Thrilling. No idea how to explain this book, it starts in Florida with a woman on the run with her child from a cult (maybe), but the husband follows and takes her back to the island from which she escaped, an island that has long (for USA, probably since 18th century) been owned by a family and now they and their spouses and friends and hangers on live there with assorted children, some theirs, some adopted. Weird things happen. It's about God, children and drink.Scary how Williams can let go a...

Joy Williams has a cadence all her own. In any given paragraph, she will unexpectedly flip from the concrete, to the metaphysical, to the hallucinatory. Her special finesse lies in being able to do this seamlessly, writing in opposing epigrams without unduly straining her prose. Later novels, though specters of bleak reality hover in the periphery, tend more towards an absurd re-wiring of the hyper-mundane, but this 1978 masterpiece drips instead with the occult, the mythic, the oneiric. It is p...

Feral children, an irresponsible and post-partum mother, a kind of weird commune on an island that may have been started by a witch. These are the things that typically make a great novel to me. And with Joy Williams at the helm, I was ready to be rocked dead by this book—after all, her The Quick and the Dead is sincerely one of the best novels I've ever read. However, something falls flat here for me, which made the disappointment double like a shadow under a solar eclipse.From the start, I thi...

It pleased me when I saw that Joy Williams' rather forgotten novel, The Changeling, was back in print after forty years, having first been published in 1978. The New York Times declares Williams 'one of the great writers of her generation', an opinion which has been echoed by many.The Changeling is a novel steeped in mystery and magical realism. Our focus is Pearl, a young mother trapped inside her marriage to Walker. At the outset of the novel, she has fled to the anonymous bar of a Florida hot...

"She had tried so earnestly once to be sane. But sanity, it was like holding onto a balloon, a balloon of the world, fragile, and full of petty secrets and desires. She would let it go. It was easy to let it go."Once upon a time a critic for some big time newspaper gave The Changeling a bad review and a once upon a time book eclipse lasted for thirty years. No fucking fair is the moral of this story.Once upon a time Pearl stood in her family home before a painting of a man who broke women like r...

I LOVED this - it's strange, eerie, disturbing and confusing. it reminded me of those folk horror films from the 70s - that mix of innocence and creepiness and kinda evil. am not 100% sure what went down in the end... but feel that might be ok!

I'm positive that I've missed something with The Changeling. It read like a different novel each day I picked it up to continue reading it.I've read different reviews that suggested the island was a cult, which never crossed my mind. It was this possibility that made the whole situation that much sadder.I took Pearl as a free spirit who was a victim of her parent’s suicides when she was younger. She muses to herself she doesn't do much other than having sex with her husband of five days, but the...

A "trippy" and, at times, stream of consciousness narrative rife with feminist themes and a smattering of non-West elements: animal spirit guides, Native American totems, I-Ching, tarot -- all relevant to the time in which it was originally published, 1978. A good study, but an unpleasant read.

Was this a cult? A commune? Some sort of paedophile scheme? An extreme postpartum reaction? A drunken dream? Did Sam die? Was Pearl the grandmother? Was she a ghost? Did the first husband ever exist? Was Thomas and Walker the same person? What the hell...

the book doesn't really begin until the plane trip back home--but a great red herring of an opener had me unprepared for that fact. i thought i was getting into a woman-on-the-run picaresque (like jaimy gordon's great SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING) but instead slowly realized i was reading a devastating and much more static portraiture of a unique drunk--a depressed mother whose deep-but-unorthodox vision of childhood ripens to rot after she quasi-survives exiting her own.often beautiful, uneven,

God I loved this book. was invigorated by its strange, dark magic and trippy alcoholic consciousness. I’ve been thinking about it since I read it a year ago and have meandered to one book club or novel lent to me after another but I will get to more joy Williams soon.

Most likely a masterpiece although I'm still grappling with it in this first read. The Changeling reads as if it was hatched as a primordial egg in the same universe as Flannery O'Connor, Leonora Carrington and Jane Bowles (the last of which Williams wrote an introduction for in the novel Two Serious Ladies) (all ladies after my own heart and whose writings have mostly been a huge influence on me). Her sentences are spare and minimalistic but can often veer into the prophetic at the turn of a ph...

Pearl drinks in the wake of tragedy. Her life a surrogate for what it could be. A rigid schedule of drinking—wine by day, gin by night. She lies by the pool. The children cluster around. They ask her questions. They utter the profound and the nonsensical. Children were like drunkards really, determined to talk at great length and with great incoherence. Pearl more or less understood them in that regard. A failed escape followed by a return to an island crawling with semi-feral children and her...

At the beginning, the beautiful language of this book completely drew me in. Joy Williams has a way of constructing sentences that is truly mesmerising and fitting for a magical realism story. I was intrigued by this woman running away from her past. But then the book began to drag. The events became more and more bizarre, started resembling a fever dream that corresponded with the protagonist's constant intoxication. I know this was intentional but it became too tedious for me. There were also

The woman on Pearl's left was now eating something brown. Pearl heard her companion say, "We were playing that dreadful game Diplomacy with the Joneses and the Foleys and the Prinns, and John got up and went out with Penny for one of those diplomacy periods, you know, where they haggle for supply centers, John had Turkey, and Penny, the bitch, had Austria-Hungary, and they were gone for one half hour, which was acceptable enough as far as the rules of the game went but when they came back John h...

One of the most haunting, disturbing and yet, eerily familiar books I've ever read.

If you hate Joy Williams you will hate this book (and the book won't care). If you love Joy Williams, you will love this book (and still it probably won't care). Started off amazing, got a bit iffy, then transformed itself into a perpetual surprise machine. We learn that Pearl, main character, gets married, then turns into a klepto, then some dude catches her being a klepto, convinces her to come away with him, which she does, to this island where a bunch of children live, along with some adults...

I can't believe how many books I've read recently that feel like this book made me feel, and it's got to just be coincidence seeing as this book is 40 years old. (Die, My Love, from the Man Booker International Prize longlist, which I hated/loved/couldn't stop thinking about and The Chandelier, which was too oppressive and I quit, for now).... The similarities have to do with motherhood and being trapped and in this case, Pearl has escaped her husband only to lose him in a plane accident, and to...

Joy Williams’s remarkable 1978 novel The Changeling (the followup to her 1973 National Book Award-nominated debut, State of Grace) was notoriously torpedoed by Anatole Broyard in a New York Times review (“startlingly bad,” Broyard declared). Absent today’s social media pushback, The Changeling sold poorly and went quickly out of print, finally to be rescued and reprinted in 2008 by Fairy Tale Review Press. The story opens in a Florida bar where 20-year-old alcoholic Pearl and her newborn have fl...

Oh here you are. Oh here you are book I always wanted to exist. Book of animal and God, woman and madness and dirt. And the children! Stripped of sentimentality but full of wild life. Children who "were like drunkards really, determined to talk at great length and with great incoherence." Who are, yes, closer to God, but that should be far from reassuring.Also: sentences. Whole pages of perfect short sentences. "Outside it was Florida." And other whole pages without sentences, beast-children yip...