Williams knows its meaning and makes goddam sure you will too by reading this wonderfully odd little fable, Advertised by Paddy as having as having an “Unclassifiable tone” a Nice young Lady and her son get sorta kidnapped by her boyfriend to come live on his island off the coast of Florida with his brother and friends and their many communally raised/increasingly feral children.
And woohoo! Checked all my boxes! , super funny, grotesque, unsettling, regular gross, with a sense of steadily deepening dread, scary growth/life stuff, and playing around with fairy tales/religion in general.
Especially liked all the blurrings, inversions and transfigurations, Child adult, human animal, high/low culture etc and how Williams likes to take archetypes and themes to such extremes that they begin to subvert themselves.
I feel a little bad handing out so may high ratings recently but I just been picking some good stuff for me recently.
Ya know gotta Know thyself,
Oh here you are, Oh here you are book I always wanted to exist,
Book of animal and God, woman and madness and dirt, And the children! Stripped of sentimentality but full of wild life, Children who "were like drunkards really, determined to talk at great length and with great incoherence, " Who are, yes, closer to God, but that should be far from reassuring,
Also: sentences. Whole pages of perfect short sentences, "Outside it was Florida. " And other whole pages without sentences, beastchildren yipping their chatter over each other,
Note: don't read the introduction, Full of spoilers and the kind of hardedged analysis that feels at odds with the spirit of the book, The Changeling seems to me, frankly, a hot mess, deserving neither of the scorn that Anatole Broyard heaped on it in his notorious NYT review nor of the fulsome praise with which Williams younger admirers have greeted its recent welcome reissue.
It might be more accurate to call it a transitional work, as writers second novels often are, a book in which Williams is moving away from the explicitly autobiographical preoccupations of State of Grace towards the more bracing and arcane set of fictional and thematic concerns she would take up in her later work.
Nevertheless, there is much to savor here,
The novels overheated plotan amalgam of elements from Gothic romance, science fiction, schlockhorror, and the paranormal thrillers that were so prevalent in thesinvolves an eldritch, cultlike family inhabiting a remote coastal island who entice mainlanders back to their sprawling manor for sex and marriage.
Pearl, the novels protagonist, is a drifting, rootless young woman whom the familys sinister eldest son picks up while she is shoplifting and soon impregnates.
Plane crashes and other lurid events ensue, many of them involving a brood of feral children who inhabit the island, The central drama of the novel hinges on whether Pearl, sunk in alcoholism to the point of insentience, can free herself from the familys evil spell and save her own child from the baleful influence of her brother inlaw, a kind of sinister Jim Joneslike figure given to metaphysical disquisitions.
Its not a very promising plot, and Pearl is less a welldeveloped character than a standin for the author, a sensibility through which to channel various antic musings and surreal observations.
But then Williams has never been principally interested in character and plot, strange to say, She can create them as effectively as any of our major American writers, as she has proven elsewhere and indeed herefew American writers aside from OConnor are as successful at rendering children as Williams is, as cannily understanding of their innