Pure Joy Williams. The book starts out with an amazing premise--Liberty and Willie, wife and husband, are living life in other people's homes. Not burglarizing them, simply living in them for a time while their owners are away. The descriptions are mindblowing. Williams is a master of defamiliarization and her matter-of-fact style smolders, searing images into your brain. And the characters! A parade of lonely, fearful, ecstatic freaks. A security guard. An alcoholic. A boy whose mother enrolls him in after school classes. A pelican, with ravaged beak. A seventy-year old female bodybuilder. A prophet/lifestyle coach who dispenses advice via telephone. For the first half of the book, Williams is so on target, nailing everything: character, dialogue, setting.A commercial: "On the screen there was a picture of a plate with a large steak and a plump baked potato on it, which was apparently its mouth, and it apparently began talking. Liberty turned up the sound. It was a commercial for potatoes, and the potato was complaining that everyone says steak and potatoes instead of the other way around. It nestled down against the steak again after making its point. The piece of meat didn’t say anything."A description of the Umberton’s house (a house where Willie and Libertay stay):“The sofas had pads under the legs to protect the rugs. The toilets had deodorant sticks to protect the integrity of the bowls. There was plastic on the lamp shades to protect them from dust and on the mattresses to shield them from nocturnal emissions. The Umbertons were waging a sprightly war against decline. They protected their possessions as though they had given birth to them.”Odd sentences that like to be re-read:"Every night she put her face in a bowl of ice cubes.""A headache cupped Liberty’s skull."Weird/funny dialogue:"'I have some suspicions about lesbians,' Duane said. 'I mean I have some theories about the way they might be spotted. I would think that might be worth something, don’t you?'”Mundane yet brutal detail:“A sign in the shop window said YES! WE HAVE MASTECTOMY BATHING SUITS!”One of my favorite paragraphs, so indicative of what JW does well, i.e., entertain, bleakly:“Little Dot did not hold onto the fifty-dollar bill. She gave it to Rosie who donated it to a large charitable organization. The large charitable organization funneled it into a drug rehabilitation clinic. It was taken from the clinic’s account to purchase a toaster over for the office staff. The owner of the appliance store where the toaster over was purchased blew it at the track one muggy matinee on a dog named Bat Mister. The bill then commenced a round of payment for lingerie, biopsy results and brake linings. It suffered a life that the most lurid of imaginations could not conjure. It penetrated deep into the repulsive nature of banality. It traveled and was suckered more than once. It knew bright lights and dark pockets. It knew admissions to pornographic films. It bought ten parts of Mexican boxing shoes, a cheap cashmere sweater and a down payment for a trip never realized. It went of like an orphan, wailing. The flashly coincidences it disclosed were made routine by repetition. It never looked life straight in the eye. Not once. And it never returned.”Unfortunately, the last half of the book seems to flail about rather than continue on any sort of developmental arc. Some, I'm sure, won't give a damn about that, but I ended up frustrated. Still, overall, you get a book like no other, one that's definitely worth reading and savoring.
SYNOPSIS: young married ne'er do wells do their passive best to fight the anomie of existence by breaking into mcmansions and experiencing their usual buried resentments and lack of affect in new environments rather than their own ill-tended home.Joy Williams is often an artist with the prose. her brilliance shines when she is exercising her descriptive muscles: she knows how to paint a landscape, to construct a house, to take a snapshot of a particular locale. although she is capable of the occasional embarrassing misstep (see progress note), for the most part her writing style is expert.SYNOPSIS: Flannery O'Connor and Don DeLillo got together, knocked boots, and made a baby named Breaking and Entering.okay this is a literary novel that starts out by giving the impression that it will be a straightforward narrative... one that emphasizes the growth of the protagonist in contrast with the gallery of grotesque supporting characters that cross her path. something, perhaps, in the "Southern tradition". but that is not the case at all; this novel does not truck in realism, not in the kitchen sink sense of the word, nor in the sense of magic realism or even the more distinctly mannered faux-realism of authors like O'Connor or Faulkner. Williams' novel belongs on the shelf next to DeLillo and Barth and Coover and company. and this was a problem for me. an absorbing narrative is set up within a perfectly captured locale by a talented writer... and then it transforms into a series of stylized tableaux featuring bizarre un-characters monologuing - people who I not only could give a shit about, but who aren't even interesting as ideas. this is Williams' book, not mine, so it's not like I felt she did anything "wrong" - she wrote what she wanted to write. that much is clear. unfortunately for me, I can't connect with a book that not only has no interest in developing the somewhat intriguing narrative that was created (and then abandoned), but I also couldn't connect with the ideas that seemed to replace an actual story. because the story was abandoned in favor of a series of off-putting soliloquies, the themes of We Create The Boxes We Live In and He Wants To Roam While She Wants To Build Some Kind Of Life were rendered tedious and sterile. SYNOPSIS: boring young woman remains boring.the worst part of this novel is the protagonist. she brings nothing to the table - no insights, no quirks, no growth, not even a real point of view regarding the nitwits that cross her path, let alone their rambling monologues. she's a vacuum, a black hole - all these ideas floated by the various characters go in but nothing comes out. she has no voice. her lack of perspective and agency started off as interesting but quickly became a frustrating bore.SYNOPSIS: a wonderful dog with a sad backstory and a loveable kid with admirable pluck are abandoned by an author who is disinterested in developing her own creations.and that made me sad.
