Why Read Joy Williams?

Joy Williams is a writer I have read much about and only one or two short stories. I categorize Williams as one of those writers I should have read 40 years ago, else I might not have put off working on my fiction until now.  Reading Joy Williams, The Art of Fiction No. 223 from The Paris Review might explain my interest. I hope it shows why she should be read by you. 

The Paris Review had already run several of the earliest, weirdest Joy Williams stories before George Plimpton agreed to publish State of Grace under the magazine’s book imprint in 1973. The novel, her first, would be nominated for the National Book Award when its author was thirty. (She lost to Gravity’s Rainbow.) She went on to write three more eerie, eccentric novels of life on the American margins as well as four renowned collections of stories, upon which her reputation solidly rests. Many have attained cult status beyond the normal anthologies—“Traveling to Pridesup,” “The Blue Men,” “Rot,” “Marabou,” “Brass”—and are frequently passed around M.F.A. departments with something like subversive glee. They are, as Williams probably hoped, unteachable as craft. The New York Times admitted more than it meant to, perhaps, when a reviewer claimed her work was “probably not for everyone.” Over the decades, wildly different stylists—Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, William Gass, Karen Russell, Bret Easton Ellis, James Salter, Ann Beattie, Tao Lin—have all expressed unqualified admiration.

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INTERVIEWER

Can you define a story, if not its usefulness?

WILLIAMS

What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes—which is Wallace Stevens, I think. As a form, the short story is hardly divine, though all excel- lent art has its mystery, its spiritual rhythm. I think one should be able to do a lot in less than twenty pages. I read a story recently about a woman who’d been on the lam and her husband dies and she ends up getting in her pickup and driving away at the end, and it was all about fracking, damage, dust to the communities, people selling out for fifty thousand dollars. It was so boring.

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INTERVIEWER

To speak of signs or interpretation suggests, at the very least, that there’s something unknowable at the heart of what you do. I asked you, before we started taping, whether you remember anything of how some of your most famous stories—“Train,” “Escapes,” “Honored Guest”—came to be written, and you looked panicked. You honestly can’t recall?

WILLIAMS

I find it so difficult to talk about what I do. There are those who are unnervingly articulate about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, which, I suppose, is what this interview is all about. I am not particularly articulate, unnervingly or otherwise. I do believe there is, in fact, a mystery to the whole enterprise that one dares to investigate at peril. The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what’s being said before the writer figures out how to say it. There’s a word in German, Sehnsucht. No English equivalent, which is often the case. It means the longing for something that cannot be expressed, or inconsolable longing. There’s a word in Welsh, hwyl, for which we also have no match. Again, it is longing, a longing of the spirit. I just think many of my figures seek something that cannot be found.

INTERVIEWER

And the writer? Are you trying to resolve that longing?

WILLIAMS

There’s a story about Jung. He had a dream that puzzled him, but when he tried to go back to sleep a voice said, “You must understand the dream, and must do so at once!” When he still couldn’t comprehend its meaning, the same voice said, “If you do not understand the dream, you must shoot yourself!” Rather violently stated, certainly, but this is how Jung recollected it. He did not resort to the loaded handgun he kept in a drawer of his bedside table—and it is somewhat of a shock to think of Jung armed—but he deciphered the dream to the voice within’s satisfaction, discovering the divine irrationality of the unconscious and his life’s work in the process. The message is work, seek, understand, or you will immolate the true self. The false self doesn’t care. It feels it works quite hard enough just getting us through the day.

Work, seek, and understand seems like a good plan. I like to think I am back on track these past 13 years by doing those three things. Looking back on when I let my depression run wild, I worked 

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