Gently Deranged
Joy Williams and the Logic of Attention
Confident and Apparently Irrelevant
Reading Joy Williams, my overwhelming first impression is of absolute confidence.
How do you open a story? You want to establish something of what’s to come; begin training the reader how to read it. Common cant is that short fiction has no time to dawdle and should reveal character and either set up for or include the inciting incident (or at least the tension that establishes its stakes). Lots of structural stuff, so long as it points to the subsequent story. Even if you take away the formal elements, you should still be establishing tone–mood or voice or pacing.
Here’s the entirety of the first section of the first (and titular) story of Joy Williams’s 1990 collection, Escapes.
When I was very small, my father said, “Lizzie, I want to tell you something about your grandfather. Just before he died, he was alive. Fifteen minutes before.”
I had never known my grandfather. This was the most extraordinary thing I had ever heard about him.
Still, I said, No.
“No!” my father said. “What do you mean, ‘No.’” He laughed.
I shook my head.
“All right,” my father said, “it was one minute before. I thought you were too little to know such things, but I see you’re not. It was even less than a minute. It was one moment before.”
“Oh stop teasing her,” my mother said to my father.
“He’s just teasing you, Lizzie,” my mother said. (Escapes, p. 1)
So what is this story about? This collection? Fathers? Death? Teasing? In this story: not really. The father is absent and, while death lingers in the background, it only does so in the usual way: pervasively, implied by the fact of bodies, of aging. Mostly ignorably.
I find this opening fun and intriguing and enjoyable but it’s not stating anything clear about the story to come. It demands instead that you look for your own conclusions.
This entry isn’t about that, at least not in any obvious way. Today we’ll be talking about Escapes, narrative attention, and multilayered cleverness. We won’t be talking about establishing tone or how to start a story. My opening this way is relevant in the way that her opening above is relevant to the subsequent story: lateral, resonant, more about priming than guiding. A real Joy Williams-ass move.
Late Entry
I came late to Joy Williams. She’s published steadily (if not profusely) since the early 1970s. A friend of mine, the almost perversely talented Timothy Day introduced her in a workshop he led in early 2024 with her story “Rot” (available in the same collection).
I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t heard of her, even when reading a lot of short literary fiction as an undergraduate. It came on the heels of a few other “why didn’t I know about this person?” writers (Angela Carter, who needs an entry one of these days, Gene Wolfe, M. John Harrison, whose resistance to genre was at the center of my entry on genre.) These “recent” discoveries of popular writers of the 70s onward led to my half-serious theory that each generation of writers loses the one immediately prior to it.
Writers are canonized by their influence on influential writers. Since you’re most likely to be shaped by other writers in your teens and twenties, and since it takes another few decades to be provably influential, there’s always a time skip in the middle where striking new voices are being published (who themselves were influenced from a couple of generations back) but are not meaningfully impacting you the same way.
If I were coming of age in the 90s (IF), then even young writers in their thirties were pulling from influences in the 70s. Most older than that–it takes a long time to build a literary career, and even longer to make enough impact on the culture that people start asking your early favs. It leaves a gap, during which you slot quite a lot of Joys Williams or Angelas Carter. So each generation has a leapfrogged blindspot, the discontinuity of history only paved smooth by retrospective anthologies, editors, and the critical canon.
This is, of course, just me generalizing from my own experience. But then, I write fiction. Generalizing from my own experience is essentially science to me.
So I read “Rot” in 2024, shared it with everyone who would put up with it, read it again, and discussed it in workshop. All in a week. The next day, I wrote a lightly surreal comedy about a separation after decades of marriage that is inexplicable even to the woman who initiated it. I like that piece. I don’t know that I would call it a Joy Williams pastiche, but conversely I don’t know that I haven’t been writing Joy Williams pastiches since.
Warning: the balance of this entry is basically just a bunch of lovingly transcribed pull quotes. Even if I have nothing insightful to say, I recommend it because you get to read some damned Joy Williams.
Descriptive Attention
What makes Williams so striking, to me, is her descriptive attention. The best summary of her writing I’ve seen is that it’s relentlessly surprising. The characters behave in unexpected ways, the prose comes at subjects sideways, and the choice of details feels lightly askew and operating at multiple levels simultaneously.
