Reading a Joy Williams story is an exercise in self-control for anyone averse to marking up her book. Most pages beckon to be dog-earned; most sentences, containing within them both specific details about their subjects and universal sentiments evoking empathy and amusement, call to be underlined. If you can resist, and read on, you’ll find in her latest collection a career’s worth of funny observations and misanthropic critiques.
From her first published story -- “Taking Care,” about a doting pastor’s dismay with his wife’s hospitalization and his resulting assertion that he’ll live a less passive life -- a thread is formed that ties together her long collection, which is marked by its consistent voice and themes. There’s a big, awing rift between how the pastor speaks and how he actually feels, between how he hopes to be and how he actually is. Most of Williams’ writing lives in that odd space, the space between optimistic wants and blunt realities.
She brings dreams and subconscious desires to life in “The Lover,” a story about a young mother who listens to a radio host’s beguiling life advice, and accepts his wild tips without much skepticism. The so-called Answer Man dishes out wisdom on the number of hours of sleep one should get, and the best way to make a lemon meringue pie. His answers are always jargon-filled and borderline nonsensical, calling attention to the insufficiency of straightforward facts.
Williams herself isn’t one for the concrete. In an interview with The Paris Review, she neatly described her own approach to fiction: “Can we incorporate and treasure and be nourished by that which we do not understand? Of course. Understanding something, especially in these tech times, seems to involve ruthless appropriation and dismantlement and diminishment.” The anecdote, for Williams, is writing about that which can’t be understood, and embedding it within our quotidian routines, where the surreal so often lives.
In “Summer,” a couple and their children share a vacation home with a writer who’s holed up working most days, but nevertheless invites a different woman to stay with him each weekend. Here, Williams mocks the idea that good writing should wrestle with broad theories we’ve deemed important, rather than the strangeness and beauty of everyday life. The writer in the story is working on “writing an aesthetically complex response to hermetic currents in modern life.” Jabs the narrator, Constance: “This took time.” She, on the other hand, whiles away her time interacting with the writers’ girlfriends and watching neighbors behave strangely when they think they aren’t being watched. As a result, she, immersed as she is in the ennui of wifehood and womanhood, ends up witnessing more honest human interactions than the writer, who’s cut off from his own social group.
Williams has more in common with Constance than with the story’s resident writer. She’s less inclined than most writers to assign lofty or romantic meanings to storytelling, and in fact has called a story not useful but “devious.” As a result, her stories are rarely political (in the sense of promoting change), with the exception of the few that suggest her preference of animals over humans. In “Shepherd,” a woman grieves the loss of her pet, while doing her best to evade conflict with her newly serious partner. The dog, for her, symbolized independence, and her earlier, more self-sufficient life. It also reminded her of how simple emotions like loyalty can be when they remain untarnished by the dull, difficult realities of human relationships. Williams is a thoughtful cynic when it comes to the knotty, often dishonest lives of adults. But through her almost-fantastical observations, her childlike characters and her whimsical descriptions of animals, she finds something to love in the uncanny.
The bottom line
The uncanny and the everyday exist side-by-side in Joy Williams’s collection of funny, thoughtful stories old and new.
Who wrote it?
Joy Williams is the author of four novels, including The Changeling and The Quick and the Dead. The Visiting Privilege is her fifth short story collection. She has been nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Who will read it?
Those interested in wry critiques of American culture, in funny dialogue and strange, almost surreal scenes.
What other reviewers think:
The New York Times: "If the human race were ever put on trial -- for crimes against the planet, animals and one another -- it would be hard to think of a more ferocious prosecutor than Joy Williams. Is there a writer whose condemnations are more convincing, whose vision is more godless and bleak? And in case this all sounds too punishing for you, is there a funnier nihilist in the ranks of American writers?"
The Washington Post: "The superb new stories don’t mark a radical departure in style or subject matter from previous work, although the characters tend to be older, and the structures a little looser, more meditative."
Opening lines:
"Jones, the preacher, has been in love all his life. He is baffled by this because as far as he can see, it has never helped anyone, even when they have acknowledged it, which is not often. Jones’s love is much too apparent and arouses neglect."
Notable passage:
"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."
The Visiting Privilege
by Joy Williams
Published Sept. 8, 2015
Knopf, $30.00
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