joy williams (fiction)

there's an article from canada that's called

Writer not as bent as her characters

in it it says,

When novelist Thomas McGuane met fellow writer Joy Williams his parting comment was, "I thought you would be more twisted."

"I was heartbroken I had disappointed him," Williams recalls. "I thought I should have been more twisted at our meeting." In fact, Williams, who reads from her latest short story collection, Escapes, tonight at 8 at the Premiere Dance Theatre, 207 Queens Quay W., is an extremely pleasant individual, without a hint of any major psychological disorders.

i like joy williams because she is funny

i don't really expect anymore to learn anything about existence from reading or from anything really

i don't 'trust' any writer who has aspirations to 'teach' anyone or to 'prove' anything

i think joy williams has gotten less rhetorical and more funny over time

she has changed, over time, book to book, like a real person

State of Grace (novel, 1973)

her first novel was nominated for the national book award

it felt to me like something written straight through without any revisions

i got to page two hundred something and couldn't focus anymore and gave it i think to the housing works, in a bag, with some other books i didn't finish

The Changeling (novel, 1978)

i haven't read this

i want to

but i think it went immediately out of print or something (because of bad reviews maybe, see below) and so i can't find it, have never seen it in any used bookstore (the only books by joy williams i've seen in unused bookstores are The Quick and the Dead and Honored Guest)

Her worst experience was the reception of her second novel, a work termed "startlingly bad" by a reviewer [i think anatole broyard] for the New York Times.

"That book was just destroyed. It was an awful experience. I continued to write stories, but it took me a long time before I ventured out with a novel again. I felt at the time that some of the reviewers wanted me to die. They just wanted me to stop writing. They were saying, 'We have other writers out there who we have to deal with and all the writers yet unborn, so please go away.'"

Taking Care (stories, 1982)

half the stories still feel State of Grace-y in an unrevised way

the other half of the stories are colloquial (in a loose, childish, unpretentious way), are funny and strange; have clear scenes with dialogue; and some even end in sort of epiphanies, but a kind of epiphany where so little--nothing, pretty much--is realized that that, the blankness and vaguness of realization, itself is the epiphany: that actually there will be no more epiphanies, ever, in the future, starting now

the only story she ever gets in the new yorker, Summer, is in here

i think the new yorker is afraid of joy williams

Breaking and Entering (novel, 1988)

she started to 'allow' herself to be funny with this novel, i think

or rather started to allow herself even more to be funny

ignore these last two sentences, i think

she gets further away from her State of Grace abstractness/dreaminess here; almost the entire novel is told in a conversational, unmetaphorical, unabstract prose

the second to last story in Taking Care, Breakfast, is inside of this novel, near the beginning, revised a little

here's some of that story, a part i think is funny and typical of joy williams:

[Liberty's mother phones Liberty early one morning]

"I had a terrible dream about penguins tonight, Liberty."

"Penguins are nice, Mother. They don't do anyone any harm."

"There were hundreds of penguins on this beautiful beach and they were standing so straight, like they do, like children wearing little aprons."

[...]

"That sounds nice, Mother. It sounds sort of cheerful."

"They were being clubbed to death, Liberty. They were all being murdered by an unseen hand."

Escapes (stories, 1990)

the stories in here were written during the time that the 'kmart realists,' or 'minimalists' were, it seemed, 'in power'

five of these stories were in best american short stories ('78 '85 '86 '87 '90), chosen by ann beattie, raymond carver, anne tyler, someone else, and i think richard ford

one, 'rot,' won an o'henry prize ('88)

they are almost all about death and are almost all funny

they are written in odd, sometimes awkward, and sometimes even ungrammatical (but endearingly so), childlike prose

michiko kakutani said:

"Several of the stories in ''Escapes'' awkwardly strain to find a metaphor for their characters' lives: a rusting, rotting car becomes a symbol for a couple's deteriorating marriage in ''Rot''; and in ''Health'' an adolescent girl's glimpse of a menacing stranger becomes a symbol of all the frightening realities she will soon face in grown-up life."

* for an entire thing on 'kmart realism' that i wrote (that continues from the above kakutani quote) and then deleted, scroll down to the end of this post; it's there, along with another footnote-y thing

The Quick and the Dead (novel, 2000)

this was nominated for the pulitzer prize, michael chabon won

joy williams changes here again

the language is now childlike, colloquial, affected, and metaphorical

there is also the old State of Grace denseness of prose here, but now it is less dense than just dense-with-meaning; and now there is always a scene that is happening; a location, characters talking, moving around

[the following quotes are from bookworm, the radio show, 1/01, where michael silverblatt talks to joy williams about The Quick and the Dead]

on after both her parents died, when she was fifty, before she wrote The Quick and the Dead:

my faith, it wasn't tested, so much, as uh, it was, uh--everything dropped away, and i seemed to be living a very--i saw everything the way it was, uh, for quite some time, and the way everything is is terrifically depressing, if not horrifying... uhm... death is supposed to, for a person of faith, ehm... one can accomodate it, i mean Tolstoy in his, his what--in his readings and reflections on life, and god, and death, saying that death--that dead people DON'T go away

on (if the novel is supposed to ask the question, 'how do we live?') if there is any one figure in the novel who knows better than anyone else:

well, i don't think there is one, and think maybe that is why people feel uneasy about the going on--the goings on here

this is her funniest book, i think

this and her next one

Honored Guest (stories, 2004)

the language in here is simple and childlike and concrete, this is her funniest book to me, and i reread it the most

death is given no more 'weight' or 'importance' than anything else

people often call joy williams odd, strange, bizarre

but really joy williams is just seeing things clearly, as they are, without preconception (as a child does; as someone who enters the world from another world would); without distraction; without politics, culture, religion, identity, race, nationality, taboo, beliefs, opinions, appearances, etc.

