in an interview with bob dylan on his songwriting process, i remember reading that for him, songwriting was about taking a story and "turning it on its head." i think that phrase aptly describes williams's writing as well. she has a knack for taking an ordinary phrase, turning it on its head, and crafting a truly beautiful sentence. i agree with the goodreads review where it says that her characters don't speak ordinary dialogue, but instead talk like prophets. and especially the retirement home...

I liked The Quick and the Dead a whole lot. I like it for the things that are hard to describe why I liked it a lot. Like, all of the characters, every single last one of them, speak as if they are in a novel where everyone speaks like they are in a novel. This could have irritated the fuck out of me. I hate it when authors use their characters to tell people about all of the stuff they wanted to say and never found one big place to do it all before. I really hate, pretty much more than anything...

As Mariel approved and MJ disparaged, this is book full of lines delivered like lines in a novel (or film) where people speak as if they're in a novel (or film). Which might bug you. But to me, really, who needs naturalism? These lines each shine (the action too, not just the dialogue) like perfect fragments pithily conveying the absurdity of life and the moments that define it. It might all become a directionless wash of clever observations, but for the Joy Williams' ability to suffuse the enti...

I discovered Williams from an intro she did for Jane Bowles, so this may color my review slightly. But Williams is the heir apparent to the twisted comic crown once (briefly) worn by Bowles (who someone once called “the Buxter Poindexter of prose”). But like Bowles she is sui generis, but they definitely travel in the same park. Insane characters revealing themselves with deadpan confessions delivered in stylized dialogue is the main show here. The elliptical “plot” or “structure” is as open end...

Having previously read and very much enjoyed some of Joy Williams’s short fiction, I’d been looking forward to reading this novel for a number of years. I’m not sure why it took me this long to reach for it (well, okay, books just tend to get buried in tbr lists). The central characters are a trio of teenage girls (Alice, Annabel, and Corvus), all three of them motherless and two of them parentless altogether. They are all portrayed in a somewhat one-dimensional way, each of them uniquely distan...

Those of you who liked Joy Williams' short stories (see, eg., The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories) should also like this novel. It's almost as if there are running stories spliced together here. And I mean that in a good way. There are familiar themes, settings, vignettes: an old age home, plenty of dogs, marriages crumbling or already crumbled, precocious children. Read this and you will recognize that we are all a little off. I do not think that Joy Williams would find me inappr...

The fifth-highest community review of this book on Goodreads is by a gentleman who awarded it one star, alluding to its "lack of plot" and comparing it unfavourably to "Dan Brown's Robert Langdon series". I don't generally like to belittle other people's opinions, or to play the intellectual snobbery game, so I'll just note that the reader in question wasn't the target audience for this book, and might more profitably be directed toward a different section of the library altogether. But a wider

Oh, she thought she didn't dream, but one morning she was going to wake up, yes, she would wake from the dream even the most reluctant and particular have but once, the one where four animals arrive to carry you off for the moment. You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such g...

Show me a novel better than this one and I'll eat my shoes. Joy Williams has a peerless command over language, and the acrobatics she performs throughout this book with her words is really something to behold. What I mean is that I went through three highlighters reading this book, wanting to yellow up every page. The characters—especially the three young girls who own much of the novel's time—have stayed with me ever since I first read this book a few years ago. Alice's misanthropic, misguided

Early on in the book a character named Alice speaks of wanting "to possess a savage glitter" and that is exactly what this novel achieves, masterfully. This was equally delightful and disturbing and filled with so many wonderfully odd characters (Alice, Nurse Daisy, Emily Bliss Pickles(s)!!!!). There were numerous sentences and whole passages so stunningly crafted that left my mouth agape in awe/horror/both. This is a novel I'm definitely going to have to read again, and again, and again.

Oh this is really good, like Lorrie Moore with a satanic streak or Ferrante if she'd been raised in an American desert. The story is deceptively simple - basically a summer novel about 3 girls who've each suffered loss - and the structure is notable. Each chapter is basically its own brief vignette, and Williams doesn't hesitate to jump into a supporting player's brain mid-sentence or have whole chapters with characters we'll never see again. As a result, this is a classic novel of accumulation:...

I don't think I can review this book. I can't even decide if I liked it or hated it. The writing is exceptional, as Williams' always is. But the characters are unlikable and their lives almost incomprehensible.The story is not "about" any one character. There are a group of people, some more tangential than others, who bump up against each other. The book begins and ends with Alice, a teenager who is against environmental destruction while simultaneously appearing to not care about anything. She...

I tried 50pp of this novel but couldn’t find much to cling to. I think Mariel nails it in her review: the characters speak as if they were in a novel where everyone speaks as if they’re in a novel. I also found the prose heavy with those carefully crafted profound-sounding sentences where the author imparts profound sentiments in profound-sounding prose, where they reader is asked to step back and say, woah . . . heavy! This sounds churlish. I know. I loved some of these sentences but there was

The Quick and the Dead is easily one of the oddest books I've ever read, and one of the most inspiring: oh the glorious things language can do! This novel is fairly short, but it took me weeks to get through it as there's not much narrative drive to speak of. Once I understood this, I simply reveled in Williams' stunning imagination and her comic lovely prose. 3 teenaged girls, a bitch of a ghost, and the cruel, apathetic desert. Fuck, this is awesome."A truck tore by on the road above them, its...

If Joy Williams were just a little less brilliant and withering, I'd hate her. Blatantly unrealistic, overblown dialogue, tangential approach to story/narrative (no rapid page-turning here, really; and even the strength of the writing wasn't enough to keep me from turning to other novels occasionally), cynical ruthlessness towards her own characters along with a stubborn resistance to portraying any successful/hopeful connection between humans. But, I get the comparisons to Flannery O'Connor. Th...

I read this book by accident, or at least without any intent: it literally fell into my lap a few months back when it appeared mysteriously on my Kindle. There is no record that I bought it or that anyone bought it for me, it showed up on only one of our three Kindle devices (the oldest one), and is not listed in our Kindle library on Amazon. I dipped into it and was immediately hooked by the writing.Given its mysterious antecedents, the fact that it turned out to be such a great fit for me coul...

The Quick and the Dead is a story of modern America and all its neuroses. There are a lot of characters in the story, and story lines that sometimes interact, but other times remain fairly isolated. Of the characters, the three teenage girls, Alice, Annabel, and Corvus are fairly memorable. Alice's environmental, vegetarian self-righteousness; Annabel's upper-class materialism and propriety, and Corvus' emptiness. From these characters, we are linked to Carter, Annabel's dad whose dead wife appe...

While this is a disturbing book, it is very absorbing.The only reason it doesn't get 5 stars is because it jumps, chapter to chapter, between several characters. Each of them is interesting in their own way and have a strange quirk that plays into their unusual actions and reactions. The dialogue is disarming while at the same time charming. It is Williams at her best, and also a book worth a second read.The stories are interconnected but the narrative is most powerful when the focus is on one c...

I hate giving up on books. I will usually trudge through one until the end, even if I'm not particularly enjoying it. But I couldn't make it with this one. Hence the one star. It's too bad because I actually think that the author is extremely talented. There were some passages or paragraphs that I reread a couple times because I thought they were brilliant. But there was no story. I made it about half way through the novel, and I had no idea why I was reading about these people. I felt like I wa...

A fistful of Arizona sand sifting through your white-knuckled grip, big-gritted dust, the same that covers the empty, blazing acres around you, some cling to your sweaty palm, and up close, they sparkle in the murderous sun, telling stories of the museum-quality diamonds they once thought they were. You're six miles from home. You will hear their stories the whole way home. If you're wise you won't listen, you'll rub the sand through your hair, pack a ziploc with a few measly grains, share it wi...