![]() ![]() In “The Farm,” from 1979, a woman utters words as “codes for other words, terrible words.” Her son has died, yet she prattles on about “food, men, the red clouds massed above the sea.” One of the strangest parts of reading Williams is the jumpiness in her language, a feeling that her nouns and verbs, no matter how meticulously ordered, might be arbitrary, a “code” for things impossible to say. ![]() She seems especially attuned to the psychoanalytic distinction between “manifest” and “latent” content-the smoke versus the fire beneath it. In her stories, and in her five novels, she opens cracks in reality, through which issue ghosts, clairvoyants, changelings, and suffering. The central subject of art, she has written, is “nothingness.” For years, Williams has worn sunglasses at all hours, as if to blacken her vision. Her tales offer a dark, provisional illumination, and they make the kind of sense that disperses upon waking. But the route can be disorienting, like climbing an uneven staircase in a dream. ![]() Williams, one of the country’s best living writers of the short story, draws praise from titans such as George Saunders, Don DeLillo, and Lauren Groff, and many of her readers, having imprinted on her wayward phrasing and screwball characters, will follow her anywhere. ![]() You don’t encounter the fiction of Joy Williams without experiencing a measure of bewilderment. ![]()
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