Entering the Shining Rooms of Joy Williams
By Andrew Roe
Lately I’ve been kind of obsessed with Joy Williams. This has happened before—and this latest round of preoccupation was spurred by reading Karen Russell’s introduction to The Changeling, Wllliams’s recently reissued 1978 novel (thank you Tin House Books).
The New Yorker published an excerpt of Russell’s piece, in which she writes: “If you’ve read Williams’s sentences, which streak across the mind with the fiery, otherworldly authority of comets, it might shock you to learn that they have a human origin.”
Exactly. Williams is one of those writers—one of those few, to-be-cherished writers—who seem to be operating on a different wavelength than the rest of us. Russell’s introduction sent me on an online quest, like a drunk searching for another, better bar, looking for more to sate my Williams fix. One of the things I came across was Irish writer Colin Barrett reading and discussing Williams’s story “Stuff” (which I’d never read before) on The New Yorker fiction podcast.
“Stuff” features all the hallmarks of what makes a Williams story a Williams story. From the beginning, things are off. The story opens with Henry, a newspaper columnist, finding out he has cancer. But the diagnosis gets delivered not by his regular doctor but someone else (“The one he usually saw was at a baptism or a wedding that afternoon, Henry wasn’t sure which.”). Then the stand-in doctor mixes up the paperwork. After Henry clarifies that he’s not eight-five, he’s sixty-three, the doctor rechecks the computer and announces, “You have lung cancer as well, a bit more advanced, actually… Sorry about the mixup.”
The story ends with a visit to his mother, who’s living in a retirement home (called Ambiance, where there’s a Rilke quote on a banner in the lobby), and who doesn’t seem to be acting like his mother. She doesn’t talk the way she’s talking to him (“Some consider Gnosticism flawed, an individualistic, nihilistic, escapist religion incapable of forming any kind of true moral community, but naturally we disagree with that assessment.”). She has a roommate, and Henry didn’t know about that. He doesn’t recognize some of the furniture and items in his mother’s room.
Again, there’s disorientation (it grows, builds as we go), and as in many Williams stories, you’re left wondering: is this our world? Is it another world, the one beyond this one? Is it a transitional state? But does this kind of shit even matter? Does it have to be one or the other? It’s just Williams’s world, the one she evokes in her fiction, and it’s a world that we should be thankful for and not question so much, or else it might start to disintegrate before our eyes, right there on the page.
Barrett said “Stuff” was in The Visiting Privilege, a book of collected and new stories published in 2015.
That night, before I went to bed, I picked up my copy of The Visiting Privilege. But “Stuff” wasn’t in there. So I returned—for the fourth, fifth, maybe sixth time—to Williams’s story “Taking Care,” which is the title story of her 1982 collection, and which is also included in The Visiting Privilege as the opening story (in contrast, it closes Taking Care).
The story consists of twelve sections, all of which are long, single paragraphs. Most begin with the name “Jones,” Jones being the main character, a pastor whose wife is dying, and whose daughter has fled to Mexico and left her infant daughter with him. Jones is left to care for this new life while also dealing with the end of his wife’s life (she has lung cancer; “her blood moves as mysteriously as the constellations”).
Yes, more cancer, more death, more uncertainty, and more questions than answers, and more comet-like sentences that you savor and repeatedly read and sometimes even say out loud to yourself.
I love Jones. And I love how Williams starts the sections:
“Jones, the preacher, has been in love all his life.”
“Jones is writing to his daughter.”
“Jones is driving down a country road.”
“Jones is waiting in the lobby for the results of his wife’s operation.”
“Jones has the baby on his lap and is feeding her.”
Declarations, sort of, but also employing the dreaded passive voice, going against all conventional writing advice. You’d instead want to say “Jones drives down a country road” or “Jones waits in the lobby.” But not Williams, not in this story at least. The “is” and “has” puts us in a certain place, a certain mindset. Jones is mired in this heavy, wrenching present and Williams’s linguistic choices remind us of this, reinforces it, whereas other writers might have worried about their sentences not being action-y enough.
After reading “Taking Care” once more, I was struck, yet again, by the story’s closing line. Jones brings his wife home from the hospital, and it’s unclear—at least in my mind—if she has died and if this is actually “happening.” I suppose it doesn’t really matter.
Here’s how the story ends:
“The house is clean and orderly. For days he has restricted himself to only one part of the house to ensure that his clutter will be minimal. Jones helps his wife up the steps to the door. Together they enter the shining rooms.”
Together they enter the shining rooms.
It’s a final line that devastates, the effect reminding me of Hemingway’s famous description in The Sun Also Rises of the two ways you can go bankrupt; the lines hits you “gradually and then suddenly.”
Together they enter the shining rooms.
It was getting late at this point, and I knew I might regret it the next morning when I was on the train to work, but I still needed more. I searched for joy williams taking care, eventually finding a Paris Review interview Williams did in 2016.
Williams describes showing a draft of the story to another writer, “a sophisticated feminist from New York. She suggests I cut the final line, ‘Together they enter the shining rooms.’ I am dismayed. I become suspicious of readers. Of course I will not cut the line. It carries the story into the celestial, where it longs to go.”
Of course she will not cut the line. Of course. And we should be thankful for Williams’s resolve and dedication to her vision. Because that story would not be that story without “Together they enter the shining rooms,” the line does carry the story into the celestial, and before I finally turned out the light and tried to fall asleep, I thought maybe that was where all stories should long to go—and what all stories, in their construction and hope and intent, should aspire to, taking us somewhere we’ve never been.
Andrew Roe’s latest book is Where You Live, a collection of short stories. His debut novel, The Miracle Girl, was a Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist. His fiction has been published in Tin House, One Story, The Sun, Glimmer Train, Slice, The Cincinnati Review, and other publications, as well as the anthologies 24 Bar Blues (Press 53) and Where Love Is Found (Washington Square Press). His nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com, and elsewhere. He lives in Pleasant Hill, California, with his wife and three children. Find out more at andrewroeauthor.com.
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