The Quick and the Dead (Paperback)

by Joy Williams (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Don't read Joy Williams if you're looking for Oprah-style stories of redemption--stories in which the human spirit triumphs. And don't look to her for a mirror of reality; with this author, there's never the sense that "I've been there" or "I identify." Williams creates novels and stories that operate under a tightly wound surrealist aesthetic. She distorts the world, but her distortions are subtle enough that you don't see them coming. You can't predict when the logic of dream will take over the logic of the text. Like the filmmaker David Lynch, Williams sees pathology and the ominous everywhere; she renders a world that looks familiar but is slightly off. Like Don DeLillo, she's a sprawling, ambitious writer whose characters often talk in a lovely, unbelievable poetry, as if they were prophets, or preachers, or ghosts.

The Quick and the Dead, Williams's fourth novel, follows a series of linked stories, all taking place in Arizona. Indeed, it could be called a desert epic, so dependent is its narrative momentum on the desert's eventual consumption of its inhabitants. These characters are consumed by thirst and mirages, by dry dreams of a lifeless landscape. They reside in a state of spiritual flatness and emptiness.

At the heart of the book, three motherless teenage girls befriend each other, go on camping trips, lay out in the sun by the rich girl's pool. Corvus, Alice, and Annabel are, respectively, spooky, apocalyptic, and prom-queen vain. In the course of things, they encounter, among others, a gay piano player named Sherwin who lives in a smelly apartment and constantly wears a tux, and a retirement-home nurse who entertains her patients with one-liners like: "Thoughts are infusorial" and "The set trap never tires of waiting." Perhaps most memorable is a cowboy-hatted stroke victim called Ray who believes a monkey lives in the back of his brain. Ray hitchhikes and steals credit cards. When he hasn't eaten for a while, the animal takes over: "The little monkey was climbing the walls in his head, making clear that it wanted out. Any avenue along the capillaries would do. There was an awful craving to get out. Ray didn't feel well."

Other lively phenomena interrupting the prevailing desert stillness: an injured deer leaping over a fence into a swimming pool in the middle of a party; a man shot in the desert by a couple of stoned guys shooting at cacti; a reappearing ghost called Ginger (Annabel's mother) who arrives every night to rail at her alcoholic widower husband, berating his clothes and his investment strategies.

In the hands of a lesser artist these various, often forcefully bizarre characters and events could have seemed like the work of someone out to impress with her weirdness. But Williams is the real thing, and The Quick and the Dead is her visionary world--a place so unmistakably doomed, it literally gives you the chills. --Emily White --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
"This was no place to be tonight for any of them, but this was the place they were." Set in the Texas desert, the first new fiction in 10 years from the much-praised Williams (States of Grace) examines the thoughts and hopes of three motherless 16-year-old girls, exploring their connections to one another, to a large cast of difficult adults and to the ghosts that populate their lives. Williams's first chapters introduce her three protagonistsAbeautiful, grief-stricken Corvus; zealous Alice, always looking for "something that would give her a little edge or obscure the edge she already had, she didn't know which"; and Annabel, whose preoccupations with skincare and sweaters seems practical by comparison. Around this trio, other characters form a web of dependence, trust and mistrustAa web repeatedly broken by sudden violence. Annabel's father, Carter, lusts after his young Buddhist gardener, but carries on drunken, hostile conversations with the vindictive ghost of his dead wife. There's also stroke victim Ray Webb, a poetic young drifter; Sherwin, a piano player with a death wish; wealthy and bored big-game hunter Stumpp and the object of his affections, precocious and articulate eight-year-old Emily. All of Williams's people have lost something important, and all of them are spending time and energy with people they would not have chosen. Williams's psychology is subtle, her attention to teen diction superb. Like the Midwestern novelist Wright Morris, Williams gives her detailed, poetic novel an episodic, meandering structure, and the book ends without much resolution. But these are deliberate choices, made by an artist attentive to real people's psychesAand to how even our smallest decisions matter to others in ways we may never know. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 8, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375727647
• ISBN-13: 978-0375727641
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #212,712 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A comedic tour de force of language and character, July 27, 2002

By	Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This is a darkly comedic novel by one of America's premiere writers of fiction. Reviewers have compared her to Flannery O'Connor and that comparison is valid in terms of originality and the ability to cut through the pretense of life and reveal what people do and what they think beneath the surface of convention. But Joy Williams does not have Flannery O'Connor's polished sense of story and structure; however she doesn't need it. She has instead an eagle's eye for detail and an awesome command of language. Her characters are alive with the quickness of life, its strange twists and turns, its Shakespearean absurdity and its banality and wonder. So insightful and so sharply rendered is her prose that it alone carries us along. Into the mouths of babes she puts words of wisdom and out the mouths of her everyday people emerge worldly philosophies.

Thus 8-year-old Emily Bliss Pickless, who likes to pour dirt on her head and to pretend she doesn't know how to read to see if adults will try to mislead her, observes, "You had to act dumb around adults, otherwise there was no point in being around them at all." Assessing her mother's new boyfriend, she concludes, "...mother lacked all discrimination when it came to men." (p. 167) When she has finished re-educating the proprietor of the stuffed animal/trophy museum, we find it shut down with her sign out front, accurately announcing, "CLOSED FOR RECONSIDERATION."

