I enjoyed the story, which serves as a meditation on grief and (lost) innocence and–in a very familiar Joy Williams way–death. There’s no clear plot here, but a lot is going on. The narrative voice shifts between Jane Click’s present (at the care facility “Dove”) and memories of interactions with her deceased son and his friend. There’s much that could be said about the story’s use of symbols and potential interpretations, but, due to a lack of time, I’ll skip a more structured and complex analysis and simply layout some of my own key takeaways.

As mentioned above, I think the key themes at play is that of grief and innocence, which are back-dropped by the death of Jane Click’s son and his friend. All three of these motifs are encapsulated in the so-called Dove, which I read as a long-term care facility for those who are too grief-stricken to be left to their own devices and who would rather retreat from their actual, everyday lives and into an artificial refuge where they might find the distractions and false contentment needed to live out their days without being suffocated by their internal sorrows. The Dove is described as a tall building with numerous isolated rooms that people inevitably compare to columbarium–a storage facility for urns. I think this can be interpreted in two ways. First, the facility can represent a place where sufferers come to put their grief (i.e. their painful memories) to rest. Second, it’s possible to think of the facility as place where the sufferers are themselves put to rest in a sense, as most of those who come to live in the Dove eventually adopt an almost emotionally removed or even catatonic state so as to insulate themselves from their painful pasts in hopes of living out their remaining days as numbly as possibly. Keep in mind that people who come to reside in the Dove are said to be “decent enough individuals caught by the mishaps of time in a circumstance of continual, bearable punishment.” They are subjected to ‘vindictive’ light in the facility, which most people (though notably not Jane Click, who has yet to settle into her new home) shield with sunglasses (which they also cry behind). Quasi-group therapy sessions are held, during which participants are discouraged (or discourage themselves) from articulating their thoughts/feelings. All feel a sense of disgust towards Theodore, the disheveled man who encourages Jane Click to visit the spot where her son was killed–the Chaunt; while other residents find exposure to so emotionally traumatic a place an impossible idea, Theodore suggests that going to the Chaunt and then returning to the Dove will result in her ‘being here’. Theodore, who is presented as being disheveled, is thus the instigator of the Dove, and his physical disorder seems like a very direct metaphor for his internal sense of conflict. As a resident of the Dove, he too must be struggling with his own demons of guilt or grief, but unlike his neighbors he is unable to simply distract himself out of caring. So, all in all, I’d say residents of the Dove aren’t particularly at one with themselves.

Then there’s the other meaning of the facility’s name. Aside from its description as a columbarium, “Dove” invokes the image of the white pigeon, which is is traditionally associated to the notion of innocence. Jane Click’s deceased son and friend are in many ways an embodiment of such innocence. For instance, the protagonist’s son’s friend is said to be shy and looks at his cleft lip not as a deformity but as an endearing feature that makes him more like a rabbit. Both boys embody a sense of wonder at the taxidermy animals that they find in a dilapidated building in the Chaunt. There are other examples that I don’t have enough time to detail. So, with their death, we also have the death of innocence. Such innocence is of course not recovered by Jane Click at the Dove. Rather, it’s exchanged with the perverted innocence of diversion and forgetfulness, something Jane sought out when she first arrived at the facility and eventually finds once she snubs Theodore and his unnerving suggestion that she confront her trauma, favoring instead to embrace the psychic placidity that the Dove offers its guests and allowing the memories of her son and his friend to “fade to nothing”.

A bit of a rushed analysis, so my apologies. Hopefully, people can make sense of it.

This piece displays Williams’s usual verve for language. The harelipped child who prefers birthday pie to birthday cake is a resonant early example of her extremely effective compactions and strange, entrancing truncations, and that all segues quickly and unobtrusively to horror (already prefigured by the columbarium and later picked up by the lost raven and absent father and the discarded letter of apology). Liminal/hard-to-define/in-between places, spaces, objects, and things recu as well. The approximations regarding the driver and how hard it is to apportion fault is a nicely hewn detail. And there’s a great form-function blend when Jane Click (much like Williams herself) rejects utterly the sentimentalizing stroke (of the “ghost bicycles”).

Absences that can become presences. Nicely done, Joy.

The animals as allegories for human’s in a godless void; also nicely rendered.

“Politely” is a necessary and well-chosen adverb.

The “sobbing of the earth” is an unfortunate conjuring that should have been excised.

The Dove and its menagerie of residents is just so-so. When we’re away from the storylines of Jane and the two boys, the story loses both momentum and gravitas.

More fulfilling were the descriptions of setting, be it the chapel/church full of animals (micro- level) or a country “vanquished of all but stones” (macro- level).

The philosophizing is fitting for a woman who’s experienced what the protagonist Jane has.

The ending feels less haunting than it ought, the tone eventually resting somewhere between Anne Carson and Michelle Huneven. It’s as if Joy is a bit stuck between the aphoristic and theology-batting mode of Ninety-Nine Stories of God and her more traditionally minimalist but still full-length short stories. That said, the moments of fervent loss and communal disrepair are rather trenchant. And Jane Click is a freakin’ phenomenal character name.

What a strange story! When I read it the first time it was hard to make much sense of what is going on or even where the story is happening. Some sentences suggest it is set in the present in the real world, but others suggest another time or a fictional world. This is a story that needed a second and close reading to try to put the pieces together. But when I read it the second time, it did not come together much more than the first time. The story has a very strong dream-like quality to it. And just as when I sometimes try to think through and make sense of a dream after waking up, this story remained mostly a collection of fragments that defied any unified interpretation. I found that, also a lot like dreams can, this story seemed to operate more on an impressionistic emotional level. There seemed a lot of details that were chosen that should have had some specific significance that was ultimately hard to find, but dreams are like that too. I’m not sure that everything in the story worked, but overall it was engaging and effective.

The climate change interpretation is interesting. There’s certainly a good deal of natural imagery–of the animals, of course, which seem somehow like they’re on the cusp of extinction, and water shortages and barren landscapes and distant mountains (empty ones, mind you, which doesn’t invoke much of an impression of life). There’s talk of overpopulation too (but not really societal collapse). On my previous readings, those details felt more like cursory details to me, aimed at setting a sense of atmosphere rather than being the meat of the story. Relatively little time was given to them in contrast to the story of Jane Click’s personal loss. Going back to the story, however, I do see more that suggests the notion of a squandered earth more generally, even though I still wouldn’t argue that it’s preoccupied exclusively about climate change. Coincidentally, I think aspects of my previous interpretation (i.e. about the Dove and what it represents) actually fit into this narrative lens, support it as it were, to the extent that one substitutes ‘lost innocence’ with something along the lines of ‘people’s lost interest in caring for their world’.

Either way, the additional interpretations only expand the story’s potential and allow me enjoy it all the more.

I thought that the Dove was a metaphor for purgatory, and that Theodore was a Christ-like figure.

William, Yeah, I noticed that too, but then Google also tells me that “Chaunt” is the name of a village in the far east of Switzerland and seems to also appear as a part of several other place names, so …. I dunno.

The opaque quality of the story gives it more impact. It is a little like how Hemingway boiled down is dialogue in more simple, more general compacted conversation. You have to work to get what was intended. So you would have to work a bit to discover what parts of it convey concern over climate change. Climate change implies loss of the familiar idea that that earth and seas won’t be damaged because it all has persisted for thousands of years. Maybe the opaque quality of the story better communicates grief that today’s existential condition is not very good for anyone.

Very interesting detective work, David. Well done. As for the extent to which TBK or the Grand Inquisitor chapter (an essential piece of literature and theological inquiry in its own right) relates to this story seems very much hard to discern, but I like your mentality of leading where the clues go. WIlliams mind seems to have been branching out in a lot of directions while writing this, which has the benefit of making it incredibly open to interpretation and the pitfall of making it virtually impossible to interpret with any authority.

Joy Williams has lived and taught in Arizona. Arizona is home to part of the Navajo Nation. “Chaunt” is a Navajo word. It means “excrement’ (this is per the web’s Urban Dictionary, which provides some colloquial usage).

The name of the friend of Jane Click’s son Billy is Jerome, which happens to be the name of a former mining town in Arizona. It’s a touristy place, of the Western ghost town sort. It has a hotel that was once a hospital, and although it is quite different in many ways from the place in the story, I can still easily imagine it may have provided just a bit of the inspiration for “the Dove”.

I’m not going to attempt to talk about all the layers of allusion and resonance I got while reading this surreal fiction. But one idea seemed to be that “the Dove” was a kind of assisted living during some kind of slow-motion ecological/climate change apocalypse. The inclusion of the youthful and unhappy “leaders” who have inherited a mop-up situation reminds me strongly of my own sense, as an older person, of what young people today are facing.

Although it seems that many people in the arts are giving us a sense of the impending catastrophe, this story seems to be coming from a place that is beyond what most are willing to acknowledge, at least not yet. It’s as if Williams posed this question: what kind of art gets made, now that we know we are well into the process of species suicide (and taking much of the planet with us)? This story is an answer.