The 12 stories in her hypnotic collection, The Pelican Child...are painterly and provocative, slipping beyond the frame of reality, as if Magritte or Dalí had propped their easels amid the Sonoran desert. We recognize her elliptical voice even as she delights in throwing us off balance ... She flavors her pieces with piercing observations, a pinch of irony, and her signature moxie. She’s still got it, still mulling the riddles we pose to each other, and to ourselves.
The singular, disconcerting uneasiness that is so characteristic of Joy Williams’ fiction, yet so hard to pin down, is once again dazzlingly on display in her latest collection ... Though now in her 80s, Williams’ imagination clearly hasn’t failed, so hopefully her remarkable stories will keep coming.
If you’re in the cult already, there’s a chance you’ll experience a tinge of disappointment when you open The Pelican Child and discover that all of the stories have appeared previously, mostly in The New Yorker. By the time an advanced reader copy came into my possession, I’d read all but two of the stories. My disappointment proved to be short-lived, however, and foolish. Williams’ stories rarely give themselves up entirely on the first read — they tend to remain disturbing and irreducible upon second, third and thirtieth reading. There is no place like the Joy Williams story.
In a dozen intricate, unnerving, caustically funny, and haunting tales, her lonely, displaced, and bewildered characters struggle with painful quandaries in a desiccated world.