Her best stories feel gently deranged. As though AI were trained on reality rather than language–where today’s LLMs select the probabilistic average of language (like some kind of reverse-defamiliarization machine intent on avoiding confusion or surprise), her writing feels like the observations of an alien perception with a scrambled sense of what’s important at any given moment.
In “Bromeliads,” reflections on a young mother from the POV of her father meander between her and their surroundings.
Jones walks with his daughter in the woods behind her small house. She is pointing out the various species of bromeliads that flourish there. The study of bromeliads is his daughter’s most recent enthusiasm. She is a thin, hasty, troubling girl with exact and joyless passions. She lopes silently ahead of Jones through the dappled lemon-smelling woods. The trees twist upwards. Only the tops of them are green. She is wearing a faded brief bikini, and there are bruises on her legs and splashes of paint on the bikini. (p. 64)
It’s easy to look at a description like this and see it as an assortment of purely external observations. But at its center is a casually incisive assessment: “a thin, hasty, troubling girl with exact and joyless passions.” Its placement amidst the factual descriptions underscore that this is Jones’s perspective, but his attention is drifting, and we get a series of seemingly unrelated details as he considers his surroundings, uninvested in any particular aspect of them. I find the whole thing both opaque and invigorating. My brain loves to puzzle at the relationship between the characters, what’s in focus, the vivid modifiers.
The movement through these pieces is what I think of as descriptive attention. Not simply the choice of details nor the mode of description, but the frissive constellations created by their assembly. Following along, inferring the logic, is exciting. With Williams, the attention doesn’t pan across a scene like a stately camera shot, but skips around, makes unexpected connections, loses its train of thought. It gives the sense that it is operating at multiple frequencies simultaneously, and each read-through reveals new harmonies.
This technique is compelling when describing a scene, but I’m most floored by it in summary. In “Health,” this long paragraph buries a surprising revelation.
Pammy tans well. Without a tan, her face seems grainy and uneven for she has freckles and rather large pores. Tanning draws her together, completes her. She has had all kinds of tans–golden tans, pool tans, even a Florida tan which seemed yellow back in Texas. She had brought all her friends the same present from Florida–small plywood crates filled with tiny oranges which were actually chewing gum. The finest tan Pammy has ever had, however, was in Mexico six months ago. She had gone there with her parents for two weeks, and she had gotten a truly remarkable tan and she had gotten tuberculosis. This has caused some tension between Morris and Marge as it had been Morris’s idea to swim at the spas in the mountains rather than in the pools at the more established hotels. It was believed that Pammy had become infected at one particular public spa just outside the small dusty town where they had gone to buy tiles, tiles of a dusky orange with blue rays flowing from the center, tiles which are now in the kitchen of their home where each morning Pammy drinks her juice and takes three hundred milligrams of isoniazid. (p. 115)
Tuberculosis is mentioned offhandedly, at the end of the sentence, and with less love than the gum and the tiles. (In fairness, I am also kinda obsessed by that chewing gum and also want to give it to all my friends at school.) As a paragraph, it’s dense and lengthy, but it speeds through so many concepts in such jarring ways that it demands focus. It then whirls them all together in that wonderful final sentence that underscores how unremarkable such a trip can become, that it’s laid down as kitchen tiles to be viewed every day alongside the equally humdrum reminder of the girl’s illness.
Where the “Health” paragraph differs from “Bromeliads” is that it is summarizing rather than telling something in scene. Among his many strong essays, Lincoln Michel’s entry on Turning Off the TV in Your Mind speaks of the tendency of writers whose primary influence is visual media (film and television, particularly) to write as though describing a scene onscreen. Each form has its own strengths and weaknesses and approach fiction like it it’s a screenplay with extended stage direction is just inheriting the limits of both forms without the strengths of either. I won’t rehash his argument as my own content (it’s worth a read, alongside the many followup essays he’s written unpacking the strengths and weaknesses of each medium), but I want to speak to one of fiction’s great strengths: summary.
Outside of montage (which has its own limits), film is terrible at summary. Broadly, it’s best when one minute of screen time approximates one minute of fictional reality. Between scenes are time skips. Film is great at recording linear time.
