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normal_____
BY JONATHAN MILES certain stories close so perfectly that their endings are almost audible -- a sudden beauty or truth reveals itself with the delicate click of a jewel box. You think of James Joyce, or perhaps Raymond Carver or Tennessee Williams: To exit their stories is to walk from a warm bath into cool night air, to feel knowledge or sensation as a sudden and real thing. At least two of the stories in Lucia Nevai's first collection, "Normal," achieve that dizzying level: "Monsieur Alle" and "Close." These two stories are jewel box-perfect -- piercing, often stunning works that portend a promising new voice in American fiction. In "Monsieur Alle," a makeshift New York clan seizes upon a Haitian-born social worker to explain to them the beauty and brutality of family life. Like many of the families that populate Nevai's collection, this brood is an awkward one and anything but, well, normal: Howie lives with ex-hippie Glenda and her two sons in an Upper West Side apartment, while the woman to whom he is still married lives with their 9-year-old daughter 22 blocks up Broadway. Glenda, too, is married -- to the vanished father of her youngest son. When Howie gets into a dinnertime chicken fight with Glenda's son, Monsieur Alle is sent to their home. What he discovers there, to crib from Tolstoy, is an unhappy family unhappy in its very own way -- an apartment full of emotional debris. There is scattered debris in "Close" as well. "Everyone was too far apart. No one ... was home," is how Nevai describes the family of a therapist returning for her brother's funeral. On the plane, the therapist tries to connect them all by tracing with her finger their converging routes on a map in an in-flight magazine. "Her right hand looked deformed, splayed over the right half of the map," Nevai writes. It's a wonderful metaphor: the warm-fingered hand stretched to its limits, seeking to tie together loose family strands. There are other stories in "Normal," of course -- 12, to be exact. In the title story, a recovering junkie tries to impress her father with her drug-free life and infant son only to watch that father vomit up eight or nine scotches. In another, a 5-foot-tall New Jersey typesetter named Gus tackles New York City by transforming himself into the artful but scurrilous typographer Gustav. As in most first collections, some of the stories are clumsy, too baldly ambitious. A rebellious teenager's therapy session in one story reads, well, like the transcript from a teenager's therapy session, and another story in which the bereaved mother of a coma patient travels to an ashram had me praying for a coma of my own.
But these missteps are exceptions. Lucia Nevai is a writer of uncommon depth and fluency. What she gives us in "Normal" is a brutally accurate snapshot of the American family at the fin de siècle -- families nuclear, extended, reconstituted or flatly weird, but never, for a moment, uninteresting. Every family, Nevai tells us, is normal in its own abnormal way (and vice versa). Beneath every rooftop lies a story all its own, so thank Lucia Nevai: She has given us some of the good ones.
Jonathan Miles is a writer who lives in Oxford, Miss. |