[the following quote is from bookworm, 2/05; where they talk about Honored Guest]

i somehow want fiction to stand up and do more, but i guess all fiction can do is to just show the anamalous in life, and, uh, startle--startle the reader into realizing that life isn't as simple as it seems

...at about 20:45 into the interview michael silverblatt cuts off joy williams as she is talking; it's blatant and embarrassing

and even while joy williams--expecting silverblatt to realize that he is cutting her off, i guess--continues to talk, herself now trailing off a little, michael silverblatt remains oblivious and keeps on talking loudly and embarrassing everyone

but then joy williams cuts michael silverblatt off at about 21:05 to make a joke about kant going to a nightclub

then later she makes a joke and they both laugh and then later both she and michael silverblatt laugh really loudly and for a noticeably long time about how she, joy williams, does not know the rules of the game or how to play the game, the game being 'writing'

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* people who 'don't get' joy williams or raymond carver or frederick barthelme or amy hempel or whoever, i've noticed, usually interpret the things that happen in stories firstly, and most importantly, as metaphorical or symbolic, as representative of something else, something that the author is trying to say, like a message, or theme

i think that most or all of the 'kmart realists' have said, or will say, if you ask them, that their stories do not have messages, themes, or symbols; that they just are what they are; which is similar (not in a bad way; not in a good way) to the way someone might tell a friend a story, in real life

i wonder if those who 'don't get it' (including Madison Smartt Bell, who wrote an essay 'against' 'minimalists') also interpret things in real life as metaphorical or symbolic or thematic

sometimes i tell someone a story that i think is funny or amusing and that really happened and they say 'i don't get it' or 'what's the point?' and i think that these may be the same people who 'don't get' joy williams, carver, etc.

do some people think about their day, their actual day in real life, and say to themselves things like, 'i ate two hamburgers to symbolize my two years in jail, and then to continue the theme of two, i stayed up until 2 a.m., and the digital clock that i didn't purchase at the store (that has no name because i refuse to date my real life) was a metaphor: i was shunning the idea of technology...'

to answer myself, yes; some people do do that, i think that is okay

i have never read an essay in which a 'kmart realist' criticizes and devalues and dismisses the work of a writer who uses symbols, who is a 'maximalist,' allegorist, etc., or any other kind of writer

and among the writers who have criticized, devalued, etc. the 'kmart realists' (** see the end of this post for quotes of 'kmart realists' 'defending themselves') are tom wolfe, frederick busch, cynthia ozick ("Less remains less. I feel very deprived. So many short-story writers are depriving themselves of the amplitude of language - both intellectually and lyrically. I don't know whether it's minimalism or incapacity. There is so little on the page that you can't make the judgment. It's data. It's menu prose. There's no wit in it, no joy in it, there's no sympathy."), madison smartt bell, and some others i think

which shows, to me, that cynthia ozick, etc, lack a certain kind of understanding (that people are different), and lacking this kind of understanding is harmful; is, really, a lack of tolerance for other ways of thinking, a prejudice, a kind of ongoing and strengthening untruth that is what many of the 'kmart realists' (uncertain, not-so confident, low self-esteem, would never say something like this) aren't, which is partly why i like them, i think

saying 'less is less' is saying 'what it is is what it is' is saying '10,000 words is 10,000 words'

so take a collection of stories by frederick barthelme that is 200 pages, then take 200 pages of infinite jest

according to cynthia ozick, these two are the same; they are what they are

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** Ann Beattie: Why should we have pretended that K-Mart didn't exist? Why should I have pretended that no one in Vermont owns a bong?

Ann Beattie (from this):

Remember that the painters who were minimalists had a philosophy that what you see is what you get: no more, no less. But this has nothing to do with the so-called minimalist writers. Frederick Barthelme clearly believes that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And the reader who understands that something is unstated--sometimes tragically unstated--between the characters would have to realize the connotations, the implied complexities. Also, Frederick Barthelme is funny. Bobbie Ann Mason can be quite funny. The minimalist painters were not funny. Minimalism in painting was a term of approval. It was a way to discuss a movement that was a responsive movement to a previous movement in art: Abstract Expressionism. When critics began to talk about literature in these terms, they were using it in a pejorative sense, saying that there were empty spaces. Bad empty spaces, not good empty spaces.

Bobbie Ann Mason: The people I write about are serious about their lives. If they go to a Marty Robbins concert and stand in line to get his autograph - there are more people who do things like that than not.

Frederick Barthelme: I don't make spareness the god of all things, but it seems to me that if you intentionally understate things, you have a chance of allowing the reader's imagination to come into play.