a temple to a young, Christian Iraq-war vet. Private First Class Jimmy Mahoney is a true believer who thinks he was saved in Fallujah from the fate of his three best friends only by “the grace of god.” And yet, over the course of the story, he must contemplate what it means to believe in sacred totems, from the Virgin Mother to the Purple Heart.

“My Darling Sweetheart Baby,” the tale of a down-and-out, blue collar worker who romances a local prostitute, doesn’t overtly concern itself with religious questions at all. But its characters are still searching for something—be it love, sex or money—that can save them. Papernick is at his best when he avoids didacticism. The weakest stories follow a formula: a young Jew resists ritual, only to encounter some kind of violence at the hands of a nasty Christian, thus affirming the need for tradition. But the essential questions asked in There Is No Other transcend religious affiliation: What is eternal in us, and what fades away? And how can we all—religious and secular alike—feel less alone?

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Like Ethan Gilsdorf, I was a teenaged gaming geek. I played a character named Shawna Stargazer in the futuristic role-playing game Shadowrun, then a half-elf thief in Dungeons and Dragons. Also, like Gilsdorf, I eventually left gaming behind, believing it had no place in the life of a fully actualized adult. Or maybe I just got too busy. Or perhaps it was the break-up with the guy who was our Dungeon Master (DM) that did it. At any rate, I moved on.

So did Gilsdorf. In his book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, Gilsdorf writes: “Dungeons & Dragons began to die for me when, during my senior year in high school, in 1983, I had my first kiss. My then-girlfriend’s highly realistic look and feel banished those fantasy leather-clad, busty she-warriors for good.”

Gilsdorf had more to escape than your average teen. In a prologue titled, “The Momster” he describes the “Kitchen Dragon”: “She hobbles around like an extra in a horror movie: old hag, hunchback, trickster.” This is Sara Gilsdorf, the author’s mother. Once a “free-spirited divorced mother who invited younger men home [and] read The Joy of Sex,” she suffered an aneurysm at thirty-eight which left her partially paralyzed and prone to epileptic seizures. Gilsdorf was twelve at the time.

Although the memory of Sara Gilsdorf haunts this book—which chronicles the author’s travels in the United States and abroad, hunting down various breeds of freak and geek—it is another woman who provides the impetus for his journey. At forty, Gilsdorf finds himself in possession of a blue cooler full of his old D&D gear and a “new love that was veering into the serious.” It’s this new love, and the pressure he feels from her to prove that he’s “ready for commitment, cohabitation and fatherhood,” that makes him decide to go on one last quest: to understand once and for all his obsession with role-playing games.

Ethan Gilsdorf

Ah-ha! You’re thinking—Fantasy Freaks is one of those books, the old I-travel-the-world-therefore-I-find-myself (on Oprah) trope. An “Eat, Love, Role-play” for the dweeb set. But one sentence later, Gilsdorf reveals a second ambition: “I had already become curious to know if any hot single gamers lurked out there, in the shadows, waiting for me.” So much for commitment.

Still, Gilsdorf’s guided tour through the gaming underworld is fascinating. If you’ve been out of it for a few years, like me, you might be surprised to learn many of its participants are also fully engaged in the real world, with mundane lives that include, of all things, child rearing. Gilsdorf introduces us to people like Elyse Boucher, a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) who met her husband, Mike Scott, at a Renaissance Fair in 1992. They bonded over Mike’s lithographs of “actual Dragon magazine covers and Spelljammer game art” and Elyse’s Monty Python jokes. Ah, geek love. It’s refreshing to read about folks like Nissa Ludwig, a disabled gamer who finds acceptance in “an alternate world where no one saw her crutches or wheelchair.” Naturally this leads Gilsdorf to muse on what it could have been like for his mother if she’d lived to see the great advances in video game technology: “The prospect of Mom playing again was an intriguing fantasy. Mom remaking herself. Choosing a new body. Becoming whole.”

When Gilsdorf interviews gamers or observes various forms of role-play, his prose is unadorned, even journalistic. We get factoids like the following: “A whopping 65 percent of American households, and 97 percent of children ages twelve to seventeen, now play some kind of video game.” But when the narrative concerns Gilsdorf himself—his struggle to overcome his self-consciousness and join in the games, or his attempt to figure out what’s going on with his unnamed paramour—he often lapses into generalizations and metaphor. “A big something happened about mid-way through my quest,” he tells us at one point. “A tic in my personal life became a twitch, and then became a series of oscillations and tremors that shook my world. On love’s Richter scale, the seismic event hit a 7.8.” Four paragraphs later we finally learn, in plain language, that he and his girlfriend have split. But without seeing or hearing this woman on the page, it’s impossible to understand why. At this point, Gilsdorf’s quest doesn’t seem to have anything to do with growing up and settling down, but with the pursuit of “hot single gamers.”

Near the end of the book, updating us on this relationship, he writes: “We each wore an invisible ring, or the Ring of Power, when it suited us…” At this point, I wanted to break up with the author. Give me the straight story, I wanted to yell. What’s really going on with you two?

As someone who once spent a fair amount of time around lovelorn gamers (myself among them) I recognize the evasion all too well. When reality becomes painful, it’s easier to communicate in a fantasy world where the rules are all written down. Still, let’s face it: Even when you’re breaking up with the DM who used to call you his Faerie Dragon, you know you’re breaking up. And when you tell your girlfriends about it later, drunk on cheap beer and woozy from too many Denny’s French fries, you don’t say that he hit you with a “spell of separation,”, you say that the fucking asshole cheated on you with a woman twice his age. One who had both fake boobs and a Harley. But I digress.

At long last, we get a snippet of dialogue between Gilsdorf and his lover/girlfriend/ex, as the two go for a walk in the woods: “Among many things she said that afternoon was how she’d always appreciated that I was a kid at heart. “Your Peter Pan qualities. That’s why I love you.” It’s hard to reconcile this with the notion, fostered throughout Fantasy Freaks, that this woman was always on the verge of breaking up with Gilsdorf because of said childlike qualities.

Regardless, what Fantasy Freaks does illustrate is that fantasy, in all its myriad incarnations, is always available to us, even if we only want to go as far as our comfortable armchairs. Gilsdorf does a fine job of reporting from the front lines. Despite his evasions, I found myself rooting for him by the end, even as he straps on his plus-two broadsword and heads off into the suburbs of Boston, hunting women and elves.

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