Past and present relationships overlap in ‘Funny Once’

$26, 304 pages

“When two divorced people marry,” says a Jewish proverb, “four people get into bed.” It’s a perfect description of the extended families that inhabit “Funny Once,” the precisely imagined, savagely funny new short-story collection from Antonya Nelson.

And by extended, I mean a clown’s car worth of ex-wives and ex-husbands, their second and sometimes third spouses, their former wives and husbands, their children and step-children, grandchildren and step-grands. Throw in the lost loves and first loves that linger and reappear in these tales, and there are sometimes more like eight to a bed.

Or as one of Nelson's characters puts it: "Ex. Former. Step. As if there was some remove in the relationship. As if there ever had been."

Though she has written four novels, Nelson’s first book of short stories, “The Expendables,” winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and five more collections, have firmly established her reputation as primarily a short-story writer and master of the domestic drama.

Here, 10 second-chapter scenarios cheekily skewer the idea that remarriage was ever the answer to anyone’s dreams. If anything, Nelson suggests that trading up, making educated choices, even growing older and wiser, don’t go very far to ensure against what we try to escape by starting over: infidelity, disillusionment, alcoholism, drug addiction, boredom, incompatibility.

What’s more, in the face of aging, illness and loss, sometimes what was left behind begins to look better.

Two best friends, now turned 50, reunite only to spar anew over a man they both dated in college. A man confined to a nursing home confuses visits from his wife with the long-ago mistress he never left her for. The slightly bored wife of “First Husband” still yearns for the bad boy she now visits only in her dreams, saying of her decent, loving second husband: “And William? Lovey loved him well enough, in the way of adulthood, she thought, not in the feverish former manner of witless drowning immersion, that love she’d fallen into heedlessly as if into a body of water, with no idea of what such a thing could cost her, it had nearly killed her when all was said and done.”

Thank God that’s over — until Nelson casually, brilliantly strips the gloss from husband No. 2: “And she understood that William, too, had been disposed of, that his ex-wife had had a similar nuclear potency, and that he loved Lovey with the same conscious intensity of somebody exacting a kind of revenge, or, perhaps, simply forever behaving with the belief that his ex was paying attention, that he had need to prove he’d survive and thrive, the victor.”

It’s inevitable that certain archetypes inhabit “Funny Once,” popping up in more than one story under different guises: the elderly husband, the errant first love, the devious best friend, the troubled young son. A variety of settings — Kansas (where Nelson grew up), Colorado, New Mexico and Texas (where she now lives) — rich detail, finely rendered characters and Nelson’s superb comedic timing keep each story fresh.

Meanwhile, never have so many irrational impulses been on parade. I spent much of the book alternating between applause and a kind of uneasy desire to yell, “Don’t do it!” Like the actors in horror movies who blithely investigate the dark basement at the sound of breaking glass, Nelson’s wives and husbands leap at the chance to screw up their lives. They revive old, inappropriate loves, tell whopping lies, and if a terrible choice presents itself, they’re on it.

During a trip back home to help tend her ailing father, the wife in “Soldier’s Joy” can’t resist a do-over with the now-married–with-kids boyfriend who broke her heart in college. In “Chapter Two,” a woman uses her alcoholic friend and neighbor as fodder for tales at AA meetings. The mother in “Iff,” studying a poster for a missing teenager, wishes her son’s moody, fickle girlfriend would similarly disappear and spare him the foreseeable heartbreak.

A novella, "Three Wishes," introduces one of the collection's only "first" families, three siblings trying to cope with the guilt of depositing their furious, senile father in a nursing home. Nelson's deadpan humor crackles throughout, especially in an account of the brother's creative writing class, taught by a hilariously bored teacher. After she explains the rules of story-making to her hopeful participants — "Do not bore me with the endless chronicle of moi," she warns — not surprisingly, two of her students sit out her classes guzzling wine and telling each other their life stories.

The title story refers to the observation that one should never restate a punch line (especially when drinking). But the marvelous first, second and third acts in “Funny Once,” by bringing us face to face with our riskiest behavior in the name of love, are worth repeating a hundred times over.