Readers of Sigrid Nunez’s long-form fiction will be familiar with her concerns about storytelling: the gaps between what happened, what is remembered and what can be understood only through fictionalising. Her new collection of 13 stories, written across several decades, returns to questions of memory and the unreliability of narrative.
The stories tend to have mundane settings: an insomniac awake late at night; a traveller stranded by a flight delay. Nunez is less interested in dramatic incidents than in the way a passing encounter can alter one’s understanding of life. Her narrators frequently find themselves re-evaluating past certainties or realising that events they thought they’d understood resist neat explanations. The titular story captures the collection’s preoccupation, the phrase ‘It will come back to you’ holding a double meaning central to the volume: you will remember it, or you will inherit it. The past proves difficult either to remember fully or to escape.
That concern with the slipperiness of narrative is a strong through-line. In ‘The Philosopher’, memory, writing and living appear antithetical to one another, which is ‘why we get so much wrong, why memory is so easily overruled by fiction, and why it can be so hard, no matter how we struggle, to get at the truth of our lives’. In ‘The Naked Juror’, writerly pursuits are viewed as oppositional to truth, with ‘concern that a writer’s imagination might get in the way of the all-important common sense, or that she might be tempted to turn the case into a story’. Nunez continues to return to the possibility that experience acquires shape only when it is turned into a narrative, but warns that the resulting shape may be misleading.
Although many of the pieces are concerned with storytelling, they are not formally metafictional. Instead, Nunez embeds questions about narrative in reflective, conversational accounts of ordinary experience. The stories may begin with the mundane and end somewhere unexpectedly lofty, but the transition doesn’t feel forced. One recollection leads to another in the associative manner of thought itself. Characters discover that the events they recall most clearly are often the ones they understand least.
Nunez returns repeatedly to this gap between what happened and the story later told about it. The title story mourns ‘the idea that a human life isn’t like a novel, that there is no plot, no narrative arc’. Yet the collection as a whole demonstrates why people continue searching for one – as life without a story is something ‘the human heart will not have’.
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