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``Some Fun'' by Antonya Nelson; Scribner ($22)
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Though the cover of her new collection is festooned with awards she's won - the Flannery O'Connor Award, a Guggenheim, the O. Henry Prize - it's possible you haven't heard of Antonya Nelson. It's like that with short-story writers. With the exception of a few biggies - say, Flannery O'Connor or O. Henry - they don't tend to get too famous.
But Nelson is well worth your attention. And in "Some Fun,'' her eighth collection, she's at the height of her powers.
One thing that sets the stories in "Some Fun'' apart from other modern tales is their slight upturn at the end, evidence of Nelson's gentle insistence on seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. As you read "Flesh Tone," a story about a teenage boy whose mother dies but sticks stubbornly with him in spirit, following him everywhere and providing droll running commentary on the general jackassininity of those around him, you think you know where it's going - and it doesn't look good. The boy, Evan, begins to resemble those poor pale kids who slide slowly into a dark place and scare the bejesus out of their parents. But Nelson rescues him, or gives us good reason to think he'll be OK, anyway: She has him fall in love.
Love, of course, is the recurring theme here. (What else?) "Heart-Shaped Rock" chronicles an unusual family's difficulty in that department; "Rear View" is about a woman who has an affair with a nurse at the mental hospital her husband has checked himself into. "My love for my husband had burst into discrete pieces when he himself had come undone. I could name them - concern, fear, fondness, pity - all separate, like parts of a broken object it was my job to reassemble, an object whose linchpin I seemed to have misplaced." It's this way with words that makes the old ground Nelson treads seem fresh - and, as the old saying goes, she makes it look easy.
First there are her metaphors. I dare you to try describing something of your everyday life as aptly as she does: a beer, a just-turned-off television, anything. Here she is on a pint of Guinness: "We watched the creamy portion roil into the deep brown, mesmerizing as a geologic event." In describing larger matters she's just as precise, visual, almost clairvoyant.
Then there is the matter of her language, and the music it makes. Consider the flow of this sentence that describes the wish of a teenage girl who has poured her mother's vast quantities of gin down the drain, and then, upon considering her mother's imminent anger, really regrets it: "If she could suck it back from the drain, she would, recant, let it flow in reverse, upward to its bottle where it belongs, solid vessel, noble kilted Brit on the label, standing in the freezer all day waiting for his date with her mother, waiting for nightfall, sweatclothes, ice and lime and bristling tonic. `I'm sorry,' Claire concedes.' " Like Johnny Marr's twinkly guitars carrying Morrissey's deadpan observations, the lovely rhythm of Nelson's language delivers devastating bits of wisdom directly to your heart: a well-aimed arrow with a sharpened tip.
How does she get such insights? How does she know so much about, for instance, people who have fallen off the edge and landed in a mental institution - about their off-kilter politeness, their immunity to sarcasm? The best writers inhabit the lives they've invented, and reading about their imaginary people's fears and triumphs feels as real as lived experience.
Nelson's characters are very much "of their time, and that's their power. "Some Fun," the title story, is actually a novella and probably the book's strongest piece. In it, the before-mentioned drinking woman starts to come unraveled as her kids look on in anguish. How they'll all come out of it is hard to say; at any moment, it seems, things could go either way. But Nelson brings the small details of their contemporary suburban existence to shocking, vibrant life, as if to say that even in times of crisis, life goes on, as vital and surprising and beautiful as it ever was.
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(c) 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
