‘Winter Chemistry’ by Joy Williams

Julep and Judy are teenagers in a charmless seaside town who sneak away to spy on their chemistry teacher each night. An innocent enough premise that, in the hands of a lesser writer, might turn into a saccharine coming-of-age tale about the girls’ budding sexuality. And it is a coming-of-age tale, in the sense that coming of age as a woman means confronting the dangers that lurk in the dark corners of daily existence. Williams is an expert at subtext and withholding. Woven throughout the story are hints of blood and menace that foreshadow the final, violent scene. I first read this story on a trash-strewn beach in July, marveling at the deliberate way Williams crafts each crystalline sentence, chilled despite the summer heat.

First published in The Paris Review, Spring1974, as ‘A Story about Friends’, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Taking Care, Random House, 1985, and also in The Visiting Privilege, Vintage, 2015

‘Honored Guest’ by Joy Williams

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

‘Breakfast’ by Joy Williams

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

‘Health’ by Joy Williams

It would be inconceivable to me to begin any selection of my favorite stories without including ‘Health’, which is my favorite short story by my favorite practitioner of the form — my favorite writer, period — Joy Williams. I first read this story when I was eighteen, after picking up a collection put out by Graywolf in the mid-80s called Short Stories by Women. I remember that I bought it for a few bucks in the basement of the Harvard Book Store. That anthology introduced me to writers like Elizabeth Tallent and Ann Beattie — more on both of them in a moment — but it was Joy’s story, ‘Health’, that most thrilled me. It’s a fairly simple story in which a young girl, Pammy, goes to a spa to get a tan. Something serious and sundering may or may not happen while she’s in the tanning booth. (The ambiguity of the encounter — real? imagined? somehow both? — is one of the most haunting elements of the story’s construction.) She exits the tanning spa a different person; the surface area of her innocence has shrunk, irremediably, irredeemably. This story contains an entire world in it, and it’s only about eight pages. It also has the best cough in all of literature.

First published in Short Stories by Women, Graywolf, 1986, and collected in Escapes, Vintage, 1990 and The Visiting Privilege: New and Selected Stories, Knopf, 2015

‘The Yard Boy’ by Joy Williams

The yard boy was a spiritual materialist. He lived in the Now. He was free from the karmic chain. Being enlightened wasn’t easy. It was very hard work. It was manual labor actually.

There is so much to love in the opening lines of this bizarre, beautiful story from Joy Williams. The bold statement, the sense of the yard boy’s earnestness, the narrator’s gentle mockery.

Meanwhile the rich characters who hire the yard boy to do their gardening are torn apart effortlessly. Mrs Wilson, who names her son Tao, “is wealthy and can afford to be wacky.” Jonny Dakota is “into heroin and intangible property.” And the has-been illustrator Mr Crown, infuriated by the construction across the street which blocks his view of the sun, opens fire on the builders with a shotgun.

First published in The Paris Review, Winter 1977 and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Taking Care, Vintage, 1982, and The Visiting Privilege, Vintage, 2015

‘Marabou’ by Joy Williams

After the funeral for her son has not gone well, Anne finds herself surrounded by his friends; first over an expensive dinner that she pays for, and then in her home. As the evening progresses, Anne becomes more and more detached from the people she is surrounded by. These gaunt young people in black. Some of them are addicts, she thinks. Some have recovered. The story is chilling and hard from the first line to the last, but all the way through behind every word is a great wave of love that has nowhere left to go, and that previously was squandered on small things, and must now be swallowed by the reader whole. There are so many works of fiction in the world that play cheaply with grief and the loss of a child, but the need to feel the force of it, as a confrontation of one of our greatest fears is real. I am glad that Joy Williams wrote this story, as hard as it is. I am glad of Joy Williams writing absolutely everything.

First published in An Honored Guest, Vintage / Knopf 2004; collected in The Visiting Privilege, Vintage / Knopf 2017

‘Train’ by Joy Williams

“Far away,” wrote railway enthusiast WG Sebald, “but from where?” And so it is with both trains and short stories. To be on a train is to be far from somewhere, a liminality that also lends itself to the story, whose ultimate concern is what takes place beyond its bounds, before it begins and after it ends.

Two ten-year-old girls, best friends, are travelling home to Florida after a summer in Maine. The journey takes place on an impossibly enchanting auto train, with bubble-topped observation cars, a car dedicated to board games, a bar-car in which parents can hasten the end of their marriage, and an all-violet interior, the girls’ favourite colour. Jane and Dan will likely not remain friends after the summer (and the story) ends. What will remain is Dan’s realisation that she is as good as alone in the world. Joy Williams’s stories portray life’s more desperate corners and I think the ones in her first collection, Taking Care, are among her best.

