"If he were free," he says aloud, nodding toward the leopard, "he'd be hunting incessantly." He says the word with astonishment. "Incessantly."Did I tell you that my Jean Rhys kick of last month was because of Joy Williams? I shouldn't be surprised now, I guess. "Oh." State of Grace was Joy Williams' first novel, published in 1973, and it could be her own Jean Rhys novel if you squint hard enough at the very Jean Rhys cover of the woman on the couch to see the blood stains and ignored filth. (I feel a faded photograph of a tropical bird would have been a better choice. Something off of a cereal box. The toy surprise has already gone.) The couch doesn't cushion the back that has removed its own spine to get a better view of the empty windows. More bendable that way. Sometimes the couch is in daddy's bedroom, or in a husband on wheels trailer park, spreading their seed motels, or in a sorority house. It doesn't matter that much where. State of Grace is a dog that has been beaten to death. The dog is behind a booby trapped fence, not that it is getting up any time soon to look for a loop hole. The neighborhood psychopaths come along to stick their fingers into its color blind eyeballs, past the black and white brain mass. Wipe your hands on its pleasing fur. The dog is probably a lab. Labradors and dalmatians are like small children in that it takes two years for the soft spots on their skulls to fully form. Kate is an adult, a babe in her own belly, and that soft spot could be crushed by anything, still. Her brains are to be picked by anyone with a pointy thing in their pants. She's already dead. She will be back with daddy. I know this is so at all times. Her story is the hair growing past death. It's shiny like daddy likes it. Nails still painted too. There's nothing that anyone can do to save Kate. The corpse would fall to ashes in your arms if you tried to bury it some place nice. How about a nice farm with lots of room to run? Not gonna happen. Daddy's house would grow up right around it."And things were always out of my hands. I have always been grateful for that."Have you heard that thing that cat people say when they talk about preferring cats to dogs? Blah blah cats won't put their tails between their legs and debase themselves for your affection? That thing. Does it have to do with feeling special if they like you? My cat will rub against my legs or hop in my lap when he's feeling lonely. That's not that often, really. If he wants to do his own thing that's cool too. My dogs have never had to perform like any kind of circus animal anything for me. Why does there have to be shame if they do want a hug the second I get home? I think Kate would probably agree with the cat people. There's such shame bleeding through like a preteen girl on her period for the first time and all of the boys see it and know what it means. Little Kate running towards her daddy with a big smile on her face, the prettiest Kate has ever been. This is the middle section of the book and not first person. No matter, the shame still feels Kates. There's the ass wagging too. What would it take to earn her affection? The analogy would get yet more cliched about this. Kate's not drawn far enough.The sorority girls have bumps on their bums. The tops of their thighs have more unsightly bumps. I think I would gladly have done without any of the sorority girls cheese cake pictorial stuff. Kate the meat market. Men with life saver rolls for penises. I could have imagined any of this, anyway, and I just don't give a flying fuck if the hot girls have bumps on their asses. What the hell does that have to do with anything? Not blowing my mind. I got that Kate resented the sex status and would have rather have died than lose it. Beating my dead dog.The truth is that I would have known all of it. From the perch on the stool in the dirty trailer park kitchen to the bus stop with her baby on the way back to daddy's. Teeth rotting from eating nothing but sugar crap if she weren't suspended as permanent baby. I don't want to know what daddy told her. I already know. Daddy's little girl. How did Kate disregard her mother telling her that she wished with all of her heart that it had been Kate who died instead of Kate's older sister? Because she "knew" that her mother was crazy? A dream of her mother asking her if her daddy touched her, a held hand... None of it ever happened. The wish dies before it could pack for the dark swim to life. He covered himself in her birthing blood and she stayed in his sperm for the rest of her life. Only daddy. The shadows under the hood of the guide for the River Styx of the death of every day of her life that gives up all choice. Kate ends up back in the sorority house without meaning too. She leaves her husband by telling him that there will always be daddy between them. Why wasn't there a "I wish this had never happened" instead of that she would want to be that sperm forever and ever? I mean, Christ. There was something important here and it was lost in the beating of what I got already that she was daddy's little sperm. Some parts of the