Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson

The Barnes & Noble Review

There is a kind of storytelling we're used to that fits neatly into one-hour blocks, where justice is served, problems are surmounted, and the worthy are redeemed. Some books are just the same. But one of the glories of literature is that it's bigger than those glossy packages; that it's open-ended and messy and complicated and uncomfortable and its characters can be flawed without being villainous and there is no pressure to resolve to a happy ending. At least, some literature is like that, as is Antonya Nelson's Nothing Right.

It's something of a paradox, then, to note that the stories in this volume fit together so well that "Nothing Right" feels complete, a fully matched set. That's because of the stories here are, in one way or another, about a time of in-between. It's not what we're trained to expect from short stories, which with their compact size are built for speed, tight epiphanies and decisive character change. But Nelson -- the author of three novels and raft of carefully wrought short stores -- works against that convention in this new collection. She's going for the moments where nothing really happens, or when we have to live with the consequences of what has happened before.

In "Party of One," a woman meets a man in a bar (there are many women in these stories, and nearly as many bars). The woman, Emily, is there to convince the man to make his breakup with her sister as gentle as possible. We learn that her sister tried to commit suicide after her last breakup; that the man who dumped her last time was Emily's (now ex-) husband; that Emily, unbeknownst to her sister, has cancer.

Lots> of important stuff goes on, but those big, heightened moments just flicker across the story. Instead, Nelson focuses on the discussion, flirtation and, finally, animosity between Emily and her sister's almost-ex-boyfriend. Emily has to live with her past and with her limited future; when she is reckless and intolerant, we understand that she is beginning to fill with the righteousness of the condemned. Like less whimsical versions of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Nelson's stories dwell in the spaces that fiction typically skips over.

There is much waiting. In "Kansas," a teen disappears with her toddler niece and the extended family -- a slightly down-at-the-heels crew of drinkers and reluctant parents -- gathers, spending days and nights hoping for the children's safe return. In "Falsetto," a much older sister returns home after her parents are hurt in a car accident; she rattles around their remote house with her too-smart adolescent brother and her comparatively dopey boyfriend, finding herself anew between those two poles. One of these stories ends with terrible news; the other does not. Both are set in the suspended days before some decisive ending, days that are less informed by the looming crisis than by the everyday business of eating and sleeping and trying to live with one another.

Other tales emerge from lives that are stalled, drained of love. Mimi, the protagonist in "Biodegradable," makes research grants to colleges and sparks up an affair -- her first -- with a grant recipient who reminds her of someone else. But one day, she swiftly and emotionlessly ends it. "She blocked his address so that his e-mails wouldn't reach her; it seemed she did the same with her love, simply turned it off. This mystified her: it was as if her need for him had produced him, full-blown familiar stranger, and now the need was gone -- without a trace, no harm, no good, as if it had never existed." The entire affair may have been a rehearsal for that someone else, the figure that cast an original shadow of familiarity.

In "Shauntrelle," the life of recently divorced, recently un-philandering Constance is not so much preparation as holding pattern. She moves into a generic, fully furnished corporate apartment; it comes with couches, linens, silverware, and someone else's -- Shauntrelle's -- obscure emotional drama. It even provides a roommate, Fanny Mann, a cheery southerner in town for a gantlet of cosmetic surgeries. Always swathed in bandages, she jokes that she's like the Invisible Man, that Constance wouldn't be able to recognize her on the street. "I sure wish I could show you a Before picture," Fanny muses, "so you could fully appreciate what's going to come After." Like Fanny, Constance is between Before and After, a ghost who is not yet ready to enter her new life, whatever it might be.

But as much as the characters are in-between, we get glimpses of vital movement around the edges, an almost-becoming. In the title story, an unemployed, divorced mother who's a little too fond of wine is trying to manage her younger son, a teenager straddling the line between mischievous and troubled. Her older son, still smarting from his parents' divorce, accuses her of cruelty toward her husband: she replies, "It's not mean not to love somebody," but she's not entirely sure she's right. Sadie in "DWI" is on the other side; her lover turned off his feelings for her "like a faucet," but she can't do the same. "Now it seems she will never be able to shut that valve, end that leak that will not cease."

