IT WILL COME BACK TO YOU

Nunez delivers vivid portraits of people living quiet lives of desperation in these sterling short stories.

There are two kinds of people in the world, said Søren Kierkegaard: those who write, and those who don’t. Nunez, best known as a novelist, writes up a storm with her first story, “Philosophers,” a tour de force of resignation. Her protagonist, who back in high school had a crush on a boy with a muscle car, adds to the categorization: “There was the kind of person who said, Let’s split the check, and the kind who reminded you you’d had the extra beer.” And then there are “good soldiers and bad soldiers” and “two kinds of Vietnamese,” wrote the young man from the combat zone. The Danish philosopher figures in this portrait, and so does heartbreak. Then there are the mentally ill and those on the way to being so, as a therapist reflects in “Greensleeves,” a title that speaks to a song with hidden dimensions. As to that, many of Nunez’s characters harbor secrets, mostly small but some very large indeed, as with a serial killer who “had never had sex without shame.” Shame doesn’t keep him from the hunt, and everyone is fair game: “People he knew, people he didn’t know. People. They were all candidates.” It’s a masterwork of horror that slowly unfolds to a creepily affectless ending. Nunez is a strong writer at every level, but she’s especially good at closings that nail their points in place, from the everyday to the sublime, as toward the end of the title story and its reflection on “why we get so much wrong, for 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.”

Nunez’s stories make a welcome addition to an already much esteemed body of work.