Skip to main content
It is a mistake to read Joy Williams' fiction in public, I have learned—especially after a drink. Far too often her stories will catch me unprepared and leave me choking on a sentence in near-metaphysical grief. I end up looking like a crazy person—like the people in her stories, comically vulnerable to the world.
"Jones, the preacher, has been in love all his life," begins "Taking Care," the title story of her first collection. "He is baffled by this because as far as he can see, it has never helped anyone…. He is like an animal in a traveling show who, through some aberration, wears a vital organ outside the skin."
The Visiting Privilege (Knopf, 512 pages, $30) collects four decades of short stories along with 13 new ones, and it shows her as one of the few true masters of modern fiction. She is often described as a writer's writer, a pale compliment that means her books are objects of intense obsession but only for the few. Read her stories all together, and no matter their line-by-line elegance and wit—and dear Lord, these stories are funny—they do seem too intense for mass consumption, too uncanny and too filled with the sadness of the world. But then, you could say the same of Flannery O'Connor.
It is not that Williams' stories are melodramatic or obsessed with tragedy. It is that she is without mercy. The surface events are often simple: A guy dumbly buys an old car eaten out by rust that is "a living thing" that "breathes" and "eats," a girl visits boarding school with her parents in chill air that is not like real air, or a mother threatens to put down her sad and stupid dog with Drano rather than live with her unchecked feelings about him. But Williams writes with uncommon clarity and concision, with disorienting humor that leaves the ground uncertain—what George Saunders has called "that particularly American brand of funny that is made of pain." Her writing evokes the wonderment and cruelty endemic to childhood.
Her children, even, wear precocious sadness like a bruise under the skin. "She was surrounded by strangers saying crazy things," thinks a 10-year-old in "Train," one of Williams' most anthologized stories. "Even her own mother often said crazy things in a reasonable way that made Dan know she was a stranger too."
The new set of stories shows its seams more readily than the ones from the early collections. One more often sees Williams the writer at work, as in "Brass," when the oddness of a child is wrapped up too neatly with an all-too-familiar violent end. But at their best—as in "Revenant," about a failed visit to an island funeral—they do what Williams' writing so often does. It peels back a life to reveal the cold wind howling beneath it, and then finds comfort there.
GO: Joy Williams will appear in conversation with author Karen Russell at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323. 7:30 pm Monday, Sept. 21. Free.
Willamette Week