What she practices is more like camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her. It’s easy enough to say that, but Williams’s individuality isn’t just a matter of idiosyncrasy, of plots and characters willfully torqued away from the ordinary.
As I tracked the mutilated pelicans and the wounded heron from “Breaking and Entering,” the “pet peahen named Atilla” in “The Quick and the Dead,” the old woman whose body appears grotesquely birdlike to the heroine of “The Changeling,” and the artificial and natural flamingos that pop up everywhere, I wondered if Williams, now 76 and a practiced observer of wildlife in her own right, might be the rarest of literary birds - one who defies guidebook taxonomies altogether. If I have birds (and bird metaphors) on the brain it’s because I’ve spent much of the past few months reading and rereading Joy Williams, whose books (four novels and five volumes of stories since 1973) abound with avian life. Look: a regional realist! A flock of autofictionists! Was that a postmodernist? I’ve never seen one in the wild. Novelists and poets show off their bright plumage and emit their unique trills and warbles while scholars and journalists peer through the foliage, identifying the specimens and sorting them into categories. If the vanity of writers is originality, the vice of critics is classification.
0 kommentar(er)
