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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
bold and innovative,
By seth magoon (maine usa) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Escapes: Stories (Hardcover)
These short stories are like those of Raymond Carver (who, incidentally calls Joy Williams a "Wonder" on the back of my copy of escapes), except that they have a much more surreal atmosphere and very, very unusual characters. I haven't found any novel or book of stories that are as engrossing and deserving of readers as Joy Williams' stories are. It may take a while for you to get into the rythym, but you won't want to stop reading once you've caught on.
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Masterful, brilliant, always interesting,
This review is from: Escapes (Paperback)
It's hard to say what Joy Williams's stories are about. Despair. Dissatisfaction. Indefinite yearnings. Alienation, maybe. They are populated with the unglamourous, the unstylish. Typically there is a central female character who is usually young, or at least younger than the other characters. She can be a little girl, as in the title story, "Escapes," or a teen as in "The Skater," or a woman in the last years of her youth as in "The Little Winter." Often she is being or has been raised by grandparents. Sometimes she is married to an older man, sometimes twice her age or more. She drinks hard liquor out of cups or a thermos, or martinis. Sometimes she's an alcoholic. She makes many observations, some startling. The men are always a bit bizarre or off center or not exactly right. Animals are often mentioned and make appearances, and technical language from biology is used in bits and pieces. Usually the girl wants to go somewhere or is going somewhere, but the destination isn't important, or maybe it is.Four of the twelve stories, "Bromeliads," "The Skater," "Health," and "The Blue Men" made The Best American Short Stories in 1978, 1985, 1986 and 1987. "Rot" appeared in Prize Stories 1988: The O. Henry Awards. Clearly, Joy Williams is at the top of her calling. I didn't understand all of the stories. This is nothing unusual. Short stories from the postmodern oeuvre as served up in Granta or The Antioch Review, or The Cornell Review, where some of these stories first appeared, or even in The Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker, sometimes leave me wondering if I missed something. Sometimes I re-read the story and I'm still not sure. Sometimes I realize something has happened, something has changed, just slightly, like a displacement in a distant landscape, and I feel a sense of significance. Or sometimes I don't. But something definitely happens in a Joy Williams story. It is revealed from deep within the story, or come upon, or realized en route. Thus we find that Gloria in "The Little Winter" is dying. This is revealed directly midway through. She is dying amidst a banal and boring existence, visiting a boring friend with many ex-husbands and her boring daughter. In "Lu-Lu" (the name for a rather large pet snake--the story has an element that reminds me distantly of Steinbeck's "A Snake of One's Own") Heather is leaving something behind ("an ugly nightie with its yearnings"), heading for a new life with Lu-Lu, whom the old couple she has been drinking with, have to let go. Like Gloria she is going off in an automobile with something vaguely grotesque, yet it is better than being by herself. Molly, from California, in "The Skater" is being shown New England prep schools where she is going to be sent. She is somehow symbolically or emotionally, or practically, going to the same place her tragically dead sister Martha went. Maybe. For some reason. In "Rot" Lucy's much older husband who is still friendly with his several ex-wives, buys a black Ford Thunderbird that is rusting from the inside out. He takes out a wall and places it in the living room. Lucy has reluctantly agreed to this, but then realizes that the car will be there obtrusively in her life forever, like Dwight's ex-wives. Some of the stories have an element of the surreal. Katherine Mansfield and Friedrich Nietzsche appear with "G." in "Gurdjieff in the Sunshine State." In "The Skater" Tom, the father, skates on ice "wearing a suit and tie, his good shoes" but without skates. Sometimes people are dying. Mothers disappear, children left to be raised by their grandparents. A beautiful young woman finds herself kinkily enthralled with her husband, a middle aged chemist who talks of sharks and things biological while she wears him out sexually on "The Route" to the Florida Keys. Part of the power of Williams's writing comes from the wonderful way she has with detail, detail of all sorts, details about the way things look, the way people talk, what they think about, cultural details, the way things feel and smell and taste. It looks easy, it reads easily, but remember the dictum, "easy writing makes for hard reading," and vice-versa. Williams works hard on her prose. She makes the details telling. I particularly enjoyed the last story, "The Last Generation" which is about the relationship between 15-year-old Audrey and 9-year-old Tommy. She has befriended him after being dumped by his older brother. It is a way of maintaining or of getting even. She instructs Tommy in how to think about the world. They are "the last generation." She says things like, "That's what true love is. Wanting something that's missing." Or, "Clouds aren't as pretty as they used to be. That's a known fact." (p. 156) She tells him about monks: "They love solitude more than anything. When monks started out, long, long ago, they were waiting for the end of time." (p. 162) "Monks live in a cool, crystalline half-darkness of mind and heart." (p. 164) I also very much liked "Health" in which the teenager Pammy goes to a tanning salon and is accidentally observed naked for the first time by a man. That's what the story is about. Williams tells it with a kind of discovery as we go along, as though she and we together are discovering what the story is about. It's an illusion. It's technique, artistry. She has Pammy recall an interview with a "radical skater," a boy who is asked why he doesn't fall. He says, "I don't fall...because I've got a deep respect for the concrete surface and because when I make a miscalculation, instead of falling I turn it into a new trick." I think this is the way Joy Williams writes.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Crisp and potent stories,
This review is from: Escapes (Paperback)
Like a melding of Jeanette Winterson with the ominous tones of Scott Heim or Janet Peery, Williams's set of stories is deeply affecting to readers. Lurking dangers affect each character in different ways. The most striking thing about her writing is the use of powerful metaphors that are almost subtle. Check out "Bromeliads", "The Little Winter", and the title story to taste what Joy Williams is about.
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