...a taut collection of flash fictions that are often beautiful but impenetrable, structured like little riddles to unspool. While it is easy to compare Williams’s work to that of Lydia Davis, another expert writer of absurdist shorts, this collection stands in its own category as defiantly whimsical and weird.
Although Williams' stories are short, they are always discomfiting. A lesser writer might not be able to pull off this wondrous mix of intensity, silliness and despair ... Her work is certainly odd, but it's also poetic, passionate, and precisely crafted. Her strange voices linger in the mind.
The whip-quick snapshots in Diane Williams's Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine pack a sizable punch; to read is to tread unstable ground. Discomfitingly and devastatingly funny, Williams upends the mundane, the painful, and the unusual, resulting—much in the way an art teacher might ask her class to copy a photograph upside-down—in precision and clarity.
Williams has been plumbing this territory for decades — she's published eight books before this one — and her confidence with language is frankly unnerving. She makes it jump through hoops, and a reader had better be willing to follow. Using repetition, juxtaposition, cliche and non sequitur, Williams defamiliarizes the lives and contexts of her very ordinary characters.
Williams’ 40 stories rely less on narrative and more on imagery. Her details are always precise, and her masterful prose distills her fictional worlds down to bright, brief moments. Still, she manages to take us places: train cars, apartments, woods, gardens, taxis and a country house. Within this tour, Williams introduces men and women grappling with failing marriages, romance, sex and inheritance.
[Everything is] evoked in miniature, with tremendous economy. So the reader is going to have to work out her own line readings. Williams has often been called an 'avant garde' writer, but that doesn’t mean these stories are hard to read or unentertaining. What she is brilliant at, though, is making ordinary language seem newly strange ... Williams’s exquisitely deadpan method can result in a story that evidently means something devastating but is so obliquely sketched that the moral is left tantalisingly out of reach. Or it can produce something that just seems hermetic and odd.
[T]he hysterics in Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine have already fallen apart, and author Diane Williams catalogs their damage with avant-garde zeal ... [Williams's] characters speak with such astonishing curiosity and independence that they stake out a space for themselves—where, fully alone and alive in language, they finally become free.
...the 40 short stories of Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine amount to a collage of beautifully trimmed and perplexing details, of moments that make us feel alien in a world we so readily recognize. ... Williams’s work resonates because it defamiliarizes — she unseats the given, that which we expect to grok innately without guidance or translation. In this way, Williams’s short stories are both confrontational and endlessly quotable.
I find these intensely taut, fraught little tales refreshing. They are surreal, but not Kafkaesque, or even Murakami-like. People do not perform impossible activities, experience bizarre events or even say absurd things, so much as they inhabit little worlds of highly condensed experience, all described in the conventional prose of a novel about middle-aged, middle-class people somehow failing to thrive. They pace through plots like expertly crafted androids plagued by software glitches.
[Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine] is made up of 44 very brief stories, which are so unlike most short stories (and even most flash fiction and prose poetry) that trying to pin a genre on them is near impossible. They have a baffling accessibility once you get going, but even the work of Williams' closest writing relatives—Donald Barthelme and Lydia Davis—can't quite prepare you for their strangeness.
This is an interesting narrative project, and when it’s paired with the unwieldy precision of her sentences you begin to apprehend the unique contours of the space in literature Diane Williams has carved out for herself.
Instead of Franzen’s realism, or even Bolaño or Knausgaard’s flat, anti-rhetorical prose, we’re dangerously close here to the pure rhetoric of fiction, which is to say that if you’re not careful, your entire notion of fiction as an art that rejects easy answers may come to resemble a Diane Williams story.
Though Williams eschews psychologizing and we only see her characters in flashes and hear their voices in a handful of sentences at most, there is a cumulative power across the book; a unifying spirit that’s desperate at times but never despairing, and once in a while joyous, even exuberant, like a veil lifted up to reveal an exclamation point.
