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[Book reviews]

Joy Williams
State of the Art

BY JULIA HANNA

I’ve known of Joy Williams for a while, in the way one knows of any writer who is said to be exceptional — her name pops up occasionally in conjunction with one of her novels or short-story collections, accompanied by the sort of reverence acolytes reserve for a beloved yogi. (And she’s among the dozen New England “Literary Lights” gracing the Boston Public Library’s annual fundraiser this week.) But it’s only since serendipity dealt me a copy of The Quick and the Dead, her latest novel, that I’ve become a little tiresome in the way of true believers whose sole mission is to convert the uninitiated.

The Quick and the Dead is not a book to be sold in a one- or two-sentence pitch — which of course is what makes it so good. It’s a dark, hilarious, frightening work set in a nameless Arizona desert suburb that features three motherless 15-year-old girls: Alice, an irresistible, rock-chucking radical; Annabel, whose priorities include high-humectant shampoo and avocado body butter; and Corvus, a peculiarly distanced, eloquent envoy of grief and death whose parents drown on a road trip to Mexico. Equally memorable characters orbit this trio, from an implacable ghost named Ginger (Annabel’s mother) to the chilling Nurse Daisy to a clear-thinking eight-year-old named Emily Bliss Pickles who makes it her mission to shut down the Wildlife Museum, a “charnel house” packed with hundreds of stuffed and mounted big-game animals. Proceeding with ruthless conviction, The Quick and the Dead exposes the horror, humor, and beauty of existing in a time when the lines between living and dying are blurred and the natural world is steadily losing ground to gated communities and Big Gulp cups.

Williams admits to a certain level of superstition when it comes to talking about work. “If I knew I had a process, it would scare me,” she says over the phone from her home in Tucson. “So much of good fiction works in the unconscious. Sometimes it’s just a phrase or a particularly mysterious or beautiful scrap of language that gets me started.”

She also revels in the straightforward declarations of nonfiction. Ill Nature, a collection of “Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals,” gives full voice to her passionate concern for the environment in the likes of “Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp” and “The Killing Game,” the latter an anti-hunting treatise that provoked an avalanche of mail when it was published in Esquire.

“When I began writing essays, I developed a certain style for them that was unlike the style of my stories — it was unelusive and strident and brashly one-sided,” she explains in Ill Nature’s “Why I Write.” “They were meant to annoy and trouble and polarize, and they made readers . . . half nuts with rage and disdain.”

Fortunately for us, Williams is more interested in practicing her craft than in placating the NRA — or anyone else, for that matter.

Joy Williams reads at WordsWorth, 30 Brattle Street in Harvard Square, this Friday, March 23, at 7 p.m. It’s free; call 354-5201. Then she joins David McCullough, Nicholson Baker, Kathryn Lasky, Howard Zinn, and others for the BPL’s “Literary Lights” fundraising dinner on Sunday at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. Tickets for that start at $250; call 536-3886.

Issue Date: March 22-29, 2001