Short Change

Can a short story dramatize the effects of a warming planet better than a novel? With Planet Earth, Nicholas Ruddock makes a strong case that it can. Across eighteen stories, the writer and physician from Guelph, Ontario, considers the interplay between the important junctures in a person’s life and the history of ecological destruction.

This animating friction is on full display in “Marriage Story.” The narrator and his wife are both candidates for a selective space program. When they are passed over by their institute’s enigmatic director, the husband realizes that they have been chosen instead for an unexceptional existence:

the humdrum essence of the life he wanted us to have, our marriage, our children, the metronomic passage of time, the tick-tock tick-tock years consumed by trivialities and small disasters, the gamut of emotions commensurate with family life jigsawed onto the crust of this dying...