Culture
January 1, 1
David Gates
In the title story of Antonya Nelson’s latest collection, Nothing Right, a divorced mother asks her teenage son—who’d once loved to be read to and now balks at writing a paper on Macbeth—why he dislikes literature. “It’s not real,” he says. “Just a bunch of imaginary crap.” Sure, you could give the kid an argument about Shakespeare, and so could the mother if she, like a lot of Nelson’s characters, weren’t worn down by parenthood. She recognizes, as he does not, that something like the story of “a weak king and his bitchy wife” has recently played out “in his