Joy Williams’ Uncanny Valley

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Truth, the saying goes, is stranger than fiction. Not so the fictions of Joy Williams, which are precisely strange enough to capture the uncanniness of reality. Case in point: I had just started Williams’ latest story collection, The Pelican Child, when my husband and I went on a road trip, him in the driver’s seat. We were heading south from New York City, straight through the Shenandoah Valley and on into the buckle of the Bible Belt. The first story in the collection, “Flour,” is about a woman on a road trip. Her driver is a man engaged in translating a story from the Gnostic gospels into English. He tells the woman that “[t]he verb forms and tenses of Coptic are interesting. For example, some tenses that we English speakers do not have are the circumstantial, the habitual, the third future, the fourth future, the optative, and tenses of unfulfilled action signifying until and not yet.” Williams’ story is a fable about a fable from the Gospel of Thomas about a woman carrying flour in a broken jar, the flour pouring out behind her; in Williams’ version, it is obliquely about translation, interpretation, and unknown and unknowable, enacting in its form a spiritual journey toward a nothingness of ambiguous quality. And here’s the thing: My husband spent the better part of the last year learning Coptic; he’s interested in the Gnostics. On the drive, we talked about conjugating verb tenses.

It was hardly the only sign, as we drove, that the world we live in is Williams’ world. She is a writer uniquely attuned to the latent comedy and obvious existential horror in America’s lunatic national character. As we drove, the bare rock of the mountains was visible through the bare trees, although it was unseasonably 78° when we got to Tennessee. Dead deer accumulated along the side of the road. We stopped for a night in Roanoke, VA, dragging our suitcases into the featureless lobby of the DoubleTree, only to find that it was the wrong DoubleTree, there being two in town; we dragged our suitcases back to the car, drove a couple minutes down the road, and entered the second, identically unidentifiable lobby. Even the signs themselves, which I began tracking as the miles went by, exhibited an accreting absurdity. 

• Man Toys! emblazoned over a photo of a handgun
• John Wayne Car Wash, Next Exit
• Anxious? Jesus Offers Rest. Shackled by Lust? Jesus Sets You Free
• South’s Largest Adult Superstore
• Low-Cost Cremation Services!

The Pelican Child is a collection of twelve stories, all previously published, mostly in The New Yorker, along with Harper’s, The Paris Review, and two anthologies of modern fables. These are stories set, like much of Williams’ work, in a world reenchanted but not saved, blending the surreal and the real to comment on the uncanniness of the world, the presence of the ineffable and wonderful, and on the barbarism of human indifference in the face of it. Williams is concerned with “the celestial,” the nature of God and time, death and the destruction of the natural world, with stories populated by dead children, motherless girls, a whole menagerie of animals, ecoterrorists, the dead and the divine walking around as if they have nowhere more sensible to be; they are set in deserts, deserted towns, and ramshackle retirement homes. 

Williams loves retirement homes, death’s waiting rooms, which feature prominently in her novels The Quick and the Dead and Harrow. She is interested in the space between life and death. In “Chaunt,” one of the stories in The Pelican Child, a woman named Jane Click moves to a retirement community well before her expected time. She moves there after her young son and a friend of his are killed in a bicycle accident, on their way back from a ruined chapel they liked to visit, full of a hushed and motionless crowd of inexplicable animals. Jane Click never visits the chapel in person, just in her mind. It does not make her feel closer to her son, only to “the mute enormity of this other absence. It was a place not of solace but of correspondence, a correspondence that might never occur.” 

Williams’ vision seems, at times, millenarian, her stories about what it feels like to live in wait for the impending apocalypse, as its anticipated arrival somewhat fails to provide meaning to those living in what literary critic Frank Kermode called “the middest,” (a phrase borrowed from Spenser), that time between Eden and the End. At other times, though, in Williams’ fiction, the apocalypse seems to have already happened, or to be happening now, slowly (“No longer imminent,” Kermode wrote, “the end in immanent.”). We’re in the middle of something, either way.

• Premium Tennessee Vodka
• Pontoon Boats for Rent
• Injured? Call Rusty
• Cregger’s Custom Meats
• An exit to a town called “Dry Run”

This collection is a return to middle-length work for Williams, whose more recent books include the novel-length Harrow and the ultra-short stories of Concerning the Future of Souls, a follow-up to Ninety-Nine Stories of God. Her forms all seem to contain each other, the long, the short, and the shorter (as the narrator of “Flour” remarks, “I quite believe that all things—every moment, every vision, every departure and arrival—possesses the celestial, the terrestrial, and the chthonic.”). Moments in her stories and novels feel like her aphoristic microfictions—take, for instance, this passage from “George & Susan,” one of the stories in The Pelican Child, about the mystic George Gurdjieff, who despite having died in 1949, takes a trip to Tucson to visit the childhood home of Susan Sontag, with whom he is, naturally enough, obsessed. “Not all Russians,” Gurdjieff reflects, 

are great, they abuse their gifts, that idiot Balanchine, for instance. He put fifty elephants in pink tutus and choreographed them in a ballet with music by Stravinsky. The crowd roared with amusement. God’s most divine and improbable and tender creation, the most beloved of all his children, was presented as a joke. Sad. G feels sad. Men are but unconscious machines and they perform their cruelties so effortlessly. He has never felt so sad. He must have made a conscious effort in the past not to think of elephants but now their eternal plight, the horror of it, engulfs him.

Imagine this reconfigured, compressed, with a title following the story of Balanchine and the elephants, as Williams styles the stories in Concerning the Future of Souls and Ninety-Nine Stories of God, almost like a set-up and a punchline. Call it: Don’t Think About It.

