Archive of an Unraveling Future: New Stories by Antonya Nelson

The title of Antonya Nelson’s new collection, Funny Once, prepares the reader for the sharp pang of nostalgia, the joy of a memory tempered by the realization that its time has passed, making way for a more somber present. The collection delivers on this promise, as its stories wade again and again into the way the past operates for its characters: the past as giddy relief from an unyielding now, the past as archives to be searched for the source of the unraveling future, the past as malevolent ghost, the past as the comforting pain of pressing a bruise. This is a collection of ex-lovers and old friends and deteriorating parents, all serving as mirrors to its characters’ former selves. The reader is left with the sense that these former selves would be, in most cases, not so much disappointed in as bewildered by the people they’ve become.

Funny Once is Nelson’s eleventh book, and while she’s shown herself to be a deft novelist, this collection highlights the reasons she’s earned a reputation as a master of the short story. At its most basic, the story form directs the reader’s attention to a moment of irreversible shift and works at revealing how it came to pass and suggesting what it might mean. For some writers, the immediacy is enough—the short story is a kind of fortune teller, leaving the reader with the anxious ache of what will come. In this collection, Nelson stretches the form the way that Alice Munro often does, giving at once the story of the moment that shifts something and the story of the story, focusing in equal measure on the thing that happened and the way characters remember it.

Nelson’s characters often carry their younger selves around with them; some obsess about the line between who they were and who they are, and others retreat as far as possible into the past. Multiple adult characters nurse addictions that were once the glamorous habits of their younger selves. Nana, the protagonist of “Soldier’s Joy,” sleeps with her now-married high-school boyfriend in her childhood bedroom and then gets high with him in the tree house next door, in order to avoid confronting the messier aspects of her adult life: the aging father she has come to help; the aging husband she has come to get away from without wanting to confront her reasons. In a New Yorker interview about the story “First Husband,” Nelson explains her interest in rebellious teenagers with the tongue-in-cheek response, “My interest in adolescence is directly related to the fact that I don’t seem to have outgrown it. For me? It’s all pretty much still seventh grade.”

But an emphasis on how close to the surface adolescence can be does not make these stories juvenile. They are willing to go bleak without blinking. In “iff,” Gloria, the narrator’s former stepmother-in-law, who is living with her after a suicide attempt, says to her that “the only saving grace of not being a mother” is “I have permission to kill myself. You don’t.” That blunt, brutal assessment of the terms on which people live feels weightier in a collection where mothers may, of course, kill themselves, leaving others to live with the consequences. In one of the collection’s strongest offerings, “Literally,” the last turn of the story calls into question whether the car accident that killed the family’s matriarch was in fact accidental. The story ends with Richard’s memory of his late wife’s long-ago confession:

“No, seriously. It’s bad. As a teenager, I used to play this dangerous game when I was driving. Closing my eyes. Turning off the lights. Speeding. It was pretty out of control. I was that unhappy. I really didn’t care if I lived or died.” She’d closed her eyes to recall it there in the restaurant, their table abruptly an island in a...