Thus Nurse Daisy, as she washes Freddie Fallow, an elderly 350-pound mountain of an old man (who had to be hoisted into the tub with the aid of block and tackle), muses, "Isn't water a remarkable element? It's exempt from getting wet. It's as exempt from getting wet as God is exempt from the passion of love." (p. 169) Or, "Birth is the cause of death," and "The set trap never tires of waiting." (p. 170) Or even, "Our capacity to do evil has nothing to do with our innocence." (p. 171) Or--most especially--her description of Freddie's impending death as, "the evaporation of your little droplet above the sea..." (p. 172)

This last is an echo of Buddhism that Williams wants to satirize, as she does through the person of the undead Ginger, whose husband Carter has taken a fancy to his gardener, Donald, who espouses trendy Eastern philosophies. She begins, "What's he doing tonight, out hand-pollinating something?" She goes on to say, "Slow white dudes studying Buddhism make me sick," and finishes up with, "I can just hear him. It's only death, Ginger. Everything is fine...Does he say, Thank you, Illusion, every time he manages to overcome some piddling obstacle in his silly life?"

Thus Joy Williams's characters are vehicles for the author's expressions and her starkly original slant on the living and the dead. But what Joy Williams does so well is that she plays fair. The words of quirky wisdom come not necessarily from characters who represent her own views, such as Alice and Emily (although sometimes they do) but they can even come from the most minor of her human creatures. Thus Ottolie "who resembled an iguana" tells Alice from her bed, "I never sleep, you know...Never. Someone sleeps for me. She lives in Nebraska." Ottolie adds, "Aksarben. That's where I get a lot of my people. You have to learn how to delegate tasks." (p. 117)

Some have criticized this novel as "structurally a mess." Not so. Williams has her own organizing mechanisms. Characters flow from one to another; incidents are connected by invisible synchronicities; people appear to further the plot, and then disappear, but they are melded into the psychological and atmospheric structure of the novel. One sees this in the rednecks who seem to appear just to finish off poor Ray of the slanted mouth, but actually they are essential fixtures of the landscape as they smoke dope and shotgun saguaros, observing that "Shooting felt good..." consisting in "the increase of one's power," or that "Paranoia is having all the facts." (p. 152)

Sometimes what is best about Joy Williams is the sheer dazzle of language. Thus the unrelenting Arizona sun is made manifest through metaphor: "The sun shone like oil upon the limousine's hood, which had been waxed to the shine of water." Or the boy Alice sees whose hair was "as white as glare." (pp. 303-304) And sometimes the best thing is her revelation of character with just a phrase or two. Thus we know what Annabel is like because she worries about things like running out of avocado butter or whether she can actually wear beige or not. On page 163 a waiter, who wore "white clinging plastic gloves" comes to life with just these words:

"Have a nice remainder of the rest of your life," the waiter said. "Gotta cough." He turned away.

Or the two loud women at a nearby table who "had poured sugar on their food so they wouldn't eat anymore."

People yearn for things that cannot be, and that is life. Thus Ginger yearns for Carter to renew their vows of love and for him to join her, but he prefers to conjoin with Donald. And Alice is strangely smitten with the tuxedo-wearing piano player who is (unknown to her, but Annabel sees this clearly) irrevocably gay. But some people do indeed find love or something akin, as the stuffed animal museum owner and his adored Pickless, or Carter with Donald, or Annabel and Paris. Or the "pretty lizard" with J.C.'s missing "Little Wonder."

"The Quick and the Dead" (Second Timothy: 4:1; also The Book of Common Prayer) is a work of art that finds its own structure, that reveals itself to us in its own way. It is a fascinating reading experience, alive and vital, a tour de force of language and character, a darkly comedic romp through the sunshine of our psyches.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an absolute delight, November 17, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Quick and the Dead (Hardcover)

I don't know how I managed to overlook Joy Williams before. If her other books are even half as good as this (and I plan to find out right away), it will be a miracle. The Quick and the Dead could very well be the best novel I've read this year. The language constantly surprises, and she very deftly conjures a narrative out of the most elusive (and allusive) elements. Comic, profound, and remarkably thoughtful. Comparable in some ways to Lynda Barry's Cruddy (another great book), but utterly original. I can't gush enough.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Death is no Falure, November 20, 2001

By	Stephen Saunders (O'CONNOR, ACT Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Quick and the Dead (Hardcover)

Having paid little regard to the literary careerist's rule of "publish early and publish often," Joy Williams tends to be underrated. Only four fiction titles stand in between her State of Grace, nominated for the 1974 National Book Award, and this new novel.

Williams is sometimes taken as an inheritor for Flannery O'Connor, who died in 1964. Both exhibit ferocious intellects that, for all their fascination, you wouldn't necessarily want as permanent next-door neighbours.

Corvus, Alice and Annabel are three motherless children pinned down in a harsh American desert landscape. The wraith of Annabel's mother pitilessly upbraids her father, all the while coyly inviting him into her "skeleton arms". Alice assists the still-living dead at the old folks' home, while Corvus tries her hand at arson.

As various characters explain helpfully, the human body is but a thief and a counterpart, while its annihilation is no failure, but merely "a night between two days ... the Radiant Coat". In The Quick and the Dead, death's personal business calls are inventive and grimly amusing.

Williams has lost none of her metaphysical skills but, structurally, her earlier novel Breaking and Entering is the more elegant.