Review of The Pelican Child by Joy Williams

In childhood, Mama often took me to the symphony. I never sat still. Violins and clarinets cut the air and made my little bones shake. When a gifted orchestra breathes its last note, eardrums of the audience still ring a moment longer. The music floats a bit past silence. I’ve since searched for this sensation, this quiet, haunting ringing; I’ve rediscovered it with the short tales of Joy Williams. In her upcoming collection The Pelican Child, each string-tight story’s end left me humming, anxious and taut, hungry for another note. 

Williams welcomes us into her disquiet psyche with “Flour.” Our nervous narrator cancels a friend’s visit after becoming convinced “that in her presence some calamity or another would arise.” The narrator then bundles their paranoia, their dogs, their things into a too-large car. Chauffeuring is a driver preoccupied with translating from Coptic the “story about the woman carrying flour to her home in a jar that is broken.” The pair has set out too late; they must make up time. This notion’s absurdity is acknowledged — “Preposterous of course. One cannot make up time.” Still, both driver and driven keep an obsessive track of every lost minute. And then they arrive, and nothing terrible has happened. But, by then, the narrator has nevertheless thoroughly unsettled the reader. Between paragraphs describing a souped-up truck, we’re told “When a little baby dies you think, If they can do it with such wonderment, so can I.” Arriving in a hotel, the narrator remarks, “In my room is a fruit basket, which contains a single orange. Quite naturally I am afraid to eat it.” These simple sentences fall like pebbles from a skyscraper, small, but with enough velocity to kill. And so “Flour” sets the tone.

In “After the Haiku Period,” two old twins reeling against their deceased mogul father’s legacy of coal-bed-methane drilling meet their bloody, grizzly end at a slaughterhouse. In “The Beach House,” a daughter wrestling with her father’s old-age decay learns he’d bequeathed the titular beach house to a German shepherd sanctuary, and desperately, she tries to convince him it’s a scam. In “George & Susan,” Guadjeff’s Susan Sontag fanaticism brings a crashing, dramatic (if ambiguous) end in an Arizona desert. In the hands of a lesser artist, such plots would veer towards hyperbole, caricature, melodrama, pretension. But Williams never loses control of characters. No word is misplaced; no sentence extends a beat too long. Nothing is ever over-explained — readers must augur their own meaning from her skeletal runes. 

But, don’t confuse her control with bland, stilted prose. Williams is dark, but also funny. Take “My First Car,” where our narrator attends a small town parade, and her companion remarks on some papier-mâché participants: “‘There’s Mother Earth,’ Marilyn said, ‘which is pretty partisan, I’m surprised they allowed that in. You’re supposed to avoid making statements.’” Whimsy, too, prevails. Williams weaves myths into her tight tapestries: in “Baba Iaga & the Pelican Child,” that favorite diva of Slavic folklore confronts John James Audubon, and “Argos” comes from the POV of Odysseus’s hound. Really, dogs feature in most of these stories, and often talk, or rather, philosophize. Children too are scattered throughout, and also all have charmingly serious dialogue. Thus, The Pelican Child delights as much as it disturbs. Read this collection to experience a music unlike any you’ve ever heard. 

Review by Mariya Kurbatova

Review of The Pelican Child by Joy Williams. To be published November 18th by Knopf (PRH). $27.00, hardcover.