Yesterday I read Female Trouble, the wonderful collection of short stories by Antonya Nelson.  Reading Nelson’s short stories is like reading a journal, a really well-written one that is guaranteed private and has been opened just this one time, for the special reader.  Yesterday I was the special reader of her amazingly authentic stories and boy was I grateful.  I love Nelson’s writing, her narrative voice, her sense of humor, her knack of timing and pace, and her ability to tell the most heartbreaking story with no over-drama, just the absolutely true level of what the story is about: life.

Not that life is the same for everyone, of course.  Nelson shows through her stories that life is a varied experience, that concepts of “love”, “faith”, and “loyalty” mean something different for each person afflicted  with — and sometimes buoyed by — living, and that our notions of what these concepts mean shift the longer we live, the more people we know, the better we know ourselves.

In her first story, “Incognito”, the narrator, divorced and living back at home with her widowed mother, finds “Love is sadness…tragedy,  just as we’d always supposed when we were in high school.“  And for her it is, yet it is also an anchor, a sure thing when other givens have fallen short.  In “Stitches” a husband’s certain love is “cloying, reassuring, inescapable, horrifying.  Secure: like a safety belt or a prison sentence.“   And later, another epiphany about love, this time foreseen for her college-age daughter after the girl’s first (and jarring) sexual experience: from this point on, “no love would be pure, no gesture uncomplicated….”

Because life is not pure or uncomplicated, lived as it is by conflicted, struggling human beings: “You wanted to be sitting in a comfortable leather recliner sipping fine wine and reading a passage of exquisite prose to your wise spouse for your mutual amusement, and you wanted to be having demeaning speed-demon sex in a seedy dorm room with a gorgeous soulless youth. You wanted a savvy, possibly unscrupulous business partner, and you wanted a devoted fool to pray at your feet.  You wanted something solid; you wanted something fluid.”  Settling somewhere in between the two polar opposites only brings misery.  Nelson’s characters keep trying to find the medium that is not settling but is good enough.

Each story in this collection is told from a different viewpoint and each one is accurate and clear, like a bullet of honesty amidst the necessary mush of living.  She portrays all ages and both sexes, expressing the lost and the found souls, the drunks and the druggies, but never the teetotaler (maybe that is one viewpoint she just cannot imagine — I can’t, either).

The final story, a quiet stunner entitled  “Female Trouble”, finds her male narrator on a porch a the end of the day, sitting amidst four women (one actually a wannabe female) and realizing he just doesn’t fit in: “And he was glad, he told himself.  Glad for his simple body, its fixtures out in the open, the expression on his face projecting exactly what was behind it in his head.  What was it with women and all this hidden equipment?  They dressed up, made up, faked orgasms, cried when happy, laughed when bitter, stirred up protoplasmic stews of life and then pulled aces from sleeves, wreaked havoc all the wide world over…”

Women and men, Nelson’s characters are messed up but trying to get straightened out, looking for love in all the wrong places and lucky enough to find it, once in awhile, exactly where it belongs, between child and parent, between lovers, and between friends.  They are apodictic to their place in life, thinking the thoughts we can imagine such a person having, harboring long-held dreams or getting over lost desires and hopes.

Nelson writes unflinchingly, getting it all right, the doubts, the regrets, and the joys of life. That’s what she conveys so beautifully: the pleasure and the pain, and the effort to try again and maybe get it right next time:  “Nothing to do but plunge on. Set the cruise control, lower the windows, raise the radio, stay between the broken yellow lines, and don’t look back. No no no.”