What do You think about Breaking And Entering (1988)?
I made it about 180 pages of a 278 page book and finally had to throw in the towel. The prose here is very good. The setting is fantastic. The entire story has a great dream-like atmosphere to it that I enjoyed a lot. However, what made this book challenging was the dialog. The characters all speak with such deep introspection and almost in verse it seems like. It was a stylistic choice for sure, but grew tiresome and then eventually irritating as each supporting character would start to monologue and monologue AND monologue and I was left wondering why the main characters were in the scene. In fact many of the scenes a secondary character would be speaking for about two pages before one of the main characters would interject with a non sequitur that would just spark another diatribe that was unique in the beginning of the story, but eventually cumbersome near the end as the plot seemed to be sputtering to a non conclusion.
—Derek Neville
I really wanted to like this book because I could tell that such care went into the writing of it. Every sentence sparkles with Joy Williams' wit. The problem for me is that the sum was somehow less than the parts. Williams begins the book with a premise: a young couple, Willie and Liberty, break into Florida vacation homes and squat there while the owners are away. It's a good premise, and the tension of it carries the book for awhile, as it becomes obvious to readers (and maybe to the characters themselves) that this little habit will end in trouble. But Williams is less than thorough about drawing the premise through to its conclusion. The hint of trouble never truly materializes, arriving instead, somewhat comically, in the form of a seventy year-old female bodybuilder. The book is no doubt intended as serious literature, so I imagine Williams was wary of wandering into the territory of a police procedural. The themes in "Breaking and Entering" are undoubtedly sincere: child neglect, religious fundamentalism, teen pregnancy, attempted suicide. They are dark themes, and help to explain how Willie and Liberty have found themselves as drifters at such a young age. Unfortunately the revelations come too far along in the story. By that point I had wearied of the characters and mainly wanted to be finished with them. Part of the problem the author makes for herself is creating a character, Liberty, who has no real interest in talking to other people or revealing anything about herself. Yes, of course these people exist in real life, but I'm not sure we want to read about them. The effect is of a watered-down character, one we can't really invest in. But this is not such a serious dilemma either. The real issue I had with the book was its cleverness, which became exhausting. The characters--drifters, alcoholics, security guards--spoke to one another in hyper-literate David Mamet-style dialogue. Opening randomly to a page from the book, I find this example: "You understand that lurking in the heart of each pure, pretty day that is given to us is a snaky, malevolent, cold-blooded, creepy, diseased potentiality." This a father tells his young daughter. This constant, artsy speech has the unfortunate effect of making the characters and, by extension, the story, merely whimsical. It dissolves any impact the weighty events might have had. I really saw this book as a response to Thomas McGuane's "Panama," another meandering Florida tale of people adrift. In "Panama," at least the economics of the existential wandering were explained. That book's protagonist made his fortune as a rock star. But in "Breaking and Entering," Willie and Liberty drive around in a pick-up, eat in restaurants, even rent a place of their own--all this without a discernible source of income. Just as Willie and Liberty wandered, so did the story, which seemed to end as it began, with the characters displaced and unable to form any true connections.
—Daniel
Welcome to the lunatic asylum. Epigraphs from Kafka and Breton indicates what kind of reality is being essayed in this book and it has nothing to do with K-mart. Two drifters float into the ghostly lives of various characters who speak like hypnotized psychoanalysis patients or piss covered prophets on their fortieth day of locust eating. Really terrifying and unsettling but somehow incredibly funny at the same time. Are there characters more bizarre and memorable then Poe (the 75 year old weightlifter) and Mr. Bobby? Resembles a novel a little more than Quick and the Dead and another in the win column for Joy Williams.
—Adam
