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Talk about an ambivalent reaction to a book. There were so many things about Joy Williams’ The Changeling that I loved and quite a few that I didn’t like at all.
Positives:
Fabulous imagery, often very disjointed and yet logical in its odd associations, a psychological weirdness that reminded me of Shirley Jackson. A still quite contemporary-seeming American surrealism that was often deeply convincing.
Propulsive, unforgettable sentences with a relentless drive.
An interest in psychological perverseness and the fringes of human complexity.
A vivid collapsing of the boundaries between the human and the animal.
Negatives:
A lack of narrative energy and focus, despite the intense energy of the sentences. Events in the book meander more than develop, and at times the momentum of the narrative comes nearly to a complete stop while the powerful sentences just kept going. There are significant stretches of the book that feel like the story is going nowhere.
Unconvincing portrayals of the real, especially when it comes to the nature of events. The “real world” in the book is at times at odds with the “dream world” and at times seems to blend with it. While that’s interesting when I put it that way, in practice the passages that seemed to be taking place in reality were often not convincing and relied boringly on coincidence and the unlikely. “Maybe it’s all a dream” is both unconvincing in terms of the narrative and also a boring cliché.
I also had mixed feelings about the stream of consciousness passages, which had a sort of “look what I can do” showiness that felt imitative and not essential.
Add it all up, I guess, and there’s a mix of less convincing story and narrative elements with fascinating writing and world view.
Sometimes I read the reviews on Amazon of ordinary people who write responses to an author or book, and I found all sorts of people saying things not all that different from what I’m saying about not only this book but others of hers as well: brilliant writing and strange thinking but unfocused stories that people lose interest in.
So my conclusion: at best, brilliant. At other times, an unconvincing pile of words that’s not headed anywhere. And no, I’m not saying something here that’s anti-experimental fiction. Experimental fiction still usually has narrative drive, and this book isn’t especially experimental anyway. The introduction to the 30th Anniversary Edition comes from Rick Moody; Williams’ work seems most connected to the context of later 20th century American realism even while the realism of this book is very thin.
Anyway, if you’re a fan, help me understand what you like about Joy Williams’ work.
1 comment:
This is a response to a series of comments that people made about this post on Facebook:
Thanks to those of you who have commented. Sometimes, when a book is odd enough, it really helps me understand what I've just read to have a conversation with people who have read it, and that's particularly hard to do when I'm not sure whether I know anyone who has read it.
What all your comments have helped me see more clearly is both what I liked and didn't like about the book.
What I liked especially about the book was the way it collapsed concepts of the literary realism of its time while being a book (and an author) still connected to the industry of literary realism as it was developed in the 70s through the 90s and beyond. So, for instance:
Human identity turns out to be a flimsy fantasy, a set of false dreams which people use to impose control on themselves and each other. Instead we remain mired in dreams, including the dream that somehow our being human has made us something other than animals, while meanwhile the most dangerous elements of our animal nature go unchecked. Who we think we are, and the worlds we build around ourselves, are simply cover stories for everything we don't know how to understand, accept, or reckon with.
On the other hand, the fuzziness of the narrative means that the power of these insights get lost in the muddy woods just like many of the characters; there's vagueness in the narrative that leads as much towards a mush of words as it does a clear following through of its implications. And that seems more true because the opening chapters set up and seem to promise a compelling narrative: Pearl's attempt to escape the island and the family and the struggles she will face on her inevitable return. But that story--like the stories on offer in a lot of contemporary horror movies--gets lost in a slow plod of a bunch of people walking around in the woods with not enough clear distinctions between what's real and not real (for the characters) or what's realism or surrealism in the language, and not enough at stake in the action: they have supposedly realistic pasts that are not believable and futures of no more than running around in the woods painting their faces and devouring each other (one of the common tropes of folk horror movies).
And I do think "folk horror" is a better description of this book than calling it either realism or surrealism (or a confused blend of the two): it's about a bunch of dreamy, vicious primitives attacking each other in the woods, the veneer of civilization stripped away from them, with the distinction between the real and the fantastic entirely lost.
It sounds so interesting when I describe it that way, but in practice it feels like one of those horror movies that tries to rely on an incoherent lumping together of creepy images to tell an unbelievable story whose goal is to show us that people are vicious and confused.
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