In the Land of Men

by Antonya Nelson

In this powerful collection of stories, Antonya Nelson portrays women whose lives have slipped loose from their moorings and the men who can't really anchor them. Here we meet Roxanne, the tomboy who consistently chooses men who are not her equal; the loving Marta, whose husband keeps a separate house where he retreats when married life overwhelms him; and Bebe, a married mother of two teenagers who leaves it all behind when her lover comes on a motorcycle to claim her. With painfully keen perception, Nelson creates stories that linger in the mind long after they are read, and which create a unique view of relations between the sexes in the small towns and big cities of America.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1992

About the author

Antonya Nelson is the author of nine books of fiction, including Nothing Right and the novels Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell. Nelson’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook, and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Grant, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and, recently, the United States Artists Simon Fellowship. She is married to the writer Robert Boswell and lives in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, where she holds the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

Reviews

[patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edgier and darker than Alice Munro, more engaging than Joyce Carol Oates in the short story/novella context. For me it could be the age difference between the three authors with author Nelson closer to my own age/experience.

This set of short stories by Antonya Nelson are my fave to date...still have a few more titles to enjoy.

[Deidre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Antonya Nelson. In the Land of Men. New York: Scribner, 1992.

She’s depressing. She’s thoughtful. She’s edgy. Okay, so the last one I read of hers wasn’t that great but this one is very, very good. It’s back to short story writing with connecting themes. I’d struggle to say that I like her characters because Nelson allows them to be uncomfortably human, with flaws that we don’t like admitting we have. Most of us tame that part of us – thank goodness. If we can’t tame those parts than it’s just better to keep them to ourselves.

“The Happy Day”
P40 “She keeps shooting, black and whites, the ones that will last. Sunny ugly snapshots at the end of a Saturday afternoon, one that is ending all over town, up in Lake Forest, over at the Brookfield Zoo. Everywhere in Chicago people are clashing, dying, making love, injecting insulin, selling shoes, stepping into steaming tubs of water, rearranging once again the idle components of a million intervhangeable lives. It is too much.”

“How Much We Could See”
P170 “It was one of those seeming conversations that are really two monologues pieced together in the form of dialogue.”

“Fort Despair”
P219 / 220 Things happen that make early teens see their families differently. In this case, it’s a sixteen year old girl. For the girl, it seems to happen in a moment. Somehow a boundary is crossed and her view of them changes. The life they have together becomes flawed, human, tarnished. She sees her father with tears in his eyes – now he is weak; her thirteen-year-old brother masterbates and probably smokes – he’s disgusting; her mother has a lover – she’s betrayed them all.

Both the teens in the story, toy with the idea that they could flip a switch and turn off the oxygen that keeps their unappealing uncle alive. He’s dying of both emphysema and a cancer that protrudes in tumor form from his stomach. Nelson’s characters are always playing with doing wrong to others, behaving badly. Her characters think bad things but only actually do “minor” infractions - smoking, drinking, cheating, lying.

Nelson is so good. In a short story she can write successfully from the viewpoint of several characters; in this case, the father, mother, daughter, and the son. The son spies on the father and watches as he breaks down and sobs while confessing to his sister that his wife is cheating on him. The son “felt tears in his own eyes, the way watching someone else vomit made him gag.”

[Ann Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of short stories had been languishing in my "to read" pile for at least three or four years until I picked it up on a whim a few days ago. Once that happened, every other book I had been reading was put on hold. This is the first book I've read by Antonya Nelson. if this is indicative of her writing, I've just discovered a new favourite author. Her stories are powerful and compelling, often from the very first line. Highly recommended.

[Nikki in Niagara · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short stories by renowned story writer Antonia Nelson. She is well known for tight, dark, stories of children and women, and their families. This is a wonderful collection with many I've rated four and five stars. There was one that did not resonate with me, while the rest I highly recommend.

1. In the Land of Men - A woman is picked up after work by her brother, this time all three of them, as she has been since her attack last year. Only now they have her rapist in the trunk and say it's up to her. Well written with believable thoughts running through her mind (4/5)

2. The Happy Day - A woman is a wedding photographer's assistant who is to take the candid shots. Well written, interesting tale but not exactly exciting. (3/5).