These characters, despite themselves, long to connect. An unbalanced student accompanies a professor to his extended family's holiday celebration, enamored with his wife, in "OBO." Family members secretly snicker over an imperious sister's online dating travails, but no one is above, as the professor sees it, the pathetic quest for love. The tale "Or Else" follows a too-charming man as he brings a new woman to a Telluride cabin that belongs to someone else. When his nested lies come to light, rather than backing away she offers him a quiet, almost inexplicable kindness.

Populated mostly by adults in midlife, these stories are told with detachment, as if the narratives themselves are withholding emotion, not ready to commit again. But, as Emily understands, "[T]his kind of distilled pain could only come from sublime pleasure." She pictures "a huge shade tree, under which grew a root system as knotty and veiny and vast as the tree above, mirrored there in the subterranean dark." These stories are set in the pauses before the roots claw beneath the surface, or the characters extend their soft green tendrils, again, toward the sky. --Carolyn Kellogg

Carolyn Kellogg is the lead blogger for Jacket Copy at the Los Angeles Times. Her writing about books and authors has appeared in numerous publications.

From the Publisher

A collection of stories from one of the New Yorker’s “twenty young fiction writers of the new millennium,” a series of unforgettable glimpses into contemporary family life.

Set in the American Southwest, and featuring one previously unpublished story, Nothing Right shows one of our best writers working at the top of her game. Antonya Nelson’s stories are masterpieces: poignant, hilarious, truthful explorations of domesticity.

The artfully rendered characters in Nothing Right try to keep themselves intact as their personal lives explode around them. A mother and her teenage son finally find common ground when his girlfriend becomes pregnant. A woman leaves her husband and finds herself living with a stranger who is getting extensive plastic surgery while her best friend is dying of cancer. In “Or Else,” one of three short stories nominated for a National Magazine Award for the New Yorker, a man brings his girlfriend to a house he claims belongs to his family, only to have his lie exposed when one of the real owners comes home to scatter her father’s ashes.

These stories are sure to delight longtime fans and readers lucky enough to be just discovering Antonya Nelson.

The New York Times - Adam Kirsch

Nelson never chafes against the limitations of her chosen form, the realistic, well-made story. It's the ideal medium for a writer who isn't afraid to remind us of the familiar, who values insight over epiphany.

Publishers Weekly

In this powerful collection of 11 short stories, Nelson's brilliantly constructed characters negotiate love, family, home and truth. Nelson consistently pays exquisite attention to detail, resulting in rich, vivid characters and settings. In "OBO," a family is gathered together for the holidays, their day reflected in the items on the kitchen table: "sparkling glitter that stuck in the syrup... then later... came the peanuts and poker chips and whiskey." In "Kansas," a wife's pregnancy ("a weapon he could plant like a bomb") keeps an unhappy marriage alive. In "Party of One," a woman secretly suffering from cancer meets her sister's adulterous lover in a bar to put an end to the relationship. While most of the stories in this collection have been previously published (many in the New Yorker), two are new: "We and They" and "People People." Nelson writes with wonderful grace and skill, each word carefully chosen, each passage carefully constructed. This beautiful collection is another remarkable accomplishment for a writer often hailed as one of our most talented storytellers. (Feb.)

Leigh Anne Vrabel - Library Journal

Mothers excuse the inexcusable, sisters defend the indefensible, and spouses orbit each other like off-kilter planets in this delightfully messy collection of short stories about contemporary family relationships. A recent recipient of the Rea Award for short fiction, Nelson (Living To Tell) gives readers plenty to ponder as her frequently baffled characters struggle to make sense of the circumstances in which they find themselves. Settings are uniformly bleak; while many of the stories take place in Kansas, the physical location serves primarily as a reflection of the characters' emotional landscapes. Readers who relish conflict will burn through the pages as the disasters pile up, while those who appreciate well-rounded characters will be impressed with the variety of responses to said disasters, which reveal just how strong, flexible, and adaptable human beings can be under pressure (see especially "Kansas" and "Biodegradable"). This weary hymn to coping with life's cruelties is a tour de force, recommended for all but the smallest short story collections.

