Book Review | An Entertaining Series Of Small Social Adventures

Does unrequited love combined with the inability to have children (not congenital but circumstantial) equal success as a writer? Does shame contain the essence of pleasure? In what kind of personality is being prone to flights of fancy translated into consistently poor judgement? What happens when medication causing somebody to change their behaviour wears off?

Despite being born and raised in New York City and having an MFA, Sigrid Nunez is a decidedly anti-woke writer. An author of nine novels, this is her tenth book comprising 13 entertaining stories. Some [like ‘Philosophers’] read like personal essays that suddenly turn moving. In some, it is the prose that is elegant and evocative: “Mounds of black snow in the yard, a thick layer separating their house and the Lems’ (where, like a low, dim star, gleamed an energy-wasting porch light.” [‘Imagination’] “From then on she was cold toward me, responding to my greetings with such a sullen moue I stopped offering them.” [‘Curiosity’] But what remains consistent throughout and what you come to appreciate best is the voice of the author like that of a kind scientist, distant, clinical and completely matter of fact, yet somehow comforting. No touch of the self there. Not laugh-out-loud hilarious, either, like some other writers, very occasionally disappointing, too, with the outcomes that it presents, yes, yet despite the inevitable doom and darkness, amusing.

Who wins? A teenager competes with her teacher for the attentions of the school heartthrob. A boring but devoted father of a self-obsessed, suicidal daughter is courted by two dames. Just to find out what the fuss is all about, a young woman slumming it out for emancipation inhabits the lair of a prostitute. A penniless orphan-widow who cooks and cleans and navigates office politics to happily marry and successfully raise two upwardly mobile children finds herself stereotyped as a victim by them for her pains. Yet, as the Indian Gen Z might be enthused to find, the author herself is all too aware that all mothers are not equal. They aren’t even the ‘holy cow’ at all times. So a girl adopts trailer trash enamoured by their verve over her cold control-freak of a mum, but is it only the latter’s jealousy that disrupts this convenient arrangement? Or is it the machinations of the adoptive mother’s vindictive second husband after he fails to have his way with his underage quarry? Is the adoptive mum’s memory unreliable, or will it all come back to you as promised by the book’s title?

These and other inconsequential social mysteries fill the pages of this lean compilation. They result in a mature, light-hearted collection containing oft-overlooked psychological truths, posing questions that sometimes lead to surprising revelations about our frequently baffling life and times.

It Will Come Back To You

By Sigrid Nunez