I don’t come to literature for reassurance. I prefer to be disturbed. The work that most moves me treads a line between naturalism and something more elusive; let’s call it the weirdness of the everyday. In part this has to do with language, which is a construction if it is anything. I think of Lucia Berlin or Denis Johnson giving voice to states of being that tilt toward the revelatory, even as their characters experience disruptions that leave them damaged or disassociated, as if the universe has lost all sense.
“Down the hall came the wife,” the latter writes in his 1989 story “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” describing the aftermath of a fatal automobile accident. “She was glorious, burning. She didn’t know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That’s what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.”
A moment like this wouldn’t feel out of place in Joy Williams’s seventh collection of short fiction, The Pelican Child, which gathers 12 stories that, each on its own terms, operate in a territory by turns recognizable and arcane. Williams is also the author of two books of nonfiction and five novels, including Harrow (2021), which imagines a universe akin to the one she details here. In both books—as in much of her recent work—she extrapolates the effect of environmental devastation on not only humanity but also, and most fundamentally, society. Yet to call her writing apocalyptic is to oversimplify. It’s not, in Williams’s estimation, that the apocalypse is not upon us but rather that, to borrow from T.S. Eliot, the world is ending with a whimper, not a bang. Humanity muddles on, in other words, as it almost certainly will: diminished, alienated, scavenging at the edges of the known, the familiar, even as both the natural and built landscapes fall prey to a slow collapse, like decrepit houses slowly crumbling from the top floor down.
The Pelican Child begins with a not-quite-parable, “Flour,” which sets the stage for what’s to come. Brief and beautifully open-ended, it involves a journey with no destination, which is to say, a passage a lot like life. “The driver and I got a late start,” Williams begins, writing from the point of view of someone wealthy enough not to work, although these specifics are neither referenced nor relevant. Instead, the story tracks a kind of lostness, both real and metaphorical. “We leave at daybreak,” the narrator confides, “the reasoning being that we would make up some time. Preposterous of course. One cannot make up time. One can make up a story or a face or a bed. Ugh. I find it all repellent.”
This notion of time’s intractability emerges not only in the content but also in the structure of the story, which slips from present tense to past and back, sometimes in the space of a single line. In that, it is as if Williams is establishing a template, a point of perspective that reverberates throughout the book. In “The Fellow,” an assistant to the director of a residential fellowship assures a new fellow that previous guests have “remarked on how astonishingly quickly their time here went by,” only to be admonished: “That’s preposterous! Time never goes anywhere!” In “After the Haiku Period,” Williams lists a factotum’s duties: “He would…set the table, pour the wine, serve the squares and Time—the severe concept of which had always troubled him—would share the banquet as friend and accomplice.”
Such an existential edge is hardly unique to The Pelican Child. “The old dear stories of possibility. No one wanted them anymore, but nothing had replaced them,” Williams writes in Harrow, referencing a different sort of temporal dynamic. Then, there is her diptych Ninety-Nine Stories of God and Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael, which together map out a new, and pitiless, cosmology.
In The Pelican Child, however, Williams’s vision is, somehow, both narrower and broader, positing the present as a shifting terrain of impressions that seamlessly elides into the future and the past. “Flour” represents a case in point, with its sneaky blur of tenses, as does “Stuff,” with its vision of a nursing home as spiritual way station. “Resurrection comes first,” an elderly woman tells her son there. “Death follows after. Unimportant. One who does not know himself knows nothing.”
The irony is that the son has a terminal illness and will predecease his mother: a flipping of the chronology on the most radical terms. Adding to the dynamic is a prior loss the two have shared, that of his sister, decades before. “He had been permitted to kiss his infant sister in her coffin,” Williams tells us. “He had placed one of his soldiers beside her, couched in a pucker of silk. He had said that it was his favorite one, but it was not. It had never been his favorite one.” The matter-of-factness of the language only deepens the bluntness of the sentiment.
If all this makes The Pelican Child sound death-drenched, that both is and is not the case. On the one hand, Mrs. B, who directs a baby day care, observes in “My First Car,” “We are in a permanent state of destroying the world.” On the other, she qualifies: “I wouldn’t harm a single hair on any one of these babies’ heads.” It’s not that one point of view mitigates the other. “I’ve grown indifferent to them,” Mrs. B acknowledges of her charges, “and indifference leads somewhere, you know. It always does.” I know enough not to conflate an author’s sensibility with that of her characters, but I can’t help thinking that, in this moment, Williams is pulling back the veil of narrative a little to address us in her voice.
The Pelican Child, after all, is not unlike a day care full of babies, each with her own story, her own life. That many of these stories end in death is less tragic than inevitable in a universe where death is always “behind us, an arm’s length back and to the left.” The tragedy is that we ever imagined otherwise, that we ever thought of ourselves as somehow immune. “He would have saved some goddamn thing or preserved some goddamn flawlessly innocent knowledge,” Williams writes in “Nettle” of another character adrift, “because he’d convinced himself that that was the requirement for being born and once loved.”•
