Books

Antonya Nelson wickedly skewers middle-class foibles

10:30 AM CDT on Wednesday, May 10, 2006

By JEROME WEEKS / Staff Writer

HOUSTON – One of the most esteemed short story writers in Texas, when she is in Texas, writes some truly disturbing tales. Not hair-raising disturbing. Knew-better-but-wrecked-my-life-anyway disturbing.

Antonya Nelson teaches one semester a year at the University of Houston, splitting her time between there and New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, trading off with her husband, fellow writer Robert Boswell. And in a glowing review in The New York Times of Ms. Nelson's newest collection, Some Fun, author Joyce Carol Oates, who knows something about troubled fictional families, points to what makes Ms. Nelson's fiction so disquieting.

Erich Schlegel / DMN

Taverns such as the La Cantina Bar in Mesilla, N.M., figure prominently in some of Antonya Nelson's stories.

All of her characters are "caught up in a maelstrom of family crises, breakdowns, catastrophes," Ms. Oates writes. "Rarely has the dysfunctional middle-class Caucasian-American family been so relentlessly dissected and analyzed, and rarely with such patience, sympathy and verve."

And, one should add, with such dry, sardonic humor. In all seven of Ms. Nelson's books – three novels, four story collections – the main characters often are deadpan appraisers of human failings, their own and everyone else's.

In her 1998 novel, Nobody's Girl, Birdy, a young high school teacher in New Mexico, learns that a despised older female teacher has a new lover. This new guy must be clueless, Birdy figures; he probably can't even speak English.

"He's fleeing some former Soviet satellite. His aesthetic sense has yet to kick in."

Being the smartest smart-mouth in the room, though, doesn't help much when the heartaches begin. It's this knowledge of our shaky moral bearings and our willingness to overrule our brains that makes Ms. Nelson's stories so compelling. And it's her clear-eyed, vivid style that makes them so scalpel-sharp.

"The impulse to write," Ms. Nelson says with a wry smile over a cup of tea in a Houston coffeehouse, "often comes from a misspent youth."

In her case, it was a youth misspent in Wichita, Kan., shoplifting, lying to get drinks (her favorite place was "the Wichita Fraternal Order of Police bar, where my friends and I were never bothered"), taking drugs and sneaking out to see older men. The kinds of things that, now that she's a 45-year-old mother, would make her tear her hair out.

"Of all these bad habits, I think lying is the saddest, and I'm glad I got to channel it into the useful occupation of writing stories and novels. Otherwise, it's just evidence of a person who wishes she were someone else."

Ms. Nelson is named after the Willa Cather novel, My Ántonia . Not surprisingly, her parents were English professors, with five children.

"And with five kids, we never really had much money," she recalls. Her parents, for example, owned a cabin in Colorado, which Ms. Nelson's family still uses.

"But it's the last shack standing in Telluride," she says. "It was bought back in the '60s when the area was nothing like it is now, just a dying mining town." And her father deliberately bought an enormous home in Kansas, she says, "more than we could afford. He used to say he was paying for time and space – enough space at home for privacy and enough time at the cabin for some fishing."

Partly as a result, Ms. Nelson says, "I'm not particularly comfortable with money."

In fact, one notable aspect of her fiction is how rarely the well-off or the suburban appear. This is not Updike Country. But neither is it the sordid, violent street world of Dennis Cooper (The Sluts). Ms. Nelson's people are struggling grad students or blue-collar alcoholics or lower middle-class families cash-strapped from divorce. They live in trailer parks or "podunk hellholes" or less-than-splendid urban districts.

"The neighborhood was called transitional," she writes about a Houston area in Some Fun. That's a term for "anything could happen."

Another quality that sets Ms. Nelson's fiction apart from master storytellers such as Ann Beattie and Lorrie Moore is the number of her protagonists who are adolescent. If readers respond to Ms. Nelson's characters with what Ms. Oates describes as "exasperated sympathy," then her teenagers definitely up the level of exasperation. And the amusing sarcasm.

"Most people don't get past adolescence," the author observes. "All the issues that plagued you then still plague you later. I remember my adolescence well." She adds with a laugh, "And I've certainly revisited it with my daughter," Jade, 18. She also has a son, Noah, 15.

