Honored Guest: Stories [Hardcover]

Joy Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 5, 2004

The first collection of stories in well over a decade by a writer Ann Beattie has called “one of our most remarkable storytellers,” and whom Bret Easton Ellis has named “the rightful heir to the mastery, genius, and poetry of Flannery O’Connor.”

These twelve stories further Joy Williams’s utterly singular achievement, described by the Washington Post as “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny . . . the brilliantly controlled style informed by a powerful spiritual vision,” and again reveal her ability to uncover, as Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times, “the somber verities lurking beneath the flash and clamor of daily life.”

Her landscapes reach from Maine and Nantucket to the Southwest and into Mexico and Guatemala, while the events cover a range of human travail, from children confronting the death of a parent to parents instead burying their own young, and the various ways–comic, tragic, unnerving–we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. And all of her characters are richly, idiosyncratically alive, in circumstances at once supremely peculiar and strangely like our own.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"To live was like being an honored guest," muses a teenage girl whose mother is dying. While death, loss and the likelihood of losing touch with reality are the focus of these 12 short stories by Williams, the elusive possibility of hope and mental well-being waits in the shadows, maybe even just within reach. Williams's deliciously fallible characters are often unfazed by their erratic behavior and violent eruptions. At work one day, a widowed masseuse in "Hammer" snaps her prosperous client's wrist bone without provocation. In "Charity," Richard refuses to stop for a needy family despite Janice's pleas. When he gets out of the car for gas, "Janice moved across the seat quickly, grasped the wheel and drove off," returning to the family and perhaps losing Richard forever. Williams's grasp of the slippery line between life and death is strong: she jars the reader with news of a debilitating accident or a fatality without a breath of forewarning. Her characters speak like poets or philosophers ("Words at night were feral things"), and her prose is imaginative and dynamic (a woman obsessed with visiting a mental institution prowls the halls, pretending "she was a virus, wandering without aim through someone's body"). Though some of her more absurd tales may perplex, discriminating readers will be greatly satisfied with this rich, darkly humorous and provocative collection.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The troubled characters in Williams' latest short stories, set in locales as diverse as Maine and Mexico, don't have the wherewithal to do anything but brood, with the exception of a forensic anthropologist who solves the mysteries of scattered bones, hair, and teeth, a feat not unlike the one Williams pulls off in these canny and dissecting tales of fractured lives. A celebrated novelist and blazing essayist, Williams is in commandingly fine form as she channels her electrifying vision of a damaged, off-kilter world into a dozen edgy tales of sorrow and stoicism, sheer eccentricity and wild incompetence. In the title story, a teenager trapped in a hellish limbo as her mother nears death is told about an aboriginal people who treat a ritualistically captured and caged bear as an honored guest until it's time to torture and sacrifice him. This becomes the mordantly existential collection's reigning metaphor, as Williams portrays loners and misfits, abused animals, and children who suffer as adults divorce, disappear, go broke, go crazy, get sick, and commit suicide. Williams' wit is serpentine, her parsing of our ignorance of the true nature of life on Earth urgent, and her storytelling transforming as she marvels over life's tenacity and humankind's weirdness and fitful grace. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (October 5, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679446478
• ISBN-13: 978-0679446477
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,029,319 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of our finest writers. . ., October 18, 2004

By 

Adam C. Hill (Grover Beach, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Honored Guest: Stories (Hardcover)

Joy Williams is a treasure who deserves a broader readsership and a higher profile. If you haven't read her before, this collection is a fine

place to start. It exemplifies everything that's distinct about her: a loopy, lyrical style, totally original points of view, and quirky characters that you actually care about. Among her novels, State of Grace is my favorite, though you really can't go wrong with any of Joy Williams' books. Check her out.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars read this book--you will not regret it, January 24, 2005

By 

Myfanwy Collins "Myfanwy" (New England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Honored Guest: Stories (Hardcover)

Honored Guest is a remarkable book. I will not say that it is easy to read, because it is not; it is heartbreaking. I will not say that you will love and cheer for each of the characters, because you will not; they are flawed. I will say that if you are lucky enough to read this book, you will be shattered into a million shards and glued back together, over and over again. And it will be worth it.

I could not read this book quickly. In fact, after reading the title story, "Honored Guest", I had to stop for a few days because I could not breathe. It is the heartbreaking story of a young woman living with her dying mother. There is no huge revelation at the end. All there is, is the knowledge that the mother will die and the girl will go on living. And yet, you feel as though you have come through something at the end. You feel as though you have made it. You have lived. And yes, maybe life is going to be crappier now, but you're still alive.

No less harrowing is the final story, "Fortune", about a bunch of thoughtlessly cruel, disaffected 20-somethings (I'm guessing at their ages but it seems most likely they are in their early 20s) living in a foreign country who practice "concern" (as well as the other "more subtle emotions") by such acts as letting a beggar boy have a pancake off one's plate and taking in a stray dog (which hates being owned). None of the main characters are worth much and yet we are left with June and her desire. Her hope is that she will have or does have a personality. And even though these characters seem irredeemable there is still something so magical about this story. And what it is is that we are glad not to be those people. In the end, we are glad to be who we are-all safe and smug reading about them and knowing that we know how to feel.

Each story offers us something. Few of the characters are people we would love but all of them show us something, some deep hateful part of ourselves. Some honest, dark pit. Something about our misanthrope or our lack of desire for life. About our tiredness or fear of death or sense of false hopefulness.

Williams is funny (and so clever! Every few pages I would stop and say to myself, "My god she is clever") and interesting and smart as hell and so are her characters. She takes risks in her writing; point of view as we know it is irrelevant because it comes across as organic as opposed to contrived. She is a master of dialogue and often, monologue. She lets her narrators be smart and crazy and doesn't give a hoot whether we think they are unreliable or not. I don't get the feeling that she is about proving what a great writer she is; I get the feeling she just is a great writer. She exists that way.

Pardon me while I gush, but I am in love with this book and with the writing of Joy Williams. I'm embarrassed to say that this is the first of her I've read but it will not be the last.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ha Ha Insane, Not Ha Ha Funny, December 30, 2004

By 

Andrew Guest (San Francisco, California United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Honored Guest: Stories (Hardcover)

After I read these stories I looked at a review that called the stories "funny." I swore and had to read them all over again and damned if that reviewer wasn't right. I laughed all the way through 'em the second time. The first time I almost cried because her characters are so broken, so alienated, so deeply strange. It was only on a second read that I realized that ultimately all these freaks are full of hope, whether it's what most of us would call hope is immaterial. And it made me laugh, but not in a nice Hello Kitty kind of way, kinda in an I'm-going-to-flip-out-and-do-something-outlandish kind of way.

The weird thing is, I look at the author photo and Williams looks like one of those women who exercises in the outdoors and walks vigorously everywhere. But man, that tanned face and toothy grin doesn't hide the fact that she's got a deep dark corner in her soul that pours strange and lonely magic onto the page. She's an original, a Southern Gothic of the Southwest.