Kirkus Reviews

Although family or the desire for family is frequently the overt subject, secrets and solitude lie at the heart of these 11 stories, of which several have appeared in the New Yorker. Nelson (Some Fun, 2006, etc.) tends to front-load her crises. Not only is Emily, the heroine of "Party of One," dying of cancer when she agrees to meet her sister Mona's lover, she also knows-although Mona doesn't know she knows-about Mona's previous affair with Emily's husband. Despite the potential for melodrama, Emily's encounter with Mona's lover evolves into a painful education. In the title story, another less-than-heroic heroine lives with her 15-year-old problem son while her ex-husband gets the son she favors, but when the troubled boy's girlfriend has a baby, family relationships clarify into something resembling redemption. In "OBO," a young grad student weasels her way into spending Christmas with her professor's family. A con artist, she's also heartbreakingly, cluelessly infatuated with the professor's distracted wife. A similar loser in "Or Else" pretends to himself as much as to his date that a vacation house belongs to his family. The actual owners treated him with generosity until he betrayed them one time too many. In "Shauntrelle," a woman who has destroyed her marriage describes her "season of uncertain and drifting identity," summing up many of these characters' predicaments. The liberal family of "We and They" adopts two black children with unintended, depressingly comic consequences. The brilliant, obese scientist in "People, People" has the unerring ability to tell people truths they don't want to know. The settings are Western and middle-middle class-Sarah Palin country-but thecharacters defy stereotype. In one of the loveliest stories, "Kansas," characters who assume disaster when a baby in the family goes missing with her teenage aunt find themselves almost disappointed by the benign ending. Despite an occasional slip into glib slice-of-life, Nelson is at her best creating densely packed, almost novel-like family mini-sagas.

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NEVER SHAKE A BABY," the flyer insisted, "Never, never, never." The public service brochures displayed at the district attorney's office seemed to be speaking to Hannah, each pertinent and personal. The face on Break the Cycle of Domestic Violence was one big yellow-blue bruise. "Substance abuse abuses us all," another insisted, a martini glass with a slash through it. The illustration was so highly detailed as to include a toothpick-speared olive.

Her fifteen-year-old son had demanded that Hannah wait rather than join him and his probation officer. Down the hall, a door banged open, a courtroom released. A young man in an orange jumpsuit emerged between two older, somber men, trailed by weeping women. His lawyers, his guards, his mother, sister, girlfriend. Like the brochures, this scene also seemed a warning; Hannah had passed from one kind of life into another. A small boy brought up the rear of the procession, one hand hitching his pants, one swiping at his running nose. Hannah felt close to bursting into tears. Ten years from now, that little boy would be wearing the jumpsuit, leading the pack. Her own son seemed poised somewhere between these two, teetering.

"Ma," he brayed, suddenly beside her, nudging to indicate that his appointment had ended, they were free to go. Still free, Hannah thought, and her mood lifted.

"You take us to the most interesting places," she said as they exited the courthouse. This had been the third required monthly meeting since he'd made a bomb threat at school. Beside her, passing through the metal detectors, Leo pulled in a savoring breath. "Good times," he murmured. He'd been to jail, he'd worn handcuffs. He had a psychologist, a lawyer, and a probation officer; this current round of meetings was part of something called "diversion," and maybe it was sort of amusing. Leo's delinquency had to become something else, Hannah supposed, having already been terrifying, divisive, pricey, and heartbreaking.

He was her second son, and he'd never been the one she understood best. Recently, she'd found herself disgusted by him-she didn't want to share a bathroom or kitchen, bar soap or utensils-with her own boy. His brother, who'd passed through adolescence sobbing instead of shouting, had not prepared her for Leo. The pure ugliness of a more traditional male's transformation to manhood-the inflamed skin and foul odor, the black scowl, the malice in every move-might eventually convince a parent to despair, to say to that child, "You are dead to me." Because it would be easier-more decorous, acceptable-to mourn the loss than to keep waging a hopeless battle.

Their next stop was Wichita Central High School.

