My, Antonya. An unconventional narrative in the current New Yorker

Antonya Nelson's story Chapter Two in the current New Yorker is a little darker and more ominous than other stories I've read from her, many of which focus on young Midwsterner women starting out in life and are striking for their impish, playful wit. Chapter Two is quirky, as are its characters, but not amusing like other Nelson stories - or, the wit comes in a different manner: it's actually a narrative wit. Nelson is trying something daring and unconventional here, playing with narrative possibilities. It's not as if her narrator is unreliable, though she may be, it's that the narrator herself tries to tell the story in several different ways or modes - just as writers often do, looking for the right place at which to begin a story, the best way to introduce characters, what details to place where in order to catch and hold an the audience, or the readership, attention and sympathy. She doesn't create multiple through self-conscious postmodern narrative experimentation; rather, she incorporates the narratives into the realistic frame of the story: her narrator is in A.A. and tells her story to varying groups (a mixed group, a women-only group) and develops different strategies for her story, about a seriously addicted and deranged wealthy neighbor, who arrives one evening on her doorstep, naked, each a part of the story that, taken together, comprise a full of very quirky picture. Not sure I'd want to read a whole collection of stories in this jumpy style, but taken on its own it's a good work that pushes the edges of the form.