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Honored Guest: Stories by Joy Williams Knopf, 2004 224 pp., $23 |
It takes a certain temperament to herald reconciliation on God's holy mountain. It takes hope. One doesn't think of Joy Williams as a writer much given to hope. Those who know her fiction are more likely to remark its fatalism and its outré collection of jaded vagabonds and shallow sophisticates; of uncanny teenagers and preternaturally knowing children; of women who drink too much and think too critically; of the lonely, the broken, the undone.
Williams' cabinet of misfits is often compared to Flannery O'Connor's, and justly so. The comparison with O'Connor goes further, too, as both authors entertain fertile religious themes. But where O'Connor's work is avowedly, if obliquely, redemptive, Williams' is dubiously so. And Williams' sacramentalism, if it can be called that, encompasses nature first and only fitfully leaks back to humanity. Indeed, the most remarkable presence in the work of Joy Williams is neither personal nor transcendental. What sets Williams apart is the animals.
Williams is the author of four novels, the most recent of which, The Quick and the Dead, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. She has penned two highly regarded collections of short stories, a volume of essays, and a book on the Florida Keys, part history and part travel-guide. She lives mainly in Key West. If she can be called a Christian writer—and I think she can—she is the kind who wrestles endlessly with faith and who broods deeply over death and the human condition. There is a word for believers like Williams, and that word is "unconsoled."
Williams is also a brilliant ironist, perhaps peerless, and much admired by other writers for her consummate craft. Of the many qualities of her prose—clarity, economy, intelligence, complete mastery of the sentence—the most conspicuous is authority. Writing for Williams is a truth-telling enterprise, an act of witness, a form of prayer.
In Honored Guest, her most recent collection of stories, all these gifts are on display, along with the usual Williams suspects. Her characters are wholly American, wholly contemporary, and decidedly unlikable. They are hip yet stupid, clever yet wrong, vain in the desert, cruel in Nantucket, clique-ish in friendship, soulless in marriage, selfish in death. They are given to philosophical asides, yet trapped in subdivisions. Williams exposes our social frauds mercilessly, and in this she approaches Oscar Wilde. There are Wildean episodes (a woman actually misplaces her husband at a highway gas stop) and Wildean lines ("She'd like to tell Richard how much she refrained from saying to him, but actually she refrained from saying very little"). There are echoes of Tolstoy, Eudora Welty, and of course O'Connor. Is Williams really this good? In her finest stories, yes. "Congress," "Hammer," "Visiting Privilege," and "Anodyne" are the best of the offerings in Honored Guest, though the other stories have their beatitudes, and their clever bits, and their overpowering grief.
Death haunts this book, and it is for the dead that Williams reserves a special and intimate affection. It is the same intimacy she shares with animals, who figure here as emissaries, or illuminations, of holiness—Williams does not hesitate to suggest they are angels. In these stories, animals comfort, enlighten, suffer and die for us, peripherally. They are fabulous, in the sense that they are granted thoughtfulness, emotion, and intent. They have natural life, but also resurrected life. In the mysterious and haunting story "Congress," a lamp fashioned from deer hooves becomes a woman's boon companion after her husband, a forensic anthropologist, is permanently disabled in a freak (and freakish) hunting accident. "The lamp," Williams tells us,
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