Besides, Ms. Nelson says, "characters ought to be in transition, and adolescence is the most transitional period there is."

Since winning a Mademoiselle short fiction prize when she was 23, Ms. Nelson has garnered just about every writing award around with an author's name on it: the Flannery O'Connor, the Nelson Algren, the O. Henry. The New Yorker called her one of the "20 writers for the 21st century."

Even so, she is not that well-known. The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors, for example, never mentions her, yet includes such household names as Frederic Tuten.

That's probably because, despite her novels, Ms. Nelson is most acclaimed for her short fiction. And short fiction still rarely makes a big dent in the public consciousness.

"I don't think my temperament is quite suited to the form," she says of the novel. "I get bored easily, and novels have to engage this larger arena. My husband can concoct the elaborate trajectory a novel requires more easily. My focus is usually just a couple of people."

Those people have been popping up more often in Texas settings lately, now that Ms. Nelson has taught in Houston for four years. And she and her husband, she says, will be living there full time soon. A chief reason is the graduate creative writing program at the University of Houston, whose past faculty has included, most famously, Donald Barthelme. U.S. News & World Report ranked the program second in the nation in the late '90s.

Much of the program's success, Ms. Nelson says, is due to Inprint Inc., the nonprofit foundation dedicated to the literary arts in Houston. It provides major funding for a reading series, a literary journal, teacher training and the program's endowed chairs.

"We are hugely lucky," Ms. Nelson declares. Inprint "would be a welcome anomaly anywhere in the creative-writing world."

In her two-household corner of that world, Ms. Nelson is in Houston at the moment for a round of oral exams and to review student applications for next year.

She mulls over the batch of young authors who are graduating and chuckles ruefully at the responsibilities of the writing teacher. "At the end of the day," she says, "I can always tell myself, 'It's not like I'm letting this person loose to commit surgery.' "

True. Not unless that person can write like she does.

E-mail jweeks@dallasnews.com

With their mother a drunk and their father living with another woman, the children of an El Paso family make do:

"Her little brothers don't mind when things begin going to hell. On its casters, the television comes rolling from the closet and takes a more permanent spot against the living room wall. It puts forth warmth like a fireplace and friendliness like the painted face of a clown. While Claire holds the remote control, the two small boys sit watching the hot circus of possibilities scroll by.

'Can you grow up to be an orphan?' the six-year-old asks scientifically.

'Can I?' responds his sister.

'No,' he says. 'Can one.'

'Maybe.'

He nods once, the way their father does, eyes and lips mashing in a deal-sealing pucker.

To Claire Pratt, the house feels crooked and wrong, like a house in a nightmare, as if the light bulbs are all mint-tinted and sickly, as if the floor slants at a deadly angle down. One Sunday evening, Claire's mother lies in her bed in her clothing, as if catnapping rather than coming to. She's been asleep more than 24 hours. When she finally wakes up, she raises her head and asks, 'Do you know what I dreamed?'

Claire says she doesn't.

'I pulled a handful of rust from my ear, just crumbles of rust.' "

An adult daughter has returned to Montana because her tough old father is dying in a hospital:

"She wouldn't be able to afford the hotel room for long, but she'd been kicked out of the St. Francis House, where the bereaved and waiting families usually stayed. First, she'd brought liquor into the place, which she had agreed not to do, and then she'd lit the bed on fire. She'd been trying to locate her book in the middle of the night and had used her cigarette lighter to search. The underside of the box springs went up instantly. It was an old, old bed.

At least her hosts had not known about her overnight guest the night before. He hadn't been allowed, either.

At the Sleep Inn, you shut the door to your room and did whatever you wanted. Jilly uncorked her bottle of wine and called her ex-husband in Tucson. He hadn't heard about her dad yet, and he'd liked the old man. 'No one found him for at least 36 hours,' Jilly said. It hadn't been clear whether he was performing the morning or evening chores on his property. If the sheriff hadn't come over to reprimand him for violating the water restrictions, he might still be pinned between truck bumper and shed wall. 'Now he's in and out of lucidity.' Her ex snorted, as if to say that had always been the case. 'He thinks we're on a car trip – he's got a great view from his room – but why he's letting me drive is a mystery.'

'So he can drink,' Pete guessed."