IT WILL COME BACK TO YOU: Collected Stories, by Sigrid Nunez
Sigrid Nunez is a baby boomer who seems younger, because idiomatic speech always sounds young. She’s been publishing fiction between hard covers since 1995, when she was in her mid-40s, but found the wider audience she deserved in 2018. That’s when her seventh novel, “The Friend,” about a novelist who adopts her mentor’s Great Dane, won the National Book Award. It was later adapted into a movie with Naomi Watts and Bill Murray.
Nunez’s new book, “It Will Come Back to You,” is her first collection of stories. Most appeared originally in respectable but second-tier journals (Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, Daedalus, AGNI, Conjunctions), before she broke through and began placing work in glossier and tonier venues.
The existence of this book reminds you why small journals matter to the literary ecosystem. To borrow the name of the comedy club chain, they’re places to catch a rising star, and sometimes a falling one. You could subscribe to one for less than tonight’s Grubhub delivery.
I’m with the novelist John Barth, who said his favorite literature is “both of stunning literary quality and democratic of access.” He might have been describing Nunez. Her writing is threaded with erudite signifiers and high-minded conversation, but there’s nothing pretentious about it. She is one of American fiction’s most crisp and realized voices. Like the food in a good restaurant, her prose is excellent but unfussy.
The first five stories in “It Will Come Back to You” are superb. They’re among her best work. They touch on themes that are omnipresent in Nunez’s fiction: failed parents, clinical therapy, the relationship between teachers and students, how animals live among us.
They tend to be narrated by bright, sensitive women, some of them writers, who carry ballasts of pain and melancholy and bruised wit. The other dramatis personae, usually the parents, are architects and filmmakers and art curators and academics, as urbane and stylized and grotesque as the men and women in a Saul Steinberg drawing.
Nunez has maintained in her work a mistrust of cultural hypersensitivity and thought policing, and that wariness is here too. In this collection’s first story, “Philosophers,” a teenage girl falls in love with the handsome bad boy of her dreams:
Ace came from what used to be called, hushedly, a bad home, one of those nice, simple descriptions — like nervous breakdown, or retarded — which society was about to decide shouldn’t be used anymore, even though they expressed perfectly what they meant.
“Philosophers” is a powerful and dreamy story. (It also contains Kierkegaard jokes.) It has a blue-collar milieu and might have fallen out of Jayne Anne Phillips’s legendary collection “Black Tickets” (1979). Its determining sentence might be this one: “What kind of girl makes a guy wear a condom the night before he goes off to war?”
It’s boring, in a book review, to tote up the plots of story after story. But let me talk about a few more. The second piece, “Greensleeves,” is about Covid, the ethics of bringing a child into a broken world, shrinks, docufiction and a daughter spiraling into suicidal thoughts. She sends her therapist a text that reads, “I’m still depressed, but now I’m depressed with a view.”
“Greensleeves” takes its title from the yearning English folk ballad. (It will send you scurrying to hear Marianne Faithfull’s 1964 mono version of the song.) Among the questions this story asks is: How did “the world’s most beautiful love song” get transmuted into the Christmas carol “What Child Is This?”
In “Imagination,” the perverse and inappropriate behavior of a 14-year-old girl, Elsie, wrecks her mother’s summer party in what sounds like the Hamptons. Elsie is an outlier, a wired and moonstruck version of a J.D. Salinger character, “trembling with the poetry of it all.” The shadows begin to lengthen. “Imagination” ends with what is perhaps recent literature’s most memorable scream.
“Curiosity” is a dirty martini of a story. It’s about a young woman named Phoebe who lives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in one of those “10 Worst Landlords” type of tenements. She begins to perceive that one of her neighbors, who wears too much audible jewelry (“you’d think it was the Tambourine Man coming up behind you”), is a sex worker, though Nunez does not use that euphemism. Phoebe spends a lot of time wondering what the woman’s life and apartment are like. Are there books on her shelves?
Phoebe is asked to take care of the woman’s cat for a day or two while she’s away. Phoebe enters the woman’s apartment, mostly to snoop. Then someone knocks terrifyingly on the door. You’ll have to read the story to find out what happens next, but it involves the purchase of a “boss-looking” vintage motorcycle jacket on St. Mark’s Place.
Other stories are about airport disasters and humiliations, the sort that make the theater of one’s life break down. Another follows a man who is bent on random murder and hangs around Lincoln Center, thinking he needs more culture. We meet a maid in an elite hotel, and consider the politics of such work. There’s a piece about a jostling mother and daughter, and one about a Brad Pitt impersonator.
“Brad” is hired by the adult children of a woman in hospice who is in thrall to the actor. The kids worry that the impersonator will be a sleazeball, a rheumy Elvis type. The story takes a turn when he turns out to be young and achingly beautiful. Nunez is picking at the seams of life.
In the lesser stories (none is a flameout), Nunez’s descriptive register slips. But “It Will Come Back to You” is a reminder that she’s among the best we have. I’d rather read one of her books than almost anyone else’s. Her headlights are on, even in midday.
IT WILL COME BACK TO YOU: Collected Stories | By Sigrid Nunez | Riverhead | 210 pp. | $29
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