"Leo's mother," the PE coach greeted her. He was precisely as billed: soldierlike, down to the bullet-shaped shaved head and stiff-armed formality. "G.I. Joe," her son called him. In his first-period class, Leo had recently pierced his own lip with a safety pin. In the divot beneath his nose, a pulsing bump he'd tried to pass off as a bug bite and then a pimple. Finally he'd just shown up at breakfast with the pin hanging there, clicking against his cereal spoon. A parent was required to come pay penance, help reclaim the old gymnasium. The smell alone could have brought back adolescence-sweat, fried food, patchouli-but this was also the high school Hannah had attended. Back then, this had been Central's only gym. In the years since, groups would intermittently creak open the metal doors and throw a party or host a science fair. The drama club had contributed a couple of sofas. Windows, metal-barred and streaked with pigeon droppings, let through a gloomy cold light; voices echoed. Hannah had played basketball here, once upon a time. More recently, her first son had acted in plays on the very stage that, today, G.I. Joe would lead the group in dismantling.

"Leo's mother, meet Dylan's father." Several fathers, Reagan's, Meagan's, Dusty's, and Jordan's; a roomful of uncomfortable men, glancing around with their hands jammed in their pockets, awaiting instruction. Hannah couldn't help prescribing makeovers for everyone. First, twenty pounds off each, that defeated weight of middle age, of parenthood. Next: therapy and SSRIs, all around. Hannah knew that whatever she saw as deficits in these people, they themselves recognized. They, too, wished not to seem sad and skittish. They wished they were trim and brave and confident. They wished they were young-not as young as their offspring, these children, clustered and glowering fifty paces away, also in the proverbial doghouse-but younger than their forty or fifty years. They knew their best years had passed, that they'd been sapped of something vital, and now could only make futile guesses at how to get it back.

The group had been told to dress "grubby," bring tools, and, now, to "buddy up." Hannah watched her son pair himself with a big slow-moving girl. This was the daughter of a dad making his way toward her, a man who'd covered his bland sameness with a vivid orange Hawaiian shirt. His long wavy white hair and bright craggy face suggested decades of overindulgence, specific decades, the seventies and eighties.

"I'm Chuck," he said to Hannah, thrusting out his hand, "and that's my girl Niffer."

"Leo's mom." They shook vigorously. He smiled quizzically, and Hannah smiled back. Perhaps they were both wondering the same thing: why their children had chosen one another. They glanced in unison that direction. Niffer was larger than Leo-taller, meatier-with soot-black hair pulled into a dozen little pigtails. She stood sullenly while Leo twitched alongside, talking at her eagerly, as if to sell her something.

"Finally, I meet the boyfriend's family."

"Boyfriend?" Hannah repeated. To her knowledge, her son had never been accused of this before.

"Leo. The boyfriend. I had to nail shut Niffer's window to make him come in the front door. 'Stop your sneaky ways, son,' I told him. Frankly, I'm more worried about mosquitoes and West Nile than finding a boy in her bed."

Hannah sighed, her heart heavy with Leo's persistent deception, its busy proliferation. She took in Niffer once more, the faintly domineering power the girl seemed to have over her son, as if she might stretch out a paw and cuff him. "How old is she?" Hannah asked.

"Eighteen. Nineteen next month. This is her fifth year of high school." The parents appraised one another, still quizzical but without the smiles, trying to guess the trustworthiness of their children.

"You a doctor?"

"No, no." Hannah looked down at her green scrubs, which had been the required outfit of her former job. "I worked at a doctor's office."

"Well, you're not a doctor and I'm not Jimmy Buffet." He laughed abruptly, like a dog. "Not anymore, anyway. And I'm betting that fellow is not Abe Lincoln." An Amish father stood rocking on his heels, looking serenely about, his sons like sentries on either side of him. What bad deed had those boys done? Now Niffer's dad noticed Hannah's hand, from which she had removed her wedding ring. He didn't wear one, either, and for whatever reason, the absence made a difference. You didn't notice until you took it off.

For a couple of hours that afternoon the two of them hauled trash from the gym while others, those who'd brought sledges and crowbars, performed the more violent labor-enthusiastically, like cavemen. Despite the chilly October air, Chuck wore flip-flops. Hannah liked his casual use of profanity, as it made him seem not young, exactly, but immature, and therefore less likely to judge her. Having grown up in Kansas, she should have been accustomed to judgment, inured to the pity and superiority her neighbors felt toward someone like herself, with her foreign vehicle and secular Sundays, and yet it still hurt her feelings. Her neighbors would change her in ways she wouldn't want to change herself, she supposed, reconsidering her earlier notion of a mutually agreed upon ideal. They would send her to pantyhose and pumps, hair spray, Episcopal fellowship, potluck dinners, blood drives.

"Do you donate blood?" she asked Chuck, trying to balance her loathing of small talk against her tendency to appear bored or annoyed by others.

"Nah," he said. "I'm a nancypants around the needle. You?"

"Never."

When his cell phone rang, he cursed reflexively. "Fucking cow."

"Excuse me?"

"Ex-wife." This opened the subject of divorce, his of twelve years, Hannah's of four months. They discovered they'd been married the same summer twenty years ago, which led Hannah to speculate that if he'd stayed in the marriage, as she had, he probably wouldn't be as bitter about the split.

"Yeah-huh," he said skeptically.

"You could pretend that's what happened," Hannah suggested. But his wife had found a new love and life immediately, spawning a crop of younger, cuter children, Niffer's half brothers she never saw; Chuck helped at high school whenever he could because his wife had simply abandoned their now-aging teenage daughter.

"No way can I forget or forgive what that bitch has done to Niffer."

Hannah didn't mention that she'd been hoping her ex-husband would do precisely what Chuck's ex had, attach himself to another marriage so as to let Hannah off the hook. It was a particular kind of hook, and it was painfully embedded: the specific knowledge that she'd disappointed a good man, and disappointed him so deeply that he'd come unmoored, lost and adrift. There was no undoing that. She could only pray someone would arrive to save him. And she wasn't a person who prayed.

"I went to school here," she told Chuck now. "Go Cougars." She made the traditional Cougar fist, the one that was supposed to resemble claws.

"I went to East," he said. "Well, for a while I did. Then I just said 'Fuck it' and got my GED."

"I played basketball in this very gym," Hannah went on. "I was so stoned during one game I scored at the wrong end of the court. Right there," she added, pointing to the netless rim under the snarling cat. They each carried two bags of trash to toss on the growing heap outside. "How'd you misspend your youth?"

"Chasing tail. Racing cars. Taking drugs." He smiled his beach-bum smile, then shook his hair out of his eyes. "But I gave up partying," he said earnestly, letting the gym door close behind them. "Since the divorce."

"Oh," said Hannah, made uneasy, as always, by someone else's committed sobriety. Now, inhaling a deep breath of the fresh, cool air, she was afraid he would proselytize, attempt to sponsor her at AA or NA or whatever A wagon he'd climbed onto, and the spark of friendship she'd felt with him fizzled. But then he began slapping at his pockets until he hit upon his pack of cigarettes, offering Hannah one. She wasn't a smoker but joined him just from relief: he'd not relinquished this bad habit.

You had to have something with which to fill the hours.

"I like Leo," Chuck announced. "He set up my e-mail account, and he always says thanks. Although his fashion statement baffles me, him and Niffer both." He had the self-possession to look down at his own feet then and smile at his flip-flops. "Fungus," he explained.

"Ah," Hannah said, trying to exhale elegantly. "Leo thinks he's an anarchist." Her son had taken to dressing like a homeless man, baggy wool pants with exhausted suspenders, food-stained shirts and holey fedoras. Anarchy, despite its resemblance to clown-wear, felt like a state of siege; Hannah was coping as best she could. Because money was regularly missing from her purse, she had begun sleeping with it beside her on the bed. She stored all the liquor in her car trunk after finding a water bottle of gin on Leo's nightstand; when he caught scabies from his thrift-store clothes, she took him to the doctor. And it was Hannah herself who'd given him the idea of obtaining his fake ID, recounting to him her own adolescent scam at the DMV, where she claimed to be her older sister, acquiring a valid duplicate license with her own young photograph on it, a full five years' difference in their ages. "I just kept forgetting to respond to my sister's name," she had told Leo, laughing. "Margaret," sent trembling into the liquor store with all the money. So how could Hannah really complain when she found Leo's fake license in his dirty pants, his photo over his brother's name and birth date?

