Writing stories like this must be like being able to fly. If you know how to do it, there’s nothing to explain. And if you don’t, well, there’s still nothing to explain.
Again and again I was amazed at Joy Williams's ability to hit the ground running—to establish characters, a setting, and a tone with just a couple of sentences. The effect is to dispel the sense that she is making stuff up and replace it with the sense that she is observing. It’s sort of the opposite of starting a story with “Once upon a time…”. One story, “The Little Winter,” begins this way:
She was in the airport, waiting for her flight to be called, when a woman came to a phone near her chair. The woman stood there, dialing, and after a while began talking in a flat, aggrieved voice. Gloria couldn’t hear everything by any means, but she did hear her say, “If anything happens to this place, I hope you’ll be satisfied.”
Having set a story in motion, Williams almost immediately begins introducing details that seem to erupt into the tale, almost as though there was a second author trying to wrest control from the first. As we’re learning about Gloria, Williams gives us this, at the beginning of the story’s second paragraph:
The plane pushed through the sky and the drink made her think of how, as a child, she had enjoyed chewing on the collars of her dresses.
I could cite a similar pair of passages from many if not most of the stories in The Visiting Privilege that accomplish this one-two trick. Not “trick” in the sense of gimmick, but rather in the sense of doing something that is both simple and astonishing. Here is how the story “White” starts:
Bliss and Joan were giving a farewell party for the Episcopal priest and his family, who had been called by God to the state of Michigan.
And then, in the second paragraph:
Joan was a fourth-generation Floridian who missed the garish sunsets and the sound of armadillos crashing through the palmetto scrub.
Crashing armadillos, chewed collars—these details do not necessarily move the story forward, rather they make the entire enterprise seem less deliberate, give us the impression that Williams is observing the action rather than creating it. They’re a kind of narrative ventriloquism, they displace the animating spirit right into the story. It occurs to me that Joy Williams must be a very good liar.
The Visiting Privilege is subtitled “New and Collected Stories,” so I take it this is sort of the culmination of her writing career, which stretches back to the 70s. The stories are arranged more or less chronologically, I think, and become stranger and more entertaining as you go along.
I read somewhere recently about a woman who takes “micro doses” of LSD to combat depression. I find this notion very appealing, though I suppose it’s a serious business and not all fun and games. Joy Williams’s stories contain micro doses of something like fictional LSD. They dart and wheel dependably, but never go completely off the rails. The typical Williams story features a first-person narrator, usually female, who is either herself a bit nutty or is interacting with person or persons who are a bit nutty. Sometimes they’re all a bit nutty, but in an earnest, unassuming way. The nuttiness is manifested by a tendency to free associate.
I fixed clocks in the garage for a while but then I stopped serving the public, who were never, ever satisfied. So it’s just a personal hobby, taking apart clocks and watches and putting them back together again. There was a Frenchman centuries ago, a watchmaker, who created a life-size mechanical duck. It could move its head, flap its wings, even eat from a bowl of grain. Then it could even shit out the compacted grain. It was all gears and springs. More than four hundred parts moved each wing. They call things like that automatons.
That selection is from a story that is a seemingly random series of recollections and meditations about characters identified as “Mother” and “the boy.” Along with the narrator, they are a family, but it takes us a while to establish that the narrator is the boy’s father and that “Mother” is (probably) the narrator’s wife. They go to New York and help a blind lady across the street. They discuss Rimbaud. They get a dog. But then:
It was around eleven in the morning. A beautiful desert day. You forget how pretty the sky can still be. Mother was over at the park fixing a sprinkler system for the fortieth time. I think they break them deliberate so they’ll have something to do. I’m in my shop thinking like I frequently do that the third cup of coffee tastes funny and then all hell breaks loose. People banging on the door and screaming and shouting and I even hear a helicopter overhead. And I say, “Stay, Amy, stay, stay,” and walk out of the garage and there’s law officers out there screaming, “sumabitch, sumabitch” and “the congresswoman” and “sumabitch” again, even the women, all of them in uniform and with guns, and I think whatever I was thinking a minute ago is the last peaceful thought I will ever have. Though sometimes now I try to pretend he’s still in the house, in his room with the door closed. I pretend he’s still living with us and eating with us and getting by with us. But of course he’s not and he isn’t.
No, we were never afraid of him. Afraid of Jared?
So “the boy” turns out to be Jared Loughner, perpetrator of the 2011 massacre in Tucson, Arizona that severely injured U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. What’s strange is that everything leading up to this surprising conclusion seems like a completely typical Joy Williams story—there is no sense of impending violence. In fact, several of the stories feature violent episodes, but there is always also this sense of disassociation, people floating along, remembering snatches of conversation, relating arcane facts, describing the vegetation.
Of course, Jared Loughner did a horrible thing, but if you didn’t know about him I do not think you could infer the monstrous nature of his act from this story. It’s a surprising and unique synapse, a spark that leaps from the fictional universe to the real one. Joy Williams’s stories may say something about the lightly medicated sense of reality in 21st century America, but you would have to be a more sensitive instrument than I am to feel a strong moral current running through them.
