What I like about theoretical physics is what I like about the work of Joy Williams. I absorb the sentences, process the dynamics, follow the dialogue, and then, somewhere during the reading, I lose the edge of what I thought I understood.
The Visiting Privilege lets us be immersed in, rather than periodically exposed to, the profound, lonely defiance of conventional thought that has always shaped Williams’s art, in content and in execution. Perhaps it will finally bring her the kind of popularity her work deserves. And if it doesn’t? She will still be great, and her greatness will still not be for everyone.
Like it or not, something is hastening toward us too. And the question of what to do in the meantime — how to feel and what to think before we die — has rarely been reckoned with as bravely as it is in these very fine stories.
It's the rare collection that doesn't have a single story, even a single paragraph, that's less than brilliant, and it proves that Williams is quite possibly America's best living writer of short stories.
Note the absence of qualifiers, the exhaustion, the rage, the disingenuousness, the inability to sit down. Joy Williams’s stories contain many different situations, of course, and their prose glitters with acute perceptions on the part of the characters, but their perceptions and insights rarely do anyone much good. The narrative rhythms have the energy and tone of screwball comedies that somehow have taken an unexpected left turn toward tragedy without quite arriving there, but with the tragedy always in view, off in the distance, unavoidable ... a book that is almost impossible to read straight through. There is such relentless vehemence in the exposition and drama that reading too many of her stories at one sitting can turn into an ordeal. The terrible suffering, viewed at sixty miles an hour in a landscape infused with unappeasable longings, inspires a kind of awed fascination...The only way to read it properly is by slow increments, one story at a time, with pauses for recovery ... Williams is a specialist in the out-of-control speech that gradually loses its bearings and wanders comically and eloquently in a mad dash from one vanishing thought to another ... These stories, with their characters weighed down with inarticulate eloquence, strike a very clear note. What they generally lack in pathos, they make up for in dark comic energy. Witty, and with a concert-hall pitch for American idioms, the stories glitter with a bright, desolate light.
Suddenly we realize that she has led us, in what felt like random moves, to a dazzling checkmate ending, final lines that feel philosophical, spiritual, universal yet particular, funny yet penetrating: 'What if everything one did mattered. Thank God it could not.'
The first collection in more than 10 years by Rea Award winner Joy Williams brings together 46 remarkable stories — bleak and flat, desolate and bizarre, always enthralling.
