Breaking and Entering [Paperback]

Joy Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 12, 1988

A book about violence and redemption, Joy Williams' new fiction tells the story of two drifters who break into Florida vacation homes while their owners are away, live there a while, then move on.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Although they are renting a house, Willie and Liberty, deeply disturbed drifters, break into Florida vacation homes of the wealthy, "living the ordered life of someone else . . . inhabiting the space others had made for themselves. For they themselves were not preparing for anything, they were not building anything." The married couple's picaresque wanderings are springboards for Williams's (Taking Care, etc.) deliberate parody of cultural foibles and mores as Willie and Liberty encounter ceramic dildos, a dial-a-sermon telephone service for the distraught, toilets with "deodorant sticks to protect the integrity of the bowls" and an old woman wearing "a low-cut evening gown which showed off her Pacemaker to good advantage." Williams, who has some arresting short stories to her credit, is best at creating mood, yet she distances the reader with descriptions that throb with isolation, doom, loss, depression and death. Her phrasing is provocative but forced and desultory ("His eyes looked like breakfast buns spread with guava jelly"), and the plot, as disconnected as the protagonists, leads nowhere. Portions of the novel were previously published in Esquire and the Paris Review.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st edition (May 12, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394757734
• ISBN-13: 978-0394757735
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #894,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars icy perfect prose, July 13, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Breaking and Entering (Paperback)

like the above review notes, there is no reason why Joy Williams isn't a widely read and appreciated author. breaking and entering is a chilling story of isolation, paranoia and senseless postmodernity. The every-word-perfect prose reminds me of Nabokov in that the book is genius just for the way she twists and fashions language into an entirely convincing, if often surreal, journey into secret inner lives. look also for her story "trains" in the vintage contemporaries anthology of short fiction.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ome of the best books of all time!, December 20, 1999

By 

india - See all my reviews

This review is from: Breaking and Entering (Paperback)

The 1st time I read this book, I flipped it over & began again the second I finished the last page. That was 6 years ago and I have read it many times since. Joy williams tells a sort of falling-out-of-love story...very touching, very poetic, often very funny. The isolation everyone feels in modern society is an omnipresent theme & it is often explored here with a surreal exactness.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars sheer genius, October 26, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Breaking and Entering (Paperback)

Joy Williams is one of the best writers around and it's a complete puzzle why the rest of the world hasn't discovered her. This book, her third novel (she also has two collections of stories and an odd Florida travel guide) is a hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly amazing story of a woman and her lover who break into Florida vacation homes when the owners are away. It's every bit as profound and grotesque as a Flannery O'Connor book.