The best literature unsettles, and Joy Williams's stories do that over and over - one after another, and again on each re-read. So many of these 46 stories - 33 from previous collections and the other 13 newly collected here - have made me gasp, their stings arriving as if from sideways yet so sharply. I've read most of them more than once now, and many of them several times.
Certain figures recur: people, usually women, drinking heavily, half-aware of a lack in their lives rendering happiness inimaginable; precocious children who show up and say inexplicable, worrying things; dogs in many guises, and frequently as bearers and subjects of elusive meaning and even grace, as in "Shepherd": "The shepherd was brown and black with a blunt, fabulous face. He had a famous trick. When the girl said, "Do you love me?" he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. And he was light, so light, containing his great weight deep within himself, like a dream of weight."
Many of the best are those in which children take centre stage; in fact, all three of my very favourites could be described in that way. There's "Train", in which Danica Anderson and Jane Muirhead, both ten years old, roam up and down a train whose adult passengers, including Jane's parents, reveal all kinds of failings, including possibly the sharpest-toothed encounter and one of the best scenes in the whole collection:
Certain figures recur: people, usually women, drinking heavily, half-aware of a lack in their lives rendering happiness inimaginable; precocious children who show up and say inexplicable, worrying things; dogs in many guises, and frequently as bearers and subjects of elusive meaning and even grace, as in "Shepherd": "The shepherd was brown and black with a blunt, fabulous face. He had a famous trick. When the girl said, "Do you love me?" he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. And he was light, so light, containing his great weight deep within himself, like a dream of weight."
Many of the best are those in which children take centre stage; in fact, all three of my very favourites could be described in that way. There's "Train", in which Danica Anderson and Jane Muirhead, both ten years old, roam up and down a train whose adult passengers, including Jane's parents, reveal all kinds of failings, including possibly the sharpest-toothed encounter and one of the best scenes in the whole collection:
"I bet you're a professional woman who doesn't believe in men," Jane said slyly.
"Crystal, how did you guess! It's true, men are a collective hallucination of women. It's like when a group of crackpots get together on a hilltop and see flying saucers." The woman picked at her chicken.
Jane looked surprised, then said, "My father went to a costume party once wrapped from head to foot in aluminum foil."
"A casserole," the woman offered.
"No! A spaceman, an alien astronaut!"
Dan giggled, remembering when Mr. Muirhead had done that. She felt that Jane had met her match with this woman.
"What do you do!" Jane fairly screamed. "You won't tell us!"
"I do drugs," the woman said. The girls shrank back. "Ha," the woman said. "Actually, I test drugs for pharmaceutical companies. And I do research for a perfume manufacturer. I am involved in the search for human pheromones."... a scene that ends with a climax:
"I know what a placebo is," Jane muttered.
"Well that's terrific, Crystal, you're a prodigy." The woman removed a book from her handbag and began to read it. The book had a denim jacket on it that concealed its title.
"Ha!" Jane said, rising quickly and attempting to knock over a glass of water. "My name's not Crystal!"There's "The Excursion" which, slipping through time, may be the saddest of the lot, which is really saying something. It's hard to tell, but to me it seems that Jenny actually does have foresight into what her future holds, in some shadowy ungrasped present-tense way; and actually it doesn't matter, because either way by the end the story has well and truly paid off the promises, many implicit, of its opening paragraphs:
Jenny lies a little. She is just a little girl, a child with fears. She fears that birds will fly out of the toilet bowl. Starlings with slick black wings. She fears trees and fishes and the bones in meat. She lies a little but it is not considered serious. Sometimes it seems she forgets where she is. She is lost in a place that is not her childhood. Sometimes she will say to someone, Mrs. Coogan at the Capt'n Davy Nursery School, for example, that her mother is dead, her father is dead, even her dog, Tonto, is dead. She will say that she has no toys, that she lives with machinery she cannot run, that she lives in a house with no windows, no view of the street, that she lives with strangers. She has to understand everything herself.