Some of the stories, too, seem like sections from her novels. “After the Haiku Period,” a story about elderly twin heiresses to an oil-and-abattoir fortune who set out on a quest atone for the sins of their father with an act of salvific violence at a slaughterhouse, would fit seamlessly into the world of Harrow, where the elderly residents of a moldering building which they call “the Institute” plot acts of terroristic retribution against those responsible for the ruined world.

• A Perdue Chicken factory
• World’s Largest Knife Store!
• World’s Best Pancakes!
• The exit to the Manhattan Project Historical Park
• Is World War III Coming?

This environmental devastation is everywhere in The Pelican Child, a slow-moving apocalypse of humanity’s own making. In “Chaunt,” the reservoirs are drying up, in “My First Car,” a woman despairs at the ruination of the Great Barrier Reef, and in “After the Haiku Period,” Kansas and Wyoming are described as “vast devastated prairies. . . Just bones and hail striking and skittering off the bones” after the military led the slaughter of buffalo in the 19^th century. In “Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child,” the familiar witch from Slavic folklore lives in her familiar hut on chicken legs with a dog and a cat and the titular pelican, her daughter. The pelican child is “stunningly strange and beautiful and very very good.” One day a man turns up at the house and asks to draw the pelican child. Baba Iaga agrees, but when he returns to draw the child, he locks Baba Iaga and the dog and the cat in a closet, leaving himself alone with the beautiful child. When Baba Iaga and the dog and the cat finally emerge, they find her “pierced through with cruel rods and [] arranged in a position of life,” dead, turned from a living, lovely creature into “a specimen.” The story is a fable about humanity’s destruction and fetishization of nature; the man is John James Audubon, the 19^th-century American naturalist.

This blend of registers is characteristic of Williams. Her stories blend history and myth, high culture and low, the sacred and the profane. In Harrow, a child is given bad news via a birthday cake with a Goya painting replicated on the top. In “Chicken Hill,” a child’s funeral is held in a biker bar. The stories in Ninety-Nine Stories of God and Concerning the Future of Souls draw equally from the Bible and the more salacious sections of the newspaper. She is the great chronicler of America’s motels, parking lots, and desert dusks, its preachers, idiot idealists, and iconoclasts. 

• People playing the slots at a gas station off the I-81
• Brown Squirrel Furniture
• Distillery & Prison Tours
• There IS Evidence For God! Call 83-FOR-TRUTH
• Own Your Own Mountain!

Williams is particularly interested in the clash between the real and the unreal world, a characteristically Gnostic concern. In “Stuff,” she dramatizes this tension. Henry, the story’s central character, is a small-town newspaper columnist, the kind who writes sappy columns about the seasons, the wind, the flowers, “screened porches and baked-bean pots.” He goes to the doctor, where he is told that he has advanced-stage lung cancer. After his diagnosis, he goes to a Christmas tree farm, where he remarks on the scent of the pine. The worker at the farm tells him, “They don’t smell at all. . . . You’re whiffing nostalgia, my friend.” He goes, from there, to visit his mother in her retirement home, where his mother, not a kind woman, recalls that “When you were a boy, the other children would draw a circle around you in the playground and tell you you couldn’t break through it—and you couldn’t.”

His mother, it transpires, has become a Gnostic. “We maintain,” she explains, “that the world is an illusion. The unconscious self is consubstantial with perfection, but because of a tragic fall it is thrown into a foreign domain that is completely alien to its true being.” Henry, unable to break through invisible circles, lives in the illusory world; the story proves this to be as true now as it was when he was a child. His mother blames herself; “[y]our father and I always found the world to be unfamiliar,” she recalls, but she raised him based on “the custom then to behave otherwise.” He lives in a fake world of sentiment, and Joy Williams despises sentiment. In “Chaunt,” she writes that Jane Click “preferred the language of displacement and estrangement that prepared a path to revelation over language that simply refreshed and enlarged upon what she already knew,” and this reads as a description of Williams’ own preferences.

“Chaunt” is an anti-sentimental story, and one of the collection’s strongest. Jane Click rejects a plan to “erect two ‘ghost bikes’ at the spot” of the accident, “bicycles painted a flat and horrid white,” preferring the strange animals that populate the memorial in her mind. As the story ends, Williams writes that eventually Jane Click “would suffer mere death, as had her child and every mother’s child, but those to whom man has awarded extinction surely suffer more than death,” an unsparing ending that points towards what has been called Williams’ antihumanism.

It is in her affinity for animals, though, that she occasionally comes close to the sentiment she elsewhere abjures. This can be felt in “Baba Iaga & the Pelican Child,” which veers towards the didactic, and in “Argos,” a retelling of Homeric myth from the perspective of a dog (Wiliams seems especially fond of dogs) verges on softly charming, lacking Williams’ usual sharp edges. In this light, “The Beach House,” about a man who plans to bequeath his beach house to a charity for greyhounds, which would leave his daughter homeless, reads as either self-awareness or self-justification. We are, she seems to say, leaving future generations an unlivable world. We owed the world more than we can now give. Imagine, again, this compressed, story following title, Williams aware as always of things working on more than one level: Let it go to the dogs.

“My First Car” drives home this oppositional stance towards human futurity. The story revolves around a daycare center located “between a mattress wholesaler and a knife outlet.” The woman who runs the center begins to resent the babies; it starts when she learns that the Great Barrier Reef is dying. One character in the story, an employee at a motel called the It’ll Do, argues that “[t]he belief in a boundaryless human future is dead. We have exceeded the limits of acceptable destruction and diminishment. The misfortunes we’ve brought upon ourselves will soon reduce this world to ashes, out of which a new way will arise. What is the only thing we know about this new way? . . . We know only that it will appear monstrous and terrifying to those whose wretched traditions it supersedes.”

The Shenandoah could be the Valley of the Shadow of Death; why not? In Harrow, purgatory is in Florida.