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.
Knockout ... Clever ... There isn’t a trace of dust or faddishness in the entire collection. Williams, at 81 years old, has published her best book since the 2000 novel The Quick and the Dead. That book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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.
Peculiar and tantalizingly ambiguous ... Ms. Williams’s stories seem to have passed beyond the dramatic arcs and emotional payoffs customary to short fiction ... The stories, likewise, are quasiparables, gesturing toward revelations that never quite cohere ... These are post-hope works, in other words, absorbed by death and annihilation. Bracingly, however, they are also post-despair.
When Williams is calling the numbers you listen, and sometimes laugh. And yet The Pelican Child is uneven, like that rock-strewn Southwestern landscape ... Knopf, please! Joy Williams fans long for an omnibus that will bring the best of this wild, weird author on the rock ’n’ roll world tour she deserves. Till then this rattling, rented coupe will have to do.
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.
Williams is a strange sort of éminence grise of American letters: celebrated but elusive, in no small part because of her multitonal style—half sardonic, half sacred ... The effect—which is rarely imitated—can cause motion sickness, confusion, or a kind of readerly rapture ... The stories in The Pelican Child are no different.
'Flour'...[is] brief and beautifully open-ended ... Williams’s vision is, somehow, both narrower and broader, positing the present as a shifting terrain of impressions that seamlessly elides into the future and the past ... The Pelican Child after all, is not unlike a day care full of babies, each with her own story, her own life.
In a dozen intricate, unnerving, caustically funny, and haunting tales, her lonely, displaced, and bewildered characters struggle with painful quandaries in a desiccated world.
Sad and darkly funny ... Wonderfully strange ... Throughout, William grabs the reader’s attention with striking dialogue and arresting conceits. This collection is a gift from a master of the form.
