LAS CRUCES, N.M. — The house Antonya Nelson shares with her husband, writer Robert Boswell, and their two grown children, Noah, 18, and Jade, 21, is doeskin adobe, built in 1910, surrounded by dusty, shaded sage plants.
Inside, there is color everywhere: flowers, pottery, paintings by local artists. The dining room is lined with books, stunningly alphabetized. The kitchen table has blue glass bowls filled with carrots and cherry tomatoes. Even the dogs' dishes are painted with colorful flowers.
Nelson is wearing a fiesta-style skirt and low Frye boots. Her children are passionate about art: Noah, music, and Jade, painting. There is order. There is color. Anyone could write a book in this house.
Or could they? Nelson is 130 pages into a new novel and she's hankering to write short stories, a "naughty pleasure." Her latest book, the collection "Nothing Right" (Bloomsbury: 296 pp., $25), is vintage Nelson: It's full of contrarian views of modern life, swift eviscerations of simpering morality, the complicated love between parents and children, brinkmanship with psychosis and everyday breakdowns, a culture that makes adolescents of us all, a lot of alcohol and a smattering of infidelity.
And why not? Nelson is the daughter of two English professors; two of her four siblings are psychologists; sarcasm was the lingua franca of her childhood home in Wichita, Kan.
"I have," she explains, "a huge capacity for listening to people's problems. Writers are uniquely suited to observe. This is why they end up drinking a lot, to desensitize. They are always slightly on the outside."
Today at the gym, Nelson found herself unable to resist the temptation to remove her earplugs. The women next to her were discussing hairdressers and the pitfalls of dieting, namely the negative effects on hair.
"The story I'm working on has a character who is the former owner of a beauty school," she says, delighted and yet not entirely surprised by the coincidence. "I spend a lot of time scribbling notes on the backs of books I'm reading. Everything feeds the story I'm working on."
Nelson's work has long been admired by many of our finest writers -- Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace (who attended the University of Arizona master of fine arts program with her), Michael Chabon.
