I could nominate any number of Joy Williams’s sere, steely, dryly mordant stories – overall she may be my favourite writer of the form (and her The Quick and the Dead is an all-time top ten novel for me). In ‘Honored Guest’, Lemore and her teenaged daughter Helen are coming to terms – or not – with the prospect of Lenore’s imminent death. This gleefully merciless story opens with Helen’s dismayed realisation that she can’t even threaten suicide, the teenager’s operatic gambit: “Suicide was so corny and you had to be careful in this milieu which was eleventh grade because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke.” The double whammy of “corny” and “milieu” shows us Helen precisely. William’s stories grow distorted and weird, cacti in the desert; what I love most are their surreal touches, hinting at other kinds of consciousness that run alongside the everyday and sometimes jump tracks: here, the family dog has developed a special growl directed solely at Lenore when it cannot be overheard; the mother herself has an unexpectedly heartbreaking habit of calling her own name at times of stress or panic, as if ventriloquising the fear Helen is too transfixed to articulate.
First published in Honored Guest, Knopf, 2004; collected in The Visiting Privilege, Tuskar Rock, 2016; you can read an extract of the story here
A Personal Anthology 