Williams starts the plates spinning (in a good way) right away in this one. Just an immediate sense that the story could rocket off in any direction. Immediate immersion. Specificity without self-aggrandizing quirk. Realistic kid voices. Declarations and Bible allusions picked up by parents that sail over the heads of kids lining up for the indoctrination meal called an American education and any teacher veering from the scrip denounced as “nuts.” Nuts-ness as theme installed early and reflected on often. My favorite was that riff about incoherence and watching it ripple out. Class and family as well are themes. Autonomy and its exercises. The nature of determinism (the opening Bible reference carries the whole story on a metaphorical level).

Williams plays with time well in so many of her compactions (to call her work “stories” isn’t entirely accurate, though this one hews pretty close to classic short story form) and does so here as well.

The Jaguar book is a well-chosen object/thing.

Another bit of compaction mastery from Williams: “His father was sitting up in bed wearing a black bathrobe, his dark hair combed severely back. The dogs weren’t permitted in the room anymore.” She gets so much in there about these people and their situation(s), and in such an incisive manner.

“She wore bright-red, uneven lipstick and was known to be intelligent and a runner” & “His mother did not believe in fate” / “’Then what do you call what happens?’ he asked her’” are also keepers. One more insanely good bit of impressiveness: “He was like one of those pathetic people who cared about the fate of the earth. But worse, for his devotions were on an even grander scale.”

The ducks story that Willie reads at school is phenomenal in its secondhand rendering, as is both the father’s and Willie’s reaction. [Is that a real story? Anybody know that one???]

“Sombrely.” Now that’s how you use an adverb.

The flashlight discussion renders child logic perfectly.

Much like her protagonist, Williams avoids the generic. Bravo.

Gin-and-tonics plural, nicely done. That whole business at the fashionably modest hotel owes a significant debt to Salinger (as does the story as a whole, with a twist of Fitzgerald). The titular dead/not dead nettle, in a story that is somewhat oblique but very much about the thin line between life and death, is a superb image, calls to mind Tanizaki.

The little things that are so important indeed. Williams on her game, using the form whilst stretching it.

Thrilling literature.

Thanks, Blair! I read that story almost twenty years ago now, back when the Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike came out. I need to go back and reread that one. I remember liking it and it being the only thing I’d ever read by that author. The details Williams chose weren’t necessarily the images that stayed with me from Hall’s story, but I thought it might have been something I’d read (or should have read) before. Thank you again.

Thanks Dave, Sean, Blair…and maybe even Paul. Joy Williams always excites me and throws me for loops.

Paul, I think the lack of obvious coherence is the point. Embrace the utter strangeness of Joy Williams if you can handle it! The lack of logic and fairness in life is a big theme as demonstrated by the not-so-logical events in the story (what’s real, what’s imagined, what’s the timeline, how messed up is human memory). And there’s the hair-raising story of unfairness about the mass slaughtering of the ducks, which mirrors what happens in the boy’s family – the father may have died through lovingly embracing his son during the son’s horrible fever, the mother may have killed herself and their dogs in a horrible auto accident, the boy is on his way to killing himself, and may have done it by end of story – completing another mass slaughter/self-slaughter of the protagonist and his whole family.

And the Pete/Petra character – who else does she have or what else does she have to do – as a person with no connections? Turns out she isn’t running anymore either! Her snobbism is ultimately shown to be unwarranted; she has nothing going for her, she hasn’t solved life has she? The snobbism and distancing may be self-protective, but that’s about it. She once cared and gave it up as she says near the end of story, but that residual feeling of being part of something loving, and the sheer idleness of all her days make her a candidate who’d be receptive to his attentions, whether or not she has jettisoned her emotions in favor of supposedly idle semi-curiosity.

“They were all sitting in their chairs.” So they were not playing during recess, not raising their hands, not conversing with the teacher, not passing notes, not immersed in drawing something, not carving into desks, not looking at their phones – in other words: they are, in this moment, young, receptive, obedient, passive, wondering what the hell it means when teacher says something scary about “I am here to protect all but one.” Kind of like those scary things you learn in a Bible class when you are too young to understand that a phrase or story might be a rather sweeping analogy, and then being able to decide about whether you care to buy into it. So when the teacher says something that is mysterious and scary, they imbibe and internalize.

No apologies necessary, Paul. There’s no expertise level or presupposition of “professionalism” required to comment. I agree that Williams is not easy to follow in the traditional sense. How clear/obvious a story needs to be to be understood by a general audience is almost always an interesting debate. Is the “common reader” likely to comprehend Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! or Woolf’s The Waves, or the works of Thomas Bernhard and Laszlo Krasznahorkai? Of course not. Literature has many nooks and crannies. Some are very offputting to the average reader. Others are digestible by even very inexperienced readers. Joy Williams oftentimes feels like reading a hybrid of poetry and fiction. There are gaps and lacunae to ford, bridge, wade into, or just walk around. As long as someone is “reading very carefully,” I’m curious about what they have to say.