Poor Mrs. Coogan! She pats Jenny's shoulder. Jenny wears pretty and expensive dresses with blue sneakers. The effect is charming. She has blond hair falling over a rather low brow and an interesting, mobile face. She does everything too fast. She rushes to bathtimes and mealtimes and even to sleep. She sleeps rapidly with deep, heartbreaking sighs. Such hurry is unnecessary. It is as though she rushes forward to meet even her memories.And there's "Escapes", in some ways one of the more straightforward stories here, but so deftly layered that its many sorrows and absences, more than the simple action of the trip to the magic show, are what remains, along with the sense that the little half-stories and recollections scattered through it are all secretly linked.
I had a dream about the car. My mother and I were alone together as we always were, linked in our hopeless and uncomprehending love of each other, and we were driving to a house. It seemed to be our destination but we arrived only to move on. We drove again, always returning to the house, which we would circle and leave, only to arrive at it again. As we drove, the inside of the car grew hair. The hair was gray and it grew and grew. I never told my mother about this dream just as I had never told her about my father leaning on the cane. I was a secretive person. In that way, I was like my mother.These stories are funny, dispiriting and razor sharp, full of conversations in which people talk past each other, with statements and questions that don't but might almost follow as sequiturs if we only knew the context and what was going on in the speaker's head, often to the dismay of at least one of them, for reasons which she (it's nearly always a she) can't articulate, even to herself. The perspective shifts around, now omniscient, now somewhere around the mid-range of what James Wood calls free indirect style, now so close to a point of view character that there's barely any distance at all, yet it all has a strange unity. There are stories that feel aphoristic, others shiver with a sharper realism, but they all feel metaphysical or, as Williams herself might have it, anagogical. And those endings, they really are murderous, always sneakily more than they seem; for example:
As it happened, my mother was not able to pull herself through, but this was later. At the time, it was not so near the end and when my mother woke we found the car and left Portland, my mother saying my name. "Lizzie," she said. "Lizzie." I felt as though I must be with her somewhere and that she knew that too, but not in that old blue convertible traveling home in the dark, the soft, stained roof ballooning up as I knew it looked like it was from outside. I got out of it, but it took me years. ("Escapes", again)
She could not go forward. Then, she couldn't go back. ("The Visiting Privilege")
They all lay on the bed. After a few moments someone began to snore. Janice wouldn't want to bet her last fifty that it wasn't her. ("Charity")
I must arrest this, Preyman thought, I must arrest what this is, and he opened his mouth with a cry to do so. ("In the Park")
"There it is, Steadman," Denise said. It all just hung there for an instant before the car swerved around them and turned in inches beyond their front bumper. Then, whatever was driving it slammed on the brakes. ("Craving")Others that I especially like: "Shorelines", featuring many plain declarations that make you suspect the opposite is true, "The Country" (still), and "Charity", with its slowly, unpredictably veering situation and troubling hints:
"I think of God as a magician," ZoeBella whispered, looking closely at Janice. "A rich magician who has a great many sheep who he hypnotizes so he won't have to pay for shepherds or fences to keep them from running away. The sheep know that eventually the magician wants to kill them because he wants their flesh and their skin. So first the magician hypnotizes them into thinking they're immortal and that no harm is being done to them when they get skinned, that on the contrary it will be very good for them and even pleasant. Then he hypnotizes them into thinking the magician is their good master who loves them. Then he hypnotizes them into thinking they're not sheep at all. And after all this, they never run away but quietly wait until the magician requires their flesh and their skin."
ZoeBella's skin was very pale and her eyes were large and blue. "Goodness," Janice said, perturbed. Only a piece of bread was going to find this hair, she decided. She pushed one into her mouth.
Zorro said, "I think of God -"
His mother yanked his arm sharply. "We don't want to hear that again," she said.Joy Williams having been discovered, in pretty quick succession, via a handful of the stories from Ninety-Nine Stories of God (initially in Tin House), which came out after The Visiting Privilege, and "The Country" in New American Stories, which continues to haunt:
I begin to speak but find I have no need to speak. The room is more familiar to me than I would care to admit. Who was it whose last breath didn't bring him home?
Or am I the first?
