To the bone
The anecdotes about Joy Williams are so legion, so strange and so telling, her body of work so storied, you’d assume her name to have long been a household word — at least among literary-fiction fans. Oddly, no — though among notable writers, yes: “Her th
Why overlooked, one wonders.
A little snooping online whets the appetite. Williams (now in her early 70s, living in Tucson and Wyoming) is brilliant in her commentary. And there may be powerful advantages in coming late to her work. To enter “The Visiting Privilege” — a mammoth, definitive collection of Williams’ stories (33 selected old, 13 new) is to smack face-first into astonishment: best words, best order.
But more: One is instantly aware, reading these stories, of a taut sensibility infusing them. Dispassionate but not uncompassionate, this steady, Flaubertian presence, both witness and engine, demonstrates (beyond “mere” mastery of craft) one sublime measure of literary art.
So distilled and sure are Williams’ sentences that at first I only wanted to scribble “oh!” in the margins. Seamlessly linked, precise, forceful, they spear the reading ear, piercing to hard, weird truth: “Her birth is a deep error, an abstraction.” They propose by their very existence — as much as by the story-freight they deliver — that we readers follow their lead and drop all artifice.
The paradox is that this purist throw-down is done with language, which by nature (selection) must always be artifice. Williams deploys an offbeat, eclectic diction, tucking two or three improbable describers, like opposite ends of magnets, into the same utterance. The energy strikes sparks. You will reread many lines. “He is concerned with both justification and remorse.” “The jacket designs are subdued, epic.” “He is gaunt with belief.” “They discussed everything with the children — love, death, Japanese whaling methods.” “Their arguments were baroque, stately, and although frequently extraordinary, never enlightening.” Mary Gaitskill and the late Laurie Colwin have taken a similar tack.
Across class and geographic lines, Williams chronicles human folly and futility while mourning the trampled innocence of animals, plants and children, who suffer consistently at adult hands. “Many things that human words have harmed are restored again by the silence of animals.” Williams can also wax funny in a bittersweet way — a skill highend writers repeatedly single out to admire. A child escorted from a magic show with her drunken mother observes, “We were being taken away to be murdered, which seemed reasonable to me.”
Most of these stories, though, do a swan dive (crisp, graceful) straight into the tar pit. Wading through 56 of them can leave a reader’s heart so sodden it’s necessary to put the book aside for a breather. (That’s the best way to read stories anyway.) One’s reminded of Nathanael West’s “Day of the Locust” and J.D. Salinger’s “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” as piece after piece matter-of-factly itemizes how the young (or innocent) survive adult neglect — or don’t. Sorrow waltzes with inanity. (Children affix gravestone rubbings to the refrigerator “with magnets in the shape of broccoli.”)
Some of these kids matriculate early. “I bet you’re a professional woman who doesn’t believe in men,” one shrewd little girl tells a woman on a train. “It’s true,” answers the woman. “[M]en are a collective hallucination of women. ... like when a group of crackpots get together on a hilltop and see flying saucers.” We recognize everywhere the Cheeverish theater of drink, of booze anesthetizing defeat — a smell that (the magic show child recalls) “reminds me still of daring and deception, hopes and little lies.” “I hope you’re enjoying your childhood,” a drunken father tells his daughter’s friend. “When you grow up, a shadow falls. Everything’s sunny and then this big goddamn wing or something passes overhead.”
The newer stories only tighten down more fiercely on loss, mayhem and ruin. In “The Mother Cell,” we listen to the wistful, Beckettian conversation of a group of mothers of celebrity killers. “Life was a mirror,” thinks one, “that didn’t know what it was reflecting.” The final story watches an alcoholic couple drive to their death. Williams has noted, in an interview, “What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.”
Perhaps this helps explain “mostly overlooked by readers.” One can’t not sense the hyper-gifted author teetering at an edge, despairing yet unable to stop looking. Very occasionally, a filament of wonder pulses weak light. “Despite their clumsy grief and all the lost and puzzling years,” one of the murderers’ mothers remarks, “... the earth was no less beautiful.”