Some Fun by Antonya Nelson
Originally published in Time Out New York, March 30, 2006
A young boy sits in a parking lot eating matches while his father enjoys a clandestine midday drink in a bar. An actor falls in love with a homeless former debutante he encounters on the stoop of a condemned Baptist church. A girl gang vandalizes a family’s house by spray-painting hearts all over it. Arresting images and unlikely narrative moments like these abound in Antonya Nelson’s Some Fun, a collection of stories and a novella. Set in the American Southwest, her tales feature marriages in various stages of decay and characters grappling with the finality of death. But despite the melancholy subject matter, Some Fun maintains an uplifting, if sometimes sobering, spirit.
Whether they’re precocious children or unfaithful wives, Nelson’s protagonists are survivors, experiencing life with all its grit and uncertainty. Eschewing judgment, most of the stories end without resolution, but this effect is not unsatisfying. Wondering whether the runaway teen in “Dick” ever returns home or how Martin in “Just a Thing” will react when he learns that his lover Julia isn’t really pregnant is all part of the titular good time.
When Nelson stretches beyond the short-story microcosm, however, she runs into some trouble. In the El Paso–set novella Some Fun, her tendency to fill in the blanks weighs down her characters with flaws. Claire is forced to grow up fast when, following the departure of her father, she must care for her two younger brothers and hard-drinking mother, Eve. Claire’s unwavering loyalty to Eve, who spends most evenings passed out, is baffling, and their relationship rings false. But even here, the poetry of Nelson’s language is unmistakable. In grimy El Paso, Claire is transported by the occasional sight of a lone white dove, which has “nothing to do with clocks or money or rage” and looks “like something from heaven, if you believed in heaven.” Some Fun is littered with hopeful imagery, which makes the hostile and desolate landscape inhabitable for both Nelson’s characters and her readers.