I read this in the winter just gone, looking at frost on the watery meadows near our house. Cows used to graze there but they flooded them to make a bypass. At her best, Williams one exceeds all those to whom she is compared. Her grasp of the fragility of the American character is not as deeply-rooted as that of Kittredge, not as uncanny as that of Carver, but more nuanced, more universal. If sometimes it means her stories remain confined by the realist paradigm so be it, those that do escape are all the more precious, because they extend that grasp of fragility to fiction itself. America is a fiction barely holding itself together. Here we get something like ‘a fragment of time in its pure state’, a ragtag group hopelessly making myths of themselves with good cheer and an ironic wink. Little details continue to unsettle us, fiction and the characters within it perched on their easy talk and melodramas of the self, a little nag in the back of the mind saying, how long, how long can we keep this going?
First published in Esquire, August, 1981; collected in Taking Care, Knopf Doubleday, 1985
A Personal Anthology 