In the title story in Antonya Nelson's new collection of dark but dead-on stories of frayed marriages and entangled families, the younger partner of a Houston lesbian couple amuses a dinner party with a clever line she drunkenly repeats three times. Newly abstemious Phoebe, unhappy spouse of Ben, "makes a mental note, in case she went back to drinking: it's only funny once." Phoebe and Ben are typical of the couples in Nelson's stories. She finds something to hate in everything around her, while he is a "professional idealist."
Winner of the 2003 Rea Award for the Short Story and author of seven story collections and four novels, Nelson (Bound) has perfected the fiction of character and place. These 10 new stories are set in her home turf of New Mexico, Texas, Kansas and Colorado--far from the celebrity glare of the coasts. Their characters wrestle with infidelity, inebriation and infirmity. Their parents are suffering dementia and destined for a nursing home--in one story hauled off by their children listening to Tina Turner while "dad was riding in the grody bed of a truck, duct-taped into an easy chair." Their own children grow up distant or isolated, as if "suddenly transformed from the young girl they'd known into the adult they couldn't fathom." With an eye for the humorous contradictions and misplaced passions of people wanting badly but failing to connect, Nelson's stories remind us that in the end there is nothing funny about the emotional distress of relationships--at least not more than once. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.