By Robert Israel

It Will Come Back to You‘s intricate, puzzle-like narratives shine—except when insider gossip gets in the way.

It Will Come Back to You: Collected Stories, by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books, 224 pages, $29.

Sigrid Nunez is a 75-year-old New York City writer who has earned high praise for her many novels, accumulating a National Book Award and other accolades. She makes an impactful debut with her first short-story collection. Consisting of thirteen stories that Nunez chose herself, the volume includes work that previously appeared in smaller-circulation literary magazines, including Boston University’s AGNI. The exceptions are two mass-market pieces: “Greensleeves,” which first appeared in The New Yorker, and “Mother-Daughter Story,” first published in Harper’s.

Her short-fiction collection reveals Nunez to be a writer who exerts tight, masterful control over language and who uses her novelist’s skills to interweave character development with the nuances of plot. She seems to have accepted the late American writer William Goyen’s advice that stories work best when they possess “a rhythm, a charged moment, a chain of pulses or beats…the pulse that beats in the material of life.” In short, they must come alive. Novels take their time to develop this “pulse,” but short tales do not have that luxury—urgency is a virtue. That said, none of these pieces falls into the category of “flash fiction,” although several of them are brief enough to be labeled “short-shorts.” Others in the collection could easily be developed into novellas, but Nunez does not opt for that route.

What she chooses to do in It Will Come Back to You is showcase her impressive skills as a weaver of prose. In nautical terms, lengthwise and crosswise threads are referred to as warp and woof; Nunez introduces readers to each of these taut stitches. Her dexterity displays its panache in the story “Philosophers,” which is structured around a main storyline but includes purposeful, disruptive tidbits, leaving us to figure it out, as if deciphering a puzzle. When Nunez conjoins these two types of stitches, the reader does not necessarily have a whole cloth but is challenged to become a co-creator with the author. There is a certain palpable joy in being duly deputized in this way—freed to hunt for clues and to figure out what the next particular thread may be revealing, concealing, or unraveling. The result is both surprising and entertaining.

This brings me to discuss why Nunez included the New Yorker story “Greensleeves” in this collection. I know why, of course: a story that appears in that magazine is not only a feather in a writer’s cap—it’s the whole plumage. Let’s not forget that the pay is handsome, too. But the story reprinted here is the least successful in the collection. Set in New York City, it involves a horny but repressed psychiatrist; a woman who confides in him and is equally repressed; asides about the good doctor’s failed marriage, his relationship with his daughter, and the confessions of other distraught characters who flit in and out of frames like cartoon characters. This is claptrap galore—the stuff one imagines hearing at social gatherings on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Nunez is a New York City native and still lives there; no doubt she overheard many of the conversations in the story or had neighbors gossip in her ear about things they overheard, delighting in sharing salacious morsels. These unsuspecting—and victimized—neighbors should have taken to heart Joan Didion’s admonition: “Writers are always selling somebody out.” The story is not without humor, but it reeks of insider baseball—only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. The sad truth is that the story, and the people it describes, are so consistently shallow. It is a perfect New York City story for a perfect New York City magazine, but for the rest of us there is no takeaway other than that a talented writer decided to resort to producing flaccid prose.

Contrast that with passages throughout the other stories that are so much more vivid: “She sailed about the living room like a giant monarch butterfly, briefly landing on this or that knot of guests.” And this: “His gaze kept being drawn to her gleaming manicure, each copper-colored nail like a Japanese beetle.” It is always a treat to read richly drawn descriptions like these, because they draw on our primal appetite for reading stories in the first place: to be drawn into worlds we have yet to discover or have once known and to experience them artfully amplified, imaginatively reinvigorated.

Nunez has achieved a great deal as a writer, and given her evident gifts, she need not pander to the allure of “sophisticated” magazines; she can continue to mine the riches of smaller literary publications, many of which pay writers a fraction of what The New Yorker does. That she has flirted with that glittery world—and displays the disappointing results in this collection—suggests she knows the temptation to kiss, tell, and sell. Nunez is wise enough to recognize the difference; going forward, she will, one hopes, hew to the substantive.

Robert Israel, an Arts Fuse contributor since 2013, can be reached at [email protected].