Collected in Taking Care, Random House, 1982)

‘George and Susan’ by Joy Williams

Joy Williams is one of those writers who can reconfigure a handful of familiar words into something breathtaking, totally violating and adjusting a perspective you thought was established and pedestrian inside of you. This particular story isn’t in any of her collections, which is partly why I love and chose it. In it the Russian philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff haunts Susan Sontag’s childhood home. Williams’ study of Gurdjieff’s point of view, as he tries to embody Sontag and understand her origins and essence, is at once so delicate and so crushing you find yourself swept away, utterly without bearings.

Gurdjieff had made a pilgrimage to the desert, to Tucson, Arizona, where Susan Sontag spent her formative years. G is in love with Susan Sontag. Dead now, sadly, but all the more reason. He’s crazy about her. She hated the desert, but no matter. The desert had her in her formative years. The desert is irreducible and strange and is not merry, it is never merry. Not even the baby roadrunners and javelinas know how to play. It is work, work, work, hopeless living work.

First published in Tin House 62: Winter Reading, 2014. You can watch a fantastic video of Williams reading it here

‘The Excursion’ by Joy Williams

We first see Jenny as a young girl:

She lies a little but it is not considered serious. Sometimes she forgets where she is. She is lost in a place that is not her childhood.

We move between seeing her with her loving and patient parents, to her adult life in a shadowy apartment with a strange older man. The structure powerfully enacts the lurch and teeter of memory. Child Jenny goes to her parents’ room after a nightmare, there are marigolds on the dresser; in the next paragraph, the man she is with “likes flowers, although he dislikes Jenny’s childishness” – the man puts “flowers between her breasts, between her legs”. A call of another mother to come and play remains unanswered because, in the following paragraph, Jenny is “propelled by sidereal energies. Loving, for her, will not be a free choosing of her destiny. It will be the discovery of the most fateful part of her”.

I found, on returning to ‘The Excursion’ after five years or so, that it’s become more opaque to me, even though I’m still overwhelmed by its innovative structure. Was it always going to turn out like this for Jenny? There is something fated about the situation, that sits uneasily with the image of the young girl, sombre as she is. The contrast isn’t for sentimental effect. Williams seems to give Jenny an autonomy often lacking from stories where a child becomes a mirror of the parents’ anxieties, but this very consistency – the lies, the secret later life – is deeply unnerving.

Published in Taking Care, Vintage Contemporaries, 1985. Also in The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories, Knopf, 2015

‘#36 DEAREST’ by Joy Williams

With some stories you’re smitten from the first sentence, which is just as well when it’s from 99 Stories of God. Each story is less than a page long, some just a couple of paragraphs. I could write out the whole of ‘#36’ and probably still hit my word count. It’s about a house owned by Penny, a house Penny never liked but her tenants adored. They want to buy it but she takes against them. “Penny found them irritating in any number of ways – they were ostentatious, full of self-regard, and cheap. They also did not read.” That I read this after a short-lived stint as a landlord with tenants I also came to loathe might have everything to do with why I love the story so much if it wasn’t also perfectly written. Penny is both a normal person and, in her own way, God. Find the collection; there are 98 other gems as well as this one.

Collected in 99 Stories of God, Tuskar Rock Press, 2017

‘Preparation for a Collie’ by Joy Williams

There is a part of me that would quite like to be Joy Williams. She lives in the middle of nowhere with her large, strange dogs and she drives a battered car. I may have read that in the The Paris Review or I may have imagined it while reading The Visiting Privilege. I came across the book in 2015 whilst on a US tour with my first book, In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre. I was in the bookshop at the University of North Carolina. The staff in the shop were lovely, and I felt welcome to sit down and start reading this book. I was drawn to it because of the cover, with its fuzzy image of a German Shepherd dog. And perhaps I cannot forget this particular story because it also has a dog in it – and it is brutal. Williams’ stories are always shot through with humour though, no matter how unpleasant the tale. For the last three years, I have not been able to get this image out of my head: “David wraps his legs around his father’s chest and pees all over him. Their clothing turns dark as though, together, they’d been shot.” Oh, Joy!

From The Visiting Privilege, Knopf, 2015. Originally published in Taking Care by Joy Williams, Random House, 1972