Prose, however, can summarize, skip around, linger in a second, compress a year. Some of the more dramatic examples of this are striking plot beats–any major time skip is a big moment when we’re invested in characters’ daily life. But where this is most interesting to me is situations like this, in which summary walks us into a scene.
The above paragraph would be impossible in film for so many reasons, but the time and attention skips are core to why fiction is unique. The paragraph starts inside the character’s head with an unsparing statement about her pores, skips to different tanning trips across time and location, the World’s Greatest Gum as presents for her friends, TB, mountain spas, parental friction, tiles and treatment. Florida to Mexico to school and home. All in 200 words. Its economy makes it feel relentless, the unexpectedness of the details and their relative emphasis (TB being the least discussed) makes each move a surprise. Even in a story in which nothing hugely dramatic happens, it gives the sense that anything could happen.
Both of these examples operate to create sparkling descriptions, whether in scene or summary, that keeps me turning the page. Not so much to see what happens so much as to see how it’s handled. What happens when these techniques are deployed to emotionally devastating effect?
Looking Directly Not at Something
“The Skater” is a delicate and wrenching story about a family that has lost their oldest daughter, Martha, a year prior. The action of the narrative is about touring schools for their surviving child. The loss of Martha is stated factually, quite early. She haunts the entire story but the narration is as hesitant to think about her as the family. In principle, this is the sort of move I’ve seen elsewhere and I always like it–characters only referencing difficult subjects rather than directly stating them. Williams’s approach is different, in the sense that it states these things simultaneously head-on and elliptically.
After that first reference (“Tom and Annie’s other child, Martha, has been dead a year.” (p. 34), we wait until five pages in for the second reference to Martha:
In California, they live in a canyon. Martha’s room is not situated with a glimpse of the ocean like some of the other rooms. It faces a rocky ledge where owls nest. The canyon is cold and full of small birds and bitter-smelling shrubs. The sun moves quickly through it. When the rocks are touched by the sun, they steam. All of Martha’s things remain in her room–the radio, the posters and mirrors and books. It is a “guest” room now, although no one ever refers to it in that way. They refer to it as “Martha’s room.” But it has become a guest room, even though there are never any guests. (37)
This paragraph (which is a section of its own) deploys its attention perfectly, and perfectly in keeping with the perspective of a family still figuring out their life after unexpected loss.
We purport to begin on Martha’s room but immediately deflect to other rooms. We describe the canyon. The owls, the small birds, the sun. All of the details are whimsical and clipped. Then, when we finally get to the room, we’re still not talking about Martha. Just her things. A radio, then a commaless list: posters-mirror-books, as though rushing to get through. (The choice of four objects is evocative, but here I’m interested in the flow.)
Finally, we get the absurd statement that it’s now a guest room. Even though it’s never been redecorated. What would the guest experience be like? No worries, there are no guests. Also nobody calls it a guest room. The inconsistent logic, the insistence on something that nobody will accept, perfectly captures the sense of something too big to process, of people afraid that if they look at the thing directly then they might lose themselves and each other to the totality of grief.
At no point in this paragraph is any affective description used, nor the family mentioned. But I come away with a comprehensive sense of their frame of mind. Not even from the details selected, but because of how the description seems to resist its own subject. Attention is its own voice. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen “not looking directly at a subject” handled so distinctly, and with such effective subtlety.
“Men Like Fish” and Other Quick Hits
So that’s Joy Williams. I’m glad I got around to this entry, which has been simmering since I read this collection in October. It reminds me that I have to get back to ripping her off.
Before we go, I can’t help but pull out some of my favorite bits and bobs from “Rot.” Because it was my first, that story holds a sacred place in my heart. Moreso than others in this collection, it’s a story that I find laugh-out-loud funny, both for how it swims in its own absurdity (which is the characteristic I most easily latch onto) but also because it just enjoys goofy conceits. It commitment to comedy means it holds several of my sacred heartspaces–the ones reserved for jokes.
“Rot” is a story about a husband with many girlfriends bringing home a new/old Thunderbird. The car serves at different points in the story as a stand-in for aging (it’s falling apart), for girlfriends (I hesitate to call it infidelity), and for children (“‘So!’ she said, ‘You’re going to have another car!’” (p. 25)). By the end of the story, the T-bird seems less a metaphor and more a vehicle (sorry!) for the essential unreliability of allegory, how a few well-chosen details can drive (just so sorry!) a plethora of interpretations. I’m not saying that’s what the story is about. I’m saying it’s incredibly playful, untidy, and resistant to holistic explanation.
A few highlights that slay me.
The Aquarium was where a baby seal had been put to sleep because he was born too ugly to be viewed by children. He had not been considered viewable so off he went. The Aquarium offended Lucy. “I like fish,” Dwight had told Lucy when she asked why he spent so much of his free time at the Aquarium. “Men like fish.” (p. 17.)
Men like fish! What more do you want?
Two small, brown birds hopped across the patchy grass and Lucy watched them with interest for birds seldom frequented their neighborhood. Whenever there were more than three birds in a given place, it was considered an infestation and a variety of measures were taken which reduced their numbers to an acceptable level. (pp. 25-26)
I understand this to be a reference to passenger pigeons, and sad at that. But the precision of three is hilarious. The birds serve almost no purpose in the story but to make the world even more surreal. I imagine that,upon sighting a third bird, homemakers with clubs and nets would gagther and prowl the streets. Which would only be the first of “several measures.”
“How is Bob?” Lucy asked.
“Husband Bob is a call I never should have answered,” Rosette said.
Lucy crossed her arms over her stomach and squeezed herself with delight because Rosette said the same thing each year when she was asked about Bob.
“Life with Husband Bob is a long twilight of drinking and listless anecdote,” Rosette said.
Lucy giggled, because Rosette always said this, too. (p. 27)
Perfect. No notes.
It’s not all just crazy logic. Williams is excellent at sentences that perfectly evoke complex concepts. Lucy’s husband Dwight is over twice her age. Describing the development of their relationship (an absurd and oddly charming form of grooming), her button is “Dwight was like a big strange book where Lucy just needed to turn the pages and there everything was already.” (p. 20)
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about that as the perfect summary of what it’s like to meet someone as an adult, where you will never know all the significant events that shaped them, but you might discover another intact story just sitting there. Add to that the perspective you have when you’re younger, that your life is filled with change but that adults are stagnant, their lives already written. Now express it in 20 words using diction a child could understand.
Reading Joy Williams makes me want to write better. Want to want to write better? Go find a copy of Escapes or The Visiting Privilege (the latter of which is a collection that contains most of the stories from Escapes). Even if the stories aren’t your cup of tea, you’ll, at minimum, have a uniquely puzzled time.
Stray Observations
Joy Williams was edited by Gordon Lish on her stories for Esquire, the same editor famous for aggressively chopping down Raymond Carver’s early writing to create the punchy, minimalist (and frequently inscrutable) style we associate with him. In Williams, the understatedness functions differently–while it has that quality of seeming like some essential connective tissue has been removed, there’s still a lot of internality and assessment at play in what remains. My lesson is to go harder in chopping down for revision: blank spaces encourage proactive reading.
Here my theory of generational blind spots breaks down upon even the remotest examination. In the same time frame that Joy Williams was publishing, all of Raymond Carver’s literary career happened and I certainly read him in school. (To be fair, he made a bigger splash in a very short time frame, then died.) You could argue that it’s because I wasn’t edified about women writers, but that doesn’t hold up to the various Annes Beattie or Joyces Carol Oates or Octavias Butler or Ursula Ks. LeGuin I was directed to. (Only the last of whom really clicked with me such that I read most of what was available to that point.) The most plausible explanation is that Carver just made a bigger, more impactful splash.
As part of poking around for this entry, I learned that Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, OR! I drove through there yesterday before writing the end of this post in Astoria! He grew up Yakima, WA! A farming town by a checkerboarded reservation, it contains an excellent Asian buffet with a truly horrifying chocolate fountain. How had I not known he was from the PNW? (I’m currently wondering if that’s why he was taught so heavily in my creative writing courses–influential, certainly, but also a local.)
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