Customer Reviews

Breaking and Entering

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

"Liberty and Clem continued walking over to the Trail to hitch a ride home. The Trail had once been a meandering Indian footpath over coral and limestone rock, but was now a murderous six-lane highway that gobbled up small animals for breakfast, dreamy old geezers for lunch, and doped-up young honor students in their developer-dads' jeeps for dinner."

Joy Williams books are rife with paragraphs such as the above--packets of words like candy pop rocks for your brain, exploding in multi-flavored glory. Like "The Quick and the Dead", this book is brimming with brilliant observations, strange characters, and mythic overtones. Williams has been compared to Flannery O'Connor, and even to filmmaker David Lynch. Her details are so good, so believable, that you are drawn into the siren song of her plots and her skewed visions of America.

Willie and Liberty are two archetypal teenage lovers. Willie is part Charles Starkweather, all manipulator. Liberty is a beautiful lost child, always accompanied by her strange white hound, Clem. Willie and Liberty, in their meanderings, meet red-neck Duane, drunk aristocrat Charlie, and the Circe-like, 75 year-old female bodybuilder, Poe...who is one of the greatest literary inventions of the past few decades.

This book would rate five stars easily, except that I found it bogging down in several passages where Liberty went into mental soliloquies.

I hope there is a filmmaker daring enough to make this into a film--Quentin Tarentino, are you listening?

Fascinating. Sui generis. Great.

I came back to Joyce Williams after reading her story "The Girls"in "Best American Short Stories, 2005." This was a 1988 publication. Another reviewer has given a sample of the quality of the descriptive writing, but it is in the dialog and characterization that she is at her most brilliant.
Willie and Liberty are a pair of delinquents who take up residence in the houses of rich and leisured absentee owners. It's often very funny.
The first chapter could stand alone as a Joyce Williams short story (I suspect it originally did). Willie is enigmatic and given to statements like "we can't disown the light into which we are born" The story gradually comes to center on Liberty, who has been rejected by her parents and by her foster-parents (who are Willie's parents) and has lost a pregnancy. She poignantly tries to care for Teddy and Dot, two neglected children while fearful of losing Willie. The caste of characters becomes filled with the eccentric and outrageous. It's a wonderful caste but eventually there's too much fruit in the cake. The plot loses coherence. Williams should learn from Shakespeare (one of the few writers superior to her). In Hamlet the prince's behavior is highlighted by the puzzled reactions of those around, by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. A few people acting and talking reasonably would have added a needed touch of realism, even though it's set in Southern Florida.

oNe oF THe DaRKeST TaLeS i'Ve eVeR ReaD. VeRy DeeP aND THouGHT PRoVoKiNG...a BooK i'Ve ReCoMMeNDeD MaNY MaNY TiMeS iN THe YeaRS SiNCe i FiRST ReaD iT.