There are two kinds of people in the world, said S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard: those who write, and those who don\u2019t. Nunez, best known as a novelist, writes up a storm with her first story, \u201cPhilosophers,\u201d 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: \u201cThere was the kind of person who said, Let\u2019s split the check, and the kind who reminded you you\u2019d had the extra beer.\u201d And then there are \u201cgood soldiers and bad soldiers\u201d and \u201ctwo kinds of Vietnamese,\u201d 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 \u201cGreensleeves,\u201d a title that speaks to a song with hidden dimensions. As to that, many of Nunez\u2019s characters harbor secrets, mostly small but some very large indeed, as with a serial killer who \u201chad never had sex without shame.\u201d Shame doesn\u2019t keep him from the hunt, and everyone is fair game: \u201cPeople he knew, people he didn\u2019t know. People. They were all candidates.\u201d It\u2019s a masterwork of horror that slowly unfolds to a creepily affectless ending. Nunez is a strong writer at every level, but she\u2019s 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 \u201cwhy 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.\u201d <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are two kinds of people in the world, said S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard: those who write, and those who don\u2019t. Nunez, best known as a novelist, writes up a storm with her first story, \u201cPhilosophers,\u201d a tour de force of resignation. Her protagonist, who back in high school had a crush on a boy with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6795,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6794"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}