That was the thing: she both understood him, and was totally flummoxed. For instance, why so angry? Why the hair-trigger temper, so often? He was always breaking the telephone. Apparently, this aspect of his character was under control over at Chucks house. "Maybe teenagers should be shuffled around," she speculated. "Maybe they'd be more mannerly with people they didn't know so well."

Niffer, it turned out, was depressed. "It's kind of like living with two different girls," Chuck explained. "You never know what side of the bed she's gonna get up on."

"I feel that way about Leo, too. And sometimes it seems like he doesn't really know, either." There often appeared to be a war going on inside Leo, the mild silly boy he'd been versus the hairy, hoarse-voiced soul who'd suddenly moved in. The divorce had contributed, no doubt, but her sons' behavior had influenced the divorce, too-their childhoods abruptly gone, leaving everyone feeling robbed. It just wasn't fun to be a family anymore. Plus, Hannah had been fired from her job. A bad year. "It's a combo plate of reasons," she acknowledged to Chuck.

"A cluster fuck," he agreed.

Hannah decided to tell him that her husband, like his wife, had seemed to give up on their child. This wasn't strictly true, but it made her feel noble, loyal to Leo in the face of so much disapproval and lack of confidence. His father was in the throes of grief, overwhelmed by losing both Hannah's passion and Leo's innocence in the same season. His response, finally, was to take their older son and retreat to his mother's home half a mile away, to his knotty pine bedroom with its desiccated ornaments from his youth. He hadn't given up on their son; he just longed for last year's model, cursed as he was by that most disastrous of devilry, nostalgia. But Hannah found it more interesting to construct a different story for Chuck, Chuck who was field-dressing both his and her cigarette butts, ready to rejoin the group.

"You have to stick with them," she said, of their teenagers. "It's like they're toddlers again." All the common household objects were dangerous once more, pills, razors, knives, liquor, glue. "Except toddlers are sweeter."

"And now we're older," he replied.

"Don't forget divorced," Hannah added.

Chuck shook his wavy hair-gold, it must have been, now silver-and opened the door. "I have to check out Niffer every night to see if she's cutting again. Up her arms, on her belly. It's just vigilance, my friend, round-the-clock vigilance. We do a UA every couple weeks. I am on the case. My ex doesn't know the half of it."

"UA?'"

"Urine analysis. I take one, too, for solidarity. I'm letting her know I'm on her side, I understand how hard it is not to use. I'm telling her every day, in every way, that I am aware of the facts, and the facts are that life is a cage of pain, just a damn cage of pain."

"Must she be named Niffer?" Hannah asked that evening, trying to tease Leo.

He glared at the cheese and grater he held, as if he could imagine ways of injuring his mother with them. She had said a foolish thing; once said, it was not retractable. She was forty-three years old; why hadn't she learned that yet? When she and Chuck had left the gym that afternoon, they'd found their children kissing by the portables. It was an alarming moment for Hannah. She'd never seen Leo touch a girl; until earlier that day, she hadn't known he was a boyfriend. His brother Justin had been so easily embarrassed by the questions she and his father had asked concerning desire or romance that they hadn't even broached the topic with Leo. They were a polite family who lived in the Midwest under those unspoken rules. The arguments she and Thomas had had-even the final, fatal ones-were marked by respectful restraint; for all she knew, Justin was gay. Where had Leo learned what to do? How had he known to grip Niffer's buttocks while chewing hungrily at her mouth?

Upon seeing the groping pair, Hannah's response was to turn away; avert her gaze from the slight pump of her son's hips, but Chuck had boomed right in, waving his arms, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, let's keep it PG, boys and girls!" Leo had leaped back as if electrocuted, then trudged sullenly after Hannah to their car, where they got stuck idling along behind the Amish horse and buggy.

Once home, Hannah didn't know how to be tactful about the subject. Up close, the girl seemed brain-damaged, her face not angry so much as smeary, as if her features had been smudged by a giant careless thumb: hooded eyes, mashed nose, down-turned mouth. She reminded Hannah of a rabbit-not a real rabbit but a stuffed one, lop-eared and lifeless, costumed in torn black fishnets and red plaid skirt, a pair of mud-spattered combat boots.

(Continues...)

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