It Will Come Back to You
by Sigrid Nunez
Riverhead Books, 224 pp., $29.00
They share with the narrators of Nunez’s best novels a flaneur’s sensibility, honed over many years. (Nunez is 75.) They wander the streets of New York City, encountering friends and strangers, reflecting on their favorite books and films, and remembering scenes from their younger years, which were spent walking the very same streets. In this way, they resemble the narrator of her prize-winning novel The Friend (2018), who, traveling from Manhattan to Brooklyn, recalls scenes from a vibrant, complicated friendship with her recently deceased mentor. The narrator of Nunez’s subsequent book, What Are You Going Through (2020), operates similarly: At the gym she’s attended for years, she looks around the locker room and remembers a time when both she and a woman she recognizes were younger and leaner. For women like these, the city is a kind of palimpsest, and their walks are projects of excavation. (This they share with the memoirs of Vivian Gornick, another native New Yorker.) While the women at the center of her novels sometimes long for their youth—and their youthful beauty—they also recognize that the richness of their lives depends on the experiences and relationships they’ve accrued with age.
These stories, spanning Nunez’s career, capture the ways the city can shape life’s different phases. We meet women just starting out as city dwellers and those who have lived in the same apartment for years. Characters scan the streets that surround them, comparing themselves to other women, and trying to place themselves in life’s grand, finite sweep. Set free from social conventions and the narratives that accompany them, they seek out the sorts of experiences that make for good stories: one-night stands and doomed love affairs, cocktail parties and courtroom dramas. If they’re not generating their own stories, they’re mulling those shared by friends and relatives, people they once thought they knew. The best stories in It Will Come Back to You are those that could only take place in a big city, where women are empowered to create their own lives in every sense.
It Will Come Back to You is presented as Nunez’s first collection of stories, suggesting a pivot for a writer who has published nine novels. But her astonishing debut novel, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), published when Nunez was 43, is also, in some sense, a collection of stories. “Chang,” the first section of the novel, was published as a stand-alone story in The Threepenny Review in 1989; “Christa,” a companion story, appeared in The Iowa Review two years later. “Chang” is about Nunez’s father, a Chinese Panamanian immigrant, a silent type who worked himself to death. “Christa” is about her mother, a German housewife whose sense of humor helped her cope with an exhausting life. The third and fourth sections of the novel describe the narrator’s teenage years and young adulthood, periods marked, respectively, by her arduous training as a ballerina and by a passionate, potentially dangerous affair with a Russian taxi driver. The stories might best be classified as autofiction: Nunez has said that “Chang” in particular could have been published as nonfiction because “it’s all true.”