At 81, Joy Williams is as good as she’s ever been
“The demands of living have consequences,” a haunted young mother says in Joy Williams’ 1978 novel, “The Changeling,” “and that is called fate.” The woman’s brother-in-law, a frightening man with phantoms of his own, disagrees. “Fate is vulgar,” he says.
A similar exchange occurs in “Nettle,” one of 12 stories in Williams’ knockout new collection, “The Pelican Child.” A no-nonsense mother who made her son change schools after his teacher quoted the Bible in class tells the boy she does not believe in fate. “Then what do you call what happens?” is his puzzled response. Williams cleverly withholds the woman’s answer. Years later, the now-grown son recalls how his mother “had died on a dark spring night, speeding down a highway in a leased Jaguar.” Was that her fate? Bad luck? A random event in an accidental universe? None of the above?
How to define humanity’s relationship with time and destiny has plagued the characters in Williams’ fiction since she published her first novel, “State of Grace,” in 1973 at the age of 29. People in Williams’ books drive themselves and others mad as they consider the directions of their lives. They resent sunsets for reminding them of time’s passage and argue over whether it’s passing at all. “That’s preposterous! Time never goes anywhere!” a man says in “The Pelican Child” story “The Fellow.” The privileged but hurried narrator of “Flour,” the book’s deliciously tart opening story, can’t even bear the phrase “make up some time.” “Ugh,” she thinks. “I find it all repellent.”
In Williams’ most recent collections, 2016’s “99 Stories of God” and last year’s “Concerning the Future of Souls,” temporal matters even vex beings who supposedly hold the answers to everything: “Concept of time! Whatever can you mean!” the Devil asks Azrael, the angel of death, in the latter book. To be sure, God has a firmer understanding of existence, though Williams, in a story titled “Inoculum,” still sends the Almighty to get vaccinated for shingles. “Just give it to him,” an impatient customer begs the pharmacist. “My ice cream’s melting.”
The oldest story in “The Pelican Child” was first published in 2010. The newest debuted this summer in the Paris Review. 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 Pelican Child” was longlisted for this year’s National Book Award.
Williams lived for many years in Florida, set much of her early fiction on the peninsula and even wrote a travel guide to the Florida Keys. Her work from that period rejects the zany caricaturing practiced by more famous Sunshine State authors and instead radiates a blistering combination of dread and wonder that today can be detected in the writing of Karen Russell and Laura van den Berg, just two of Williams’ many acolytes.
In the middle of her career, Williams moved to the Southwest, and her writing acquired a drier, angrier heat. “The Pelican Child” features stories set in Florida and Arizona, where, as one character laments, the “desert is irreducible and strange and it is not merry, it is never merry.” The climate crisis has left people — as well as a few talking animals — locked in a never-ending present, where “belief in a boundaryless human future is dead.” One woman admits to having become indifferent to babies. Another suspects that she and her partner are ghosts. Still others actually are.
Because it is a Joy Williams book, “The Pelican Child” involves characters who are never so despairing that they can’t laugh at the absurdity and unfairness of their lives. In “My First Car,” a motel clerk refuses to employ her Oldsmobile’s turn signal. “Why should I show Death where I’m going,” she says. The humor is often that dark, and much of it is delivered at the expense of others. In “Stuff,” a cringe-inducing story about a disrespected columnist for a community newspaper, a dying old woman asks her terminally ill son: “Why is your mouth open like that, Henry? Are you thinking?” That is one of her milder insults.
Williams can be severe when describing a character’s physical appearance. One “plump and pale” man on a fellowship at an artists retreat “reeked of mildew or worse.” A receptionist’s “raw” face “seemed quietly percolating.” In “Nettle,” the adult son’s longtime crush thinks he “could have been good-looking, but some quality distorted his features, so he didn’t look quite normal, actually.”
The woman’s judgment is more candid than cruel, though. She goes on to offer a measure of hope for the doomed young man that also captures this sure-to-be-timeless book’s own singular appeal: “But who wanted to look the way people looked? Or behave the way they behaved? The further you could get from the generically human presentation and its habit of being the better.”