book later appear wholly in short stories of Williams. The "Action Man" advice phone line on the radio? That whole part was the first story in her collection Taking Care (1988). The girl who eats the maraschino cherries, and nothing else, even though they are very, very bad for her? That's in Honored Guest (2005). There's more than that, besides. I felt like Williams had some ideas that she wanted to use and they appear in Kate's story for no more reason than that. (This isn't the first time this has happened. Honored Guest accomplished what novel The Quick and the Dead didn't quite manage.) Kate's story could have brought me to my knees beside her inside out corpse on someone else's front lawn asking for help she is incapable of giving to herself. She wouldn't hunt if she were free. But I felt beaten myself. There's too many comets, oh wait I mean sperm, riding on the back of the sentences to knock this earth off its intended axis. I wasn't as moved as I could have been. Was there not yet life on this planet? Kate isn't born yet and all of the other people are walking around with their cliched good old southern boy husbands and this could be my last chance anyone else could make it with a guy like this. I can't help but think of Jean Rhys and her spineless characters. They are wholly unwilling to help themselves. When Rhys is great it is because the story is about how they won't help themselves. The dark space in their cavities is where it takes place. When she's not great it is because it is what everyone else is doing that's to blame. Williams is by no means the empty lipstick tube that Kate Fucking Zambreno was in her Rhys "homage" Green Girl (I hate that book), though. I just think she was trying too hard to be pretty, again, like the weaker moments of her other two novels I've read, Breaking and Entering and The Quick and the Dead. The sun fades out too much for the stars. Williams has a much bigger world than this unborn one. You don't have to work so hard for me. Dance if you want to. You'll have to bring your own milk but I've got sugar cereals.
Torrid, gorgeous, challenging, frustrating, stunning. I'm just going to reproduce the opening paragraph below:"There is no warning of daylight here. It is strange to know that it is only twenty miles to the Gulf of Mexico and all that dizzying impossible white light, for here there is such darkness. Here when one can see the sky, it is almost always blue, but the trees are so thick nothing can make its way through them. Not the sun or the wind. And the ground never dries. The yard is rich mud with no definition between it and the riverbank. Tiny fish swim in the marks our feet make. The trees are tall and always look wet as though they'd been dipped in grease. Many of them are magnolias and oaks. Pods, nuts and Spanish moss hang in wide festoons. The river is the perfect representation of a southern river, thin and blond, swampy, sloppy and warm. It is in everyone's geography book. I was not shocked at all when I saw it. I was not pleased, although it is quite pretty."I am always trying to write an opening paragraph that is that good.
What do You think about State Of Grace (1990)?
State of Grace passes the page ninety test in that, if, like me, you too are initially put off by the rapid, staccato one-line sentences, hold on—because from that point onwards (view spoiler)[ i.e. the Jaguar accident scene onwards (hide spoiler)]
—Mala
Language is a poor medium to convey a nightmare. Dark memory is a rooted sorrow and we are incapable of excising those tendrils. Think of the last time you tried to convey the horror of a really bad nightmare to a loved one and recall how difficult is was to explain the dream, to explain your terror. That part of our mind is fettered. Perhaps for good reason.Joy Williams' prose in State of Grace is the perfect unfurling of nightmare made cogent. In tight, staccato sentences that combined make an image that can barely be seen, Williams does something with a sad tale that makes it into a horror story. Whatever the last scary book I read didn't give me the willies like this one did. The protagonist Kate exists in a hell that she only slightly realizes as hell. As the spectator, the reader, we are horrified at the events that shape her life. The book's three sections alternate between third person and first person narratives - and it's the section where Kate tells us her story in her own words that is the most heartbreaking.Kate opines Nature is one vast mirage of infinite delusion. After reading her story, who am I to argue?
—Brian
A fragmentary book, all the words came out faster than she could say them. I have the bad habit of reading Joy Williams too quickly, my eyes practically just skim the page. Her short, rapid sentences demand to be read that way. Inevitably, I go back and re-read and get confused. It's almost like scripture, needing those little chapter and verse numbers to sort of divide all the holiness into little paragraphs. Her familiarity with the Bible is really evident in this book and I have a definite feeling she grew up with it.
—Sarah
