ABQ / Santa Fe News

New West Book Review

Antonya Nelson’s “Nothing Right”

By Jenny Shank, 3-06-09

Nothing Right
by Antonya Nelson
Bloomsbury USA
304 pages, $25

Antonya Nelson packs a novel’s scope into her short stories, plunging the reader inside complex family dramas within just a few incisive lines.  She is brutally funny in her new collection, Nothing Right, with stories set in the places she calls home—Telluride, Colo. and Houston—as well as in Montana and her native state, Kansas.  Wherever the story is set, Nelson cuts right to the heart of the matter, her characters revealing caustic wit as they navigate the terrain of marriage, child-rearing, divorce, and adultery.  Nelson’s humor is the rich, observational sort that derives from emotional pain and enables people to endure it.

In the title story, Hannah is a divorced mother whose fifteen-year-old son Leo is spiraling out of control, sentenced to a diversion program after he made a bomb threat at school.  As a part of her son’s penance, Hannah must pitch in on the weekend at Wichita Central High School, the school she attended herself, where she finds “a roomful of uncomfortable men, glancing around with their hands jammed in their pockets, awaiting instruction.” While there, she meets Leo’s 19-year-old girlfriend Niffer for the first time.  She’s “taller, meatier” than Leo, “with soot-black hair pulled into a dozen little pigtails.” Niffer shortly turns up pregnant, and her baby is born prematurely, causing both Hannah and Leo to straighten up and attend to the baby’s needs.  The subject matter sounds dour, but Nelson turns it into comedy, her funny observations rendering it completely enjoyable without sacrificing the serious emotion at the core of the story.

“Kansas” is another gem, the story of a slapdash family living together in a big house—Anna, her husband and their three-year-old, and Anna’s sister Emily, her husband, and their teenage daughter.  The adults live a casually debauched life, drinking with abandon that leaves them hung over on many days.  Kay-Kay, the teenager, has recently emerged from a rough patch ("Four years ago her adolescence had descended upon the household like a lit match in a powder keg"), and Cherry Sue is an ebullient preschooler.  One day the two girls turn up missing, and the adults’ frantic search for the kids and their self-rebuke make for a great story that switches back and forth between Anna and Emily’s perspectives.

It’s difficult to say which story in Nothing Right is the funniest (and saddest), but it just might be “Shauntrelle.” Constance recently threw her marriage aside for an affair and discovered her lover wasn’t interested in seeing her full-time.  She tries living in a hotel for a while, but learns she doesn’t like to be alone, so ends up answering an ad for a roommate at Laventura, a Houston corporate housing establishment, that comes complete with furniture and a variety of colorful past residents whose presences haunt the current occupants, including the mysterious Shauntrelle of the title.

“If it had a name, this brief era,” Nelson writes of the interlude in Constance’s life that the story covers, “it might be Shauntrelle: the season of uncertain and drifting identity, of upheaval and limbo, of anxiety and laughter, of transience and transients, flying ashtrays and painkilling drugs, of tawdry television and baby tomatoes, of furnishings that not only did not belong to them but belonged to nobody, not even to the rooms they temporarily filled.”

Constance’s new roommate Fanny Mann is a stitch.  She has temporarily relocated to Houston from New Orleans to submit herself to a variety of cosmetic surgery procedures.  Her face is so often covered in bandages that Constance doesn’t really know what she looks like, but Fanny is warm and confessional, sharing details about her love life and liposuction.  On the other hand, as Nelson writes, “it was not Constance’s habit to make herself available to other people; they mistook her for cold; complete strangers would stop her on the street and implore her to smile.” But she warms to Fanny, and the reader feels her regret when the roommates must part at the end, and Fanny, with her “coiffed honey-blond hair” sets out to claim her new life in a mint-colored Mercedes. 

Because Nelson creates such distinctive family milieus, her stories don’t feel repetitive even though may of the perspective characters have similar viewpoints and biographical details—divorced and sometimes remarried women, many of them mothers, many of whom have had or are having affairs. 

The only story that falls a little short of the very high bar set by Nelson’s other work is “DWI,” about a married woman whose very young lover commits suicide.  In “DWI,” Nelson doesn’t quite wring the same level of humor out of the situation that she otherwise manages even with the most sad topics, such as in “Falsetto,” in which Michelle, a woman in her late twenties, returns home to a little town outside of Missoula to care for her eleven-year-old brother when their parents are seriously injured in a car accident.  Michelle realizes that she’s got to ditch her young boyfriend Max, who has accompanied her.  “Max had decided that his role was Rock, and he kept kissing Michelle’s cheek and squeezing her shoulders, as if he had the power to bolster her.”

In Nothing Right, Antonya Nelson reaches both hands into the mess of contemporary American family life and comes up with gold.  Although she most often writes about people who are in the middle of a bad day—or a bad year—Nelson’s intelligence and wit will help anyone get through their own bumps in the road.

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