3. Human Habits - A man marries an older woman and her young teenage son comes to live with them. The rocky life story as they have another child. Sad. (4/5)

4. The Control Group - The quirky life of a 9-year-old foster kid who is in love with his 4th grade teacher and his mother has killed his grandfather. Heartfelt characters. (5/5)

5. Adobe - As itinerant workers build her adobe home in New Mexico, a white woman falls in love with one of their children. Beautiful characterization. (5/5)

6. Here on Earth - 13yo Darcy and her mother take a trip to Chicago where they lived for the first three years of her life. Her mother continuously narrates about their life there. About divorced life for the child, not bad. (3/5)

7. Fire Season - A man is a sponge living off women. Right now, he's living with a rich 19yo whose parents are in the Bahamas while waiting for the fire season to start out west. Delicious ending. (4/5)

8. Goodbye, Midwest - The author and a woman grow up in the Midwest, jealous of each other's families,equally pretty but differently, better and different subjects, even through college, until they have the big silly forever breakup. Didn't really hold my attention throughout. (3/4)

9. Inertia - A woman looking out her sewing room window watches a squirrel crash land on its back and rushes to help. Takes a look at the suddenness of death. (3/5)

10. Fair Hunt - A woman dying in the hospital is coming home and the husband is told a sterile environment might prolong her life. They live on an overrun cotton/pecan farm with many stray animals and the anti-NRA husband decides to shoot them all. An interesting character study. (3/5)

11. How Much We Could See - A family summers in a small town and the eldest daughter narrates the relationship and tragedy with the neighbor. A dreary story with gloominess always around the corner. (4/5)

12. Bare Knees - An early 20-something YWCA pool lifeguard reminisces about her job, her coworkers, her older brother, and the wake for a suicide she went to the evening before. Gloomy (3/5)

13. The Facts of Air - This goes lots of places buts without giving spoilers let's just say a woman leaves her husband, moves to Tuscan, and one of her cats goes missing for a couple of days and is ill when it comes back. The story is about so much more and is very dramatic, oh la la what an ending. (4/5)

14. Fort Despair - A Chicago family goes to visit their stereotypical Southern family for Thanksgiving and something monumental happens. I hate what happens but I loved the story-telling. My favourite of the whole book. (5/5)

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some stories were good and others I “didn’t get”. This will probably be the last I read of this author.

[Socraticist · Rating 5 out of 5]

The main characters are all at or under forty and none of them are really settled into their eventual permanent groove, so we feel the flux and tension in this part of their lives. Antonya Nelson doesn’t gloss over their flaws — especially for the delinquent and troubled ones — yet she handles all her characters with kindness. No sugar coating or wishful thinking; the stories are frank, direct and sometimes disturbing, sharply observant of the shortfalls in life. Amazing how she pulls all that off.


The best stories are:

In the Land of Men
Adobe
Fire Season
How Much We Could See
The Facts of Air
Fort Despair


This is her second book and the second one I’ve read. It’s better than her first, and it’s nice to see a good writer becoming even better.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be the second or third Antonya Nelson book of short stories on my shelf, and I like each one better. Antonya really gets to it. Before she is done with one idea or character or setting, she is already painting a new picture to deepen the meaning to her story. She has this talent to put one picture down after another so that as you read along you feel like you are going deeper into this kaleidescope of real life tragedy. In fact, in one of my favorites in this collection "The Happy Day", the main character is a secondary wedding photographer who is responsible for shooting "things gone tender or real or wrong, the off-center parts that lend the standard event its idiosyncratic patent." She has developed a special eye for the sadness and irony that doesn't make it into the foto albums or frramed pictures.
Sound familiar?
I think that's what Antonya does with her writing. So many of her stories take us through everyday real-life sequences, but the more familiar things become, the more frightening images develop. Seemlessly, she takes us through our bedrooms and kitchens and swimming pools. But as we tip toe through the narrative, we all know that something horrible lurks below the surface. She knows the intricacies of our faimilies and relationships, our loves and fears. Go ahead: read "Bare Knees" and see if you don't identify with young Lynnie Link's struggle for independence. It's a nice coming-of-age story until one day lifeguard Lynnie's inner turmoil delays her rescue of a drowning retard at the deep end of pool. You see we already know of her teen-age sensibilities and her love and admiration for her older brother, but what we didn't know was she hates this retard and everything about him. She freezes to contemplate life's meaning as he goes down under. Her staying dry, is us staying straight. When you read this passage, aren't you going to think you are capable of the same cowardness and/self-hatred?
In the Land of Men is great! What you don't see is more important than what you read. Antonya Nelson has this ability to connect with her readers through the most subtle of suggestion. Never does she give you the confidence for you to feel like you know anything. The stories will curl your toes and twist your heart.

[Ann M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some very good stories here.

[Patricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found her in The New Yorker and am curious about more of her work.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked this so much I read two or three more of hers in relatively short succession.

[John Pappas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nelson does dislocation and loss well. When they take center stage, her male characters seem a bit wooden. Her female characters, however, are more dynamic and vital.

[Ken Titt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tender stories brilliantly penned with passion and grit.