In this series of short stories entitled FUNNY ONCE,
Antonya Nelson has provided us with interesting characters,
great settings and engaging plots. Three of the stories
were my favorite, although the entire collection is worth a
read.
In "Literally" a widowed father of two is trying to raise
his two children without the guidance of their mother.
Richard does have a maid named Bonita who tries to help him
through his everyday chores. It seems that Bonita, an
immigrant who can barely speak English, needs Richard in
her life just as he needs her. Their children, Danny and
Isaac, are playmates and best friends. Once day when the
boys wander off, Bonita and Richard must work together to
find the boys and bring them home safely.
"First Husband" and "Soldier's Joy" are both about women
who have married much older men. In "First Husband,"
Lovey was married to an older man and despite the fact that
she has been divorced from her first husband and is happily
settled with her second husband, her first husband's family
keeps encroaching on her life. Her ex-stepdaughter has
made a mess of her life and calls on Lovey in the middle of
the night to babysit her three children. Lovey doesn't
want to say no, but she contemplates the awkwardness of
being involved in the ex-stepchildren's lives.
In "Soldier's Joy" Nana is also married to a much older man
who, despite his advanced age, is still trying to be a
ladies' man. When he makes a pass at a friend's daughter
at a party, Nana feels the need to call her friend and to
apologize profusely. Nana goes home for the weekend when
her father has an accident and while she is there she is
reunited with an old boyfriend. Unlike her husband, he is
the same age as her and she is drawn to him because of
their history together. I especially like the surprise
ending in this story.
Whenever people tell me that they do not have time to read
I always recommend short stories. FUNNY ONCE is full of
engaging stories that are sure to entertain.
Michael Chabon once said, “I scan the tables of contents of
magazines, looking for Antonya Nelson's name, hoping that
she has decided to bless us again.” And now she has blessed
us again, with a bounty of the stories for which she is so
beloved. Her stories are clear-eyed, hard-edged, beautifully
formed. In the title story, “Funny Once,” a couple held
together by bad behavior fall into a lie with their more
responsible friends. In “The Village,” a woman visits her
father at a nursing home, recalling his equanimity at her
teenage misdeeds and gaining a new understanding of his own
past indiscretions.
In another, when a troubled girl in the neighborhood goes
missing, a mother worries increasingly about her teenage
son’s relationship with a bad-news girlfriend. In the
novella “Three Wishes,” siblings muddle through in the
aftermath of their elder brother’s too-early departure from
the world.
The landscape of this book is the wide open spaces of
Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. Throughout, there
is the pervasive desire to drink to forget, to have sex with
the wrong people, to hit the road and figure out later where
to stop for the night. These characters are aging,
regretting actions both taken and not, inhabiting their
extended adolescences as best they can. And in Funny Once,
their flawed humanity is made beautiful, perfectly observed
by one of America’s best short story writers.
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