My sister built up Joy Williams to an almost mythological state in my mind. She’s earned her highest regard and I can see now why she touched her so much. Reading Joy Williams is like finding your book twin over and over again. I like to listen to my sister discuss the books she reads and then read them later on myself fresh. It’s great to experience these books through her mind. I started that habit with my older siblings as a kid but unfortunately, the books my brother told me about didn’t live up to his version of the stories. Joy Williams stories on the other hand, should be lived by everyone. Marabou and Hammer were almost frightening in the portrayal of the callousness of youth. My favourite part of Hammer, a story about a woman Angela, whose daughter Darlene despises her, is that she’d regret her daughter losing an aspect of herself if she grew out of hating her. That something would break inside Darlene if she did so. That idea of choosing to be hated rather than someone break was interesting. Angela was deeply fascinating and I was pleased when Deke took to her. I would not have that quality inside me to return love to someone who hated me so much. I have no fantasies about myself that I could.Claro read to me of the exact opposite intentions that Angela felt towards Darlene. Lilly is suffering from an illness while her husband Danny has made significant progress. Lilly doesn’t like people, and remarks she may have been an Ash tree once. Ash trees don’t care for people. I appreciate that while writing about characters who are socially awkward or don’t like other people Williams makes me like people more, feel less alone and relate more to others. Eduardo, the servant, whose face shifts from hatred to love with such ease has a daughter Stephanie. Eduardo realizes that Lilly admires Stephanie so he doesn’t tell her about her throwing a cat in the toilet. What intrigued me the most in this story was this part: “She was learning ignorance, Lily marveled. She had begun to be false, false to herself and others. Lily would not allow this, she would not. This the child of whom Barbara had said, “Why, she thinks you hung the moon!” She had a responsibility to this child. Danny asks Eduardo the next day what she was upset about and he replies “Stomachache.” Was this another lie to cover another misdeed? Or did Lilly destroy Stephanie by trying to keep her true to herself. I don’t think Angela would have forced another person to remain as she wished them to be.The only frightening young tough in the story Fortune was Harold. There wasn’t something right about him in June’s mind. They were a rather peaceful bunch staying in Guatemala. No one fell in love like their parents did. In Marabou, Anne’s son Harry dies. The druggie and former druggie friends of his were creepy. I can’t get the image of them crowding outside her door after they returned, demanding to be told the real version of their trip to Africa. Honored Guest and Substance are more stories dealing with death but one in Honored Guest, it hadn’t taken place yet. Helen’s mother Lenore is dying of cancer. The dream world, Helen’s world and Lenore’s brief moments of feeling better [which she worried wouldn’t be fair to Helen] were effortlessly weaved together alongside the shifting perspectives of the two characters. Helen’s starkly different pain of feeling suicide wasn’t cool at her school, or her mother wanting life not to go on without her. The fact of life was summed up at the end with the girl on her bus who knew how these things went. Substance is a story about a group of friends who are all left a specific item after their friend’s suicide. No one knows the meaning of their gifts, but will be revealed at a later time. We the readers never discover the reason but I have two theories. Either, the twins discovery of Pablo Neruda’s ”Death also goes through the world dressed like a broom” is as good as anything I’d come up with. Louise gets the dog Broom who she slowly gets used to. Louise reminded me of Angela from Hammer in the way that she slowly got used to things. Lucretia reflected that she’d lost her spark. Was this from having old Broom around? Or maybe Elliot had no reason to leave pajamas, watches and things to his friends.Anodyne is about a diabetic teenager whose mother sort of picks up a shooting instructor for dinner. She doesn’t even like him but has him around anyway. She describes it as her mom isn’t the sort of person who objects to each day. There seemed to be a sense of letting go but not the loss of anything she did have like Louise. The depression and general unhappiness that isn’t all encompassing but just giving in to things.Hammer had that quality about Angela as well. The reason of that depression is the death of her father. ACK is also about depression. The narrator is grateful to his wife, Pauline, for rescuing him in that he could feel assurance through her. His friends Betty and Bruce lament this happiness for him. I wasn’t too sure they really saved him from anything. The awful woman Starky, and her description of her ten kids felt wholly oppressive. Pauline’s looks and whispers were right on with that one.Congress is the highlight among this wonderful set of stories. Miriam’s boyfriend Jack is a forensic anthropologist. His students cannot understand why he is with Miriam. I found that Miriam ended up a bit like Jack in the end. He liked to make up little stories for the bones he worked on.“She was a loner, adventurous, not well educated and probably unemployed. Odds are the rings were stolen. She would have certainly done herself a favor by passing up the temptation of those rings.” Miriam lands a job at a taxidermist in the end precisely because she can make up different answers for the visitors questions and talk to the animals. Poor Jack takes on suggestions from his student Carl and ends up paralysed and a vegetable. Carl absolutely killed me. “He likes you!” and when Miriam asked him if he’d ever been in love before. Now the lamp, I read that straight as the lamp really read books. Miriam reads a book a loud ”I shot him right up his big fat fanny” without realizing the damage to poor lamp. The lamp held steady. His disagreements with the books they read captivated me and when he read Moby Dick I’d wish she’d been reading it with him to hear his thoughts on it.I’m hard pressed to pick a favourite quote but this: Miriam had always felt that she was the kind of person who somehow quenched in the least exacting stranger any desire for conversation with her. The Visiting Privilege is a story about truly not being accepted society not just the sort of person strangers group up or want to talk to. Donna reflects the best thing her best friend Christine did was get committed to the Pond, a mental institution. She likes to pretend that the elder lady is her mother and takes an interest in her. Christine is disgusted by Donna’s interest in the old lady and the two fat girls despise Donna for not paying them that attention. She tries to listen to the group therapy sessions until she is caught and kicked out. Donna has a morbid curiousity with the Pond, which I feel is because she feels less off-beat, and has a place, something to do.Someone to care for even if the relationship was one-sided.Charity and The Other Week were more marvelous stories of self-reflection and making up identities for other people. In Charity, Janice reflects that without her boyfriend Richard, she would be capable of awe and transfiguration. With him, she felt nothing. Janice evoked to me a person who blames others for being held back and imagining something from strangers. In The Other Week, Francine is the object of another person’s imagination of themself. Francine and Freddie are having financial problems due to his not having a job for three years and her sleeping twenty hours a day. Williams vividly describes that status between sleeping and awaking. It is so easy to become addicted to sleeping. Francine’s gardener accepts not being paid as he convinces himself she is his deceased babysitter Darla. The unspoken horror of this story is what happened to that dog Freddie took for walks. I have a dreadful feeling he was a sacrifice of some sort when the other dog-walkers congratulated her.
"But your life’s center is on the periphery."In the grand scheme of things, little things sometimes fail to become an indispensable part of the complete picture and inadvertently choose a different path for themselves. They walk alone, live through the day and quietly go to sleep without holding any promise of opening their eyes the next day. For me, short stories are made out of such ephemeral yet strong happenings. I approach them with almost zero expectations and whatever I receive in exchange for my time, I humbly accept it. Here is an obvious presence of some uncertain motive on my part but I have difficulty in defining its true nature. However it’s suffice to admit that I long to savor the flavor of different slices of life that these stories carry within them. Even if she slurred her words when she thought, the lamp was able to follow her. There were tenses that human speech had yet to discover, and the lamp was able to incorporate these in its understanding as well.And along comes Joy Williams with her Honored Guest. Without exaggeration, it is one perfect story collection I have read in a long time. It’s perfect in terms of writing, in executing unconventional ideas, in building an ambiguous atmosphere, in gathering a unique set of characters and perfect in keeping the interest of a reader till the very end. And even amidst so much perfection, there never crops up a sense of taking in too much and that’s precisely why this book has left an indelible mark on my psyche and I’ll strive to retain it in my memory bank. “I suspect there’s only one thing to know about that other world … You don’t go to it when you’re dead. That other world exists only when you’re in this one.”In the set of twelve splendid stories, death plays the part of a common protagonist though its identity is carefully wrapped in the translucent layers of subtlety. We get to know it only through a source it generally affects – living beings. A mother has few days left to live and her daughter is not exactly prepared for the same, a wife learns the fickle nature of love during her husband’s illness and finds solace in the surreal existence of an illuminating but inanimate object, a couple realize that they are past the age to discuss Kant’s philosophies, how the sense of being benevolent turns the table in unexpected direction and what happens when a deceased friend bequeaths odd things to his friends about which his friends are both curious and clueless. There is a masterful but effortless examination of life which is about to take the last steps towards death and how these steps becomes the part of the journey of those who are left behind. It’s a sad book for apparent reasons but the way Williams has handled the narration with an ample dose of dark humor makes it an essential and entertaining read. There are not many out there who talks about death and life and convince us that after all both of them are nothing but partners in an inevitable crime.“You’re too nostalgic, June,” Caroline said. “Nostalgia nauseates me. I lack the nostalgic gene, thank god.”
What do You think about Honored Guest (2005)?
I wonder why I don't give this more stars. It's absolutely gorgeous writing, with a great sense of weirdness and detail and dialogue. Cameron Pierce lent me this specifically so I could read "Congress," the story about the deer-foot lamp -- and I loved it! I guess I hoped the rest of the book would be equally surreal and unhinged, but instead the rest of the stories have convinced me that the weirdness of "Congress" is more a depiction of the heroine's mental illness than a step into impossible worlds. These characters are all about curious outward symptoms hinting at severe inner wreckage."A woman, cracking up from anguish and trauma inflicted by loved ones, starts behaving strangely in some desert or wasteland setting, while denying that she is behaving strangely or cracking up, Hilarity or pathos ensues, or both." Which story in this book am I describing? All of them. That is the formula that Joy WIlliams follows. (Except perhaps in the last two stories I didn't read.) And they're brilliant stories, magically done. But I just can't follow that arc over and over without growing numb to these well-drawn women and their poignant problems. None of these stories end with completion or resolution -- which is totally fine, i'm not like the guy on IMDB who complained that the ending of Casablanca was "gay" and should have been more like 007: Golden Eye -- but the weird result of my reading this all in one afternoon is that I remain vaguely worried about, and annoyed with, the fates of a whole basket of dysfunctional non-existent women who define themselves through other people.Which is a testament, I think, to the quality of the writing: haunting is the right word. But honestly, there are so many other arcs in the world for a writer this good to trace. I feel the same way about this as about George Saunders: you are way too good a writer to be re-writing the same story over and over like this. Maybe her novels are different? Recommendations appreciated.
—Mykle
Another collection that failed to pull me all the way through. The NY Times reviewer nailed the book's fatal flaw dead on, arguing that the collection's lack of landscape led to its groundless characters. Williams has a knack for ironicizing the detail, but when it comes to putting her skewed characters in some kind of context where their pretenatural abilities seems to emanate from some unknowable natural world, she falls well short of the successes in her first collection, which had such texture to its imagined worlds, such a stark physical context. If it is true that writers are at their best when writing toward their abiding concerns, then Williams, whose abiding concern is most definitely the side effects of a disinterested, even destructive relationship to the natural world, sets herself in this collection as a writer who seems to have forgone serious concerns in favor of trading in on her literary strangeness. Skip this one, read "Taking Care" instead.
—Patrick Faller
3 Woman is an amazing movie, I can see the connection.Bill wrote: "I loved this collection. Other than Lynch, Altman's 3 Women also seemed very Joy Williams-esque to me."
—Adam
