cover image DR. KING'S REFRIGERATOR: And Other Bedtime Stories

DR. KING'S REFRIGERATOR: And Other Bedtime Stories

Charles Johnson, . . Scribner, $20 (144pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-6453-2

Sages squabble, philosophers deliberate and kings dream in this collection of eight short stories by National Book Award–winner Johnson (Middle Passage, etc.). Like fairy tales for policy-minded grownups, the stories revolve around ethical and philosophical decision making. In "Executive Decisions," the head of a Seattle company ponders which of two candidates to hire for an important post. The easy favorite is a white woman, capable and personable; the other contender is a tense, watchful black man, who knows "firsthand and through research... the contributions from people of color." In the end, the narrator's decision hinges on a revelation about the role of a black woman in his own white father's past. Though wooden in conception (like many of these stories), the tale comes to life at its ambiguous ending. Johnson's longer, more carefully fleshed out stories are most effective. In "The Gift of the Osuo," the king of a 17th-century African tribe is given a magic chalk that allows him to draw anything and make it come to life. The things he draws resemble "not the Real, but the Real transfigured," and it's the magic of this vision that transforms an otherwise ordinary fable. The didactic flatness of most of the other entries—including the title story, in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. finds inspiration in lettuce and grapefruit—isn't quite obscured by occasional bursts of inventive language and insight. Agent, Anne Borchardt. (Feb.)