Some Fun: Stories and a Novella

Another collection of short stories and another rave review. Just reading the list of writers who read Nelson (including Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace to name a few) would be enough to convince me to do the same if I wasn't already a fan of hers from her articles in the New Yorker. She's won a ridiculous number of awards and is obviously a highly acclaimed author. If that's not enough to make you read this book, do so because she writes about real people, with real problems and real flaws, and she makes you encompass yourself in their own lives. And that is a tremendous accomplishment.

"Some Fun" is the newest collection of short stories by Antonya Nelson and as in the past these stories and a novella ("Some Fun") deal with families in turmoil, families adrift: most drowning in a quagmire of their own lack of communication, substance abuse, mis-placed loyalties, unheard cries for help and of course...Love. "Dick" concerns boyhood friendship or more to the point a warped version of boyhood friendship in which Dick is not at all happy that his friend Cole has moved to Colorado without saying goodbye: "(Dick and Cole) were children who deferred by instinct, not peacemakers but peacekeepers, knobby-kneed guys who had to be prompted to eat and encouraged to defend themselves against the other boys..." Then Dick disappears. "Flesh Tone" is a "Ghost and Mrs. Muir"clone about a boy (Evan) whose mother (Merry) acts as his counselor long after she is dead: "Evan did not care if Merry was his secret; Merry had taught him the beauty of a secret life, the one unmeasured by others, and if unmeasured then unjudged, unknown in the most fundamental way, something held close as a heartbeat, a phantom voice near the ear, the most intimate of places." "Only a Thing" can be summed up by its first line: "You could compare a certain kind of love affair to a car wreck. You don't expect it, but when it does happen, it seems inevitable--even overdue." But it is in the novella, "Some Fun" that Nelson can stretch her formidable, and in this example very Raymond Chandler-like, writing licks: "Summer has come to the desert and wrapped the daylight around the dark like a hot fist holding a cold bullet." "Some Fun" deals with a broken family: the mother Eve, an alcoholic, beautiful, yet tragic, Claire, the oldest child and the one who holds the family, consisting of her two brothers, together and Eve's ex-husband who has escaped into the arms of a fitness guru, Gweneth: "There is no way not to mock that woman's name. It is also difficult not to mock her appearance, because she isn't striking, and Claire's mother is. Claire's mother has thick dark hair...tragic European looks...she wears clothing the colors of red wine, dark chocolate, rich cream and in the style of another century, elegant, adult." As with all children, adult or not, of alcoholics Clare's main concern is her mother's drinking. She looks for evidence of her mother's sobriety everywhere: is the bottle of wine from last night still in the refer? How many empties are in the trash now as opposed to last night? "Some Fun," the short stories as well as the novella is Antonya Nelson at the zenith of her writing powers and observational skills and as such it is required reading for anyone interested in the fine art of contemporary writing.

I found this new Antonya Nelson book in my mailbox yesterday afternoon. I stayed up all night reading the stories, and finished around 5 this morning. Some Fun is a remarkable collection, set in the rural and urban American West. These are mostly stories of families, the disappointments that fracture them, and the love and duty that hold them together, mother to son, daughter to mother, husband to wife, and so on. Of course, that talk doesn't tell you much about the writing itself, which is so rich and full of the same contradictions life offers us that the reader is grateful, for once, to not be forced by anger (and, okay, lack of self-control) to throw the book across the room. No way, Jack. Even as I devoured the pages, I was careful to keep the dust jacket unblemished and the pages uncrinkled. Some Fun is a book I want to keep with me for a long, long time.