As for the line about the students. I pretty much agree with Karen. There are lots of things students do in classrooms besides “they were all sitting in their chairs.” That line points toward passivity, receptivity, strict order, education perhaps replaced by pseudo-mystical dispensation. It reminded me of George Carlin’s and Joseph Heller’s and Ken Kesey’s takes on how American schools are very fascistic, enforcing conformity and uniformity; brainwashing, prison-like, factory-esque places where throughout the US’s rather Puritan history the religions of nationalism and Christianity have been passed out to the compulsory young inmates like Nurse Ratched’s pills.

There’s a Bookforum review of Joy’s New & Collected Stories where Deb Olin Unferth calls Munro a nemesis of Williams’s (calm and humorous compared to Joy’s more chaotic, riotous, and nihilistic stories). The Guardian’s review of Williams’s collection also posits Munro and Williams as opposites (“She [Williams] makes Alice Munro’s reductive domesticism look thin to the point of brittle transparency.”). So it’s an interesting possibility, although that’s one of Munro’s newer pieces and Williams doesn’t seem like she reads a tremendous amount of contemporary fiction, so who knows.

Hi Paul. I am so sorry, and should have responded sooner, but am just getting back to this thread. I meant only that you did not like the story as much as I (and the other commentators) did – it had absolutely nothing to do with anything but that, and I was kidding around, to be honest. I’m a big Joy Williams fan, and you are not – that’s all I meant. I found your comments as intriguing as any of the others’, and felt it was as thoughtful, whether or not it was written quickly. I should have made that clear. Thank you for letting me know that my remark was rude, or perceived that way; I will try to be a little more careful. I love corresponding with people who read the New Yorker stories, and am learning a lot from reviewing everyone’s thinking in this format.

As with all NY short stories, I wanted to like this one, or at least appreciate some aspect of it, but it’s ultimately just like Radiohead lyrics or a Pollack painting…supposedly meaningful, but really just incoherent and pointless.

Isn’t “arty” always faux, though, William? And I’m not sure “meaning” or “theme” are necessary for a short story to work. Calvino comes to mind as almost completely lacking such things, and I’m sure a longer think would bring other short story writers to mind. And I didn’t intend to drop the “common reader” on you. At least not intentionally. I do think that yes, one runs the risk of sounding pretentious or snobbish using this designation, but it is in my mind anyway a very useful designation. I think the vast majority (like close to 99%) of people who grab a book at Barnes and Noble or the airport table or from Amazon are not going to make it through thirty pages of Finnegans Wake or Absalo, Absalom! This is not to say that all Joyces or Faulkners they wouldn’t/couldn’t read. Some of the stories in Dubliners or Faulkner’s pulpier titles are quite digestible to the “common reader.”

Your Jack Reacher line was swell, btw. That really made me laugh. But when I talk about common or general readers, you know what I mean, right? For example, Sally Rooney’s book Conversations with Friends is blurbed by Sarah Jessica Parker saying “I read it in one day.” That is said as an endorsement by a very particular actress speaking to a very general readership. And this is a readership that I think would throw their hands up at most of Joy Williams’s stories, this one included. Now. Are there literary novels the common reader could read in a day — sure! Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea or McCarthy’s The Road or even maybe Fitz’s The Great Gatsby, surely doable in a day by many readers. But are they reading Blood Meridian in a single day or even sticking with it past thirty pages? Almost certainly not.

These discussions are essential to literature though. What makes something literary or not? Worthy of the New Yorker’s pages or not? What is a page-turner that even an inexperienced or very young reader can tackle vs. what is a book that is probably only going to be comprehended by people with advanced reading skills or years of experience and expertise? This is not even about their “worth” as art, I don’t think. Is Charles Portis’s True Grit simply more ingestible than Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow? Yes! But if one wanted to make the argument that True Grit is the better book, that’s certainly not a dismissible POV.

Alright, just throwing that out there.

The first time I read this, last night, I was drinking a little bourbon and although I knew I liked it, (the story, that is), I also knew I didn’t get it that time around—it seemed to move all over and around and up and down but I knew there was something there (even with the bourbon). Today I reread it sans bourbon and it started to become more clear and towards the end I started to see what was going on. I cut it out and stapled it together and I’ll read it again tomorrow with this new “info” and see if it makes sense. As I said, I enjoyed it and I know there is something there, you just have to work for it. Time for a bourbon.

I’m also fascinated with the idea of where the line is between “literature” and “not literature.” I’ve read a lot of early Balzac lately and he’s not always on the “literature” side of the fence. He’s always engaging and he’s good at boiling the pot, but he often creates shallow characterizations and at points is overwhelmed by his complex plots. The Balzac of Pere Goriot, in contrast, is a great writer.

Pere goriot is definitely worth a read.

I have decided that I dont have anything useful to say about various classes or levels or types of stories and novels. Some of us like some writers’ products and others like other writers’ products. Nice that there is something for everyone.

Paul is right about the ‘sitting in chairs’ line. They wouldn’t be sitting in anything else so ‘in chairs’ is redundant, which is important in a piece where the writing is so precise. I do like the piece.