National Book Award-winner Sigrid Nunez says, “The reader will forgive the novelist for some things. Like, in a 400-page book, you can have a dozen flat sentences. But in a (short) story? No. You can’t do that.”
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Twelve medium sentences in a book of perhaps $6,000 have an authorship hit rate of 99.8 percent. This is a high bar. But Nunez puts the numbers aside; She is not talking about the novel, but about the semantic density of the short story, which she is considering ahead of her first story collection, it will come back to youFrom Riverhead on July 14.
“I finished writing weak peopleNúñez says in her 2023 novel, “And then, for me, an unusual thing happened. I had a story idea, I wrote it and I was happy with it. That doesn’t usually happen. And then,” she says, “surprisingly, I had another one. And then another. And another. So I had a bunch of stories that had just been written.
With some encouragement from his agent, the hot hand convinced Núñez that he had something. He began an unpublished novel and some older pieces, but only those that stood the test of time without editing. “If something has already been published,” she says, “there’s something awkward about going back and touching it. Plus, I don’t enjoy it.”
Pleasure is central to Nunez’s craft. There is no central theme it will come back to youNot in the traditional sense, but at the level of language, Núñez’s bizarre, jigsaw puzzle paragraphs are nodes from which hidden motifs—the overall strangeness of human society, the prevalence of severe emotional alienation, the value of creativity—emerge. This artistry is perhaps most evident during character introductions, which is important in short fiction, when personalities have to enter the page memorably enough to keep track of, but quickly enough so as not to derail the pace.
The first thing we learn about Ace, who is interested in “philosophers”, is that he “often starts sentences of some kind. There are two kinds of people in the world.” Ace’s teacher thinks he “looked like James Dean, which wasn’t true, even though we knew she was really talking about his aura.”
This teacher, Mrs. Mint, was “an unhappy woman with beautiful hair and large, distracting breasts. She had the aura of a woman whose husband had married her because of her breasts and was now tired of her.”
Later, in “It’s All Good”, the protagonist telephones a nursing home supervisor, “though I never found it easy to talk to that woman. She’s the same age as my mother but has the same physique, has unusually pale, watery eyes that look like there’s a headache behind them, and such a precious deadpan manner that you get the feeling the alarm will go off if you lean too close.”
“I don’t understand why people don’t remember what it was like in that era. They say they remember, but they don’t behave like that. They have completely forgotten everything.”
Not every character comes across with such confidence. But it’s remarkable how Núñez churns out these introductory descriptions, each of them a kind of Borgesian, self-contained flash fiction. “I think a lot depends on serendipity,” she says, when I ask her what makes a memorable failure. “I’m writing along and I say something about the character, and describing him that way in the first draft hits me. I think it works, and I keep it. Or in later drafts, it will come to me.”
(A common twist on asking great writers about their art. Dig deep enough, you’ll reach the water table: explanations get messy. “It will come to me.”)
“It’s never something I want to stop and struggle with,” says Nunez of the character introduction. “If it doesn’t come to me in a natural way, it’s too forced. But you know, it can’t be a name, eye color, hair and height. You need a few details about them. And you only need one if it’s strong.”
Here Núñez’s process seems less dependent on technique than on pure “imagination,” which is the third story in the collection, which begins in episodic style: “Dick Franz went as a warlock…”
published in Sun In 2012, “Imagination”, intentionally or not, sheds light on Núñez’s creative engine. Its protagonist is a quirky teenage girl named Elsie, who weaves dreams through a party at her parents’ country house.
“An inventive imagination was a gift from the gods,” Núñez writes, “or a curse if you couldn’t control it.” Elsie would sometimes start talking, tell a story, say, and go on so far, pile it on so thickly, fly off on so many tangents, that she might as well have been speaking in other languages. If you told him this, his reaction was to remain silent.
Núñez says she still has “a vivid memory” of what it was like to be a teenager. “I’m always amazed when I see how concerned adults are about children,” she says. “I don’t understand why people don’t remember what it was like in that era. They say they remember, but they don’t act like that. They’ve completely forgotten everything.”
As an example, Nunez cites the average teen’s obsession with appearances, such as when Elsie becomes infatuated with the soiree’s 30-year-old bartender. “He’s not quite old enough to be a father, but close,” Núñez writes. “(Elsie) tried to imagine what she would have looked like at that age. As beautiful as she is now? Beautiful? (Doubtful.)”
There’s a kind of “narcissism” that comes with being young, Núñez says. “But it’s not unhealthy. It’s about finding yourself and trying to decide how you look. You know, everything is a potential disaster, the end of the world. It’s wonderful, wonderful!”
Perhaps fiction writers, I dare say, are forced to bring more adolescence into their careers than the average person. “I think they probably do,” Nunez says. “Being able to access how you were as a child is probably one of the greatest tools you have as a writer. I mean, brain surgeons: you want them to be very adult.”
Núñez, true to his subject, ranks among the top young writers of today.
The “wisdom” of age plays a major role in the collection’s three concluding stories, but it is most provocative in “The Rabbit’s Foot,” published last year. yale reviewIn which Carmine, an underprivileged maid in a glamorous New York City hotel, is later criticized by her successful Ivy Leave daughter for taking advantage of her as a young woman. Nunez says the setting was inspired by Sherman Alexie’s 2017 New Yorker Story “Clean, Clean, Cleanest.” Apart from some idea of setting and further time changes, Núñez began writing the script and left the rest to improvisation.
“I usually write things my own way,” Núñez says of her plotting. She believes that “probably all” of the stories in this collection changed direction mid-writing, which in some ways is not surprising given the nature of putting words on a page, but in other ways points to what Núñez said earlier about leaving the door open to wandering bouts of inspiration.
“It just comes to me…”
“It’s never something I want to stop and struggle with…”
The resistance of the plot seems as if it might give rise to a certain kind of story, full of Elsie’s famous digressions (“Laying it on so thickly, flying off on so many tangents”). Nunez avoids this trap with writerly determination. Once she begins drafting a short story, she says, “I definitely try to finish it. I’ll never start another story. I start, and I want to finish as quickly as possible.”
Núñez has heard of other writers who skillfully multitask, completing one partial manuscript while starting another, and combining it with stories and essays. “It’s very awkward for me,” she says. “I need as narrow a focus as possible and as few drafts as possible.”
With this mindset, it is not surprising that the protagonist of the collection’s title piece laments today’s crisis of distraction, calling it “a neurological disaster on a massive scale.”
“It’s very concerning,” Nunez says. “I mean, technology in general is extremely worrisome for many different reasons. We know that some type of loss (to memory and focus) is occurring. But we don’t really know the specifics.”
The narrator of “It Will Come Back to You” wonders whether these problems are affecting the younger generation more than the older one. But Núñez, true to his subject, is at the top of today’s young writers. She says, “Whatever distractions contemporary novelists may have, I don’t think it’s a prevalent problem, that the quality of work is declining. It’s not that we only have bad writers now. Nothing could be less true than that.”
