#4 Nadia- Judy Budnitz

#4 Nadia (2006)- Judy Budnitz

Originally published in One Story, I read this is the 2006 Nonrequired Reading collection edited by Dave Eggers.  I highly recommend these compendiums as well as the others in the Best American Series.  I’ll be using a lot of their selections.

Nadia is a fascinating story, equal parts about relationships between friends and American guilt/Privilege while facing horrible realities of poorer communities.  The narrator is a female relating a story of her longtime male friend who is divorced and gets a mail-order bride.  The seemingly startling reality of a U.S. High School teacher legally paying for a foreign bride…in itself is not important.  Even when he visits her country to find her previous husband’s child and witnesses a murder, the plot’s details take a back seat to what the narrator is thinking.

What is important and what I found exceptionally well done is the semi-conscious dialogue within this narrator head.  Budnitz taps into how friends think about each other; the judgment, the envy, the love, the pity, in this case sexual tension. She toggles back and forth between allegiances and entertains wild assumptions that if spoken aloud would be hurtful and damaging. In a nice juxtaposition and something we have all done, she tells him:

“Frankness, we reminded him, was the basis of any good relationship” which repeats back to him wrongly what he spoke earlier:

“Frankness will be the death of any good relationship”

The strength of the story is its authentic tap into the veil of deception we filter our relationships through, or at least our understanding of them. 

The other theme I mentioned was how the privileged class sees someone like Nadia, a tough story, or someone who needs our help.  The narrator quickly turns her thoughts not to Nadia but to herself and how Nadia's situation effects her own.  And when her offered help is refused or misses the mark, she turns resentful and violent.  It’s an important point in how American’s see the world’s less fortunate.  And it’s a point well made in this short story.

Notable Passage: “Near death experience? […] I’ve been having one of them for years”

Rating: 8-7-8-9 Total= 32