I requested Funny Once from Bloomsbury. I had the feeling, that all bibliophiles have from time to time, that I would like it. There are ten stories, taking place in Houston and Wichita mostly, and also New Mexico and Colorado. These are non-bicoastal stories about middle class Americans, that increasingly ephemeral social class.
Their literary quality is high. And the relations that Nelson chooses the write about can seem at an inventive tangent from what you might expect.
In “Literally”, we are in a liberal suburban enclave in Houston. Bonita works as a maid and Isaac is her eleven year old son. Bonita has claimed the zip code of her employer so Isaac can attend a better school with Danny, the offspring of her employer, Richard. Danny and Isaac are best friends, a relationship that may splinter in a year as both boys move on.
Richard is a widower but the two families have been close. Richard’s wife had helped Bonita get a restraining order against her abusive husband. And nowadays on parent teacher night, Richard and Bonita go together. Bonita is just the maid but there is the shadow of a suggestion that in this household she functions as more.
“Literally” is not a long story. Yet those pages are packed with detail, a piling up of a small mountain of domestic facts.
That plays into the strategy of the narrative. This story turns on what people don’t know. Antonya Nelson shares her omniscience with the reader. We can see what the characters are missing and it hurts. Antonya Nelson engenders a tense empathy in the Funny Once stories. Empathy as a form of tension. That’s interesting.
And there’s some fine scene setting. In “Soldiers Joy”, Nana, a middle aged wife, has returned to her childhood home in Wichita to lick her wounds. It’s back to her parents for a restart at an awkward point in midlife.
She’s taking a sanity break from her husband, a distinguished academic well into his sixties. Back when she and best friend Helen were students they were rivals for the attention of their charismatic professor. Helen seemed the more glamorous of the pair but the professor chose to marry Nana.
It’s evening and Nana is in a treehouse on the property next to her parents. She smoking hashish with the boyfriend of her youth. They have just had great sex in Nana’s childhood bedroom…hiding from Nana’s parents for the afternoon as if they were teenagers again.
Nana takes in the treehouse perspective at dusk. On one side she sees the lighted kitchen window of her boyfriend. Inside the kitchen will be his wife and kids preparing the family dinner that he will shortly join.
As she looks in the other direction she sees the kitchen window where her parents are preparing her meal.
Nelson conceives asymmetrical family relations. A former daughter-in-law finds herself closer to her ex-husband’s mother than that mother is to her son.
A woman is navigating her relationships with her ex-stepchildren. That gave me pause! Ex-stepchildren? Those kids are twice removed but she is still seeing them.
Nelson talks about a woman walking through the rooms of her house and the rooms are like shells of darkness through which she inhabits her life. In another narrative, despite the extended wealth of detail, the most salience is derived from the person who is not there.
The stories of by Antonya Nelson are a joy for any literate reader. A wonderful discovery for me which makes my face red since she is the author of ten books of fiction.
Intelligent, as sharp as your best kitchen knife, thoroughly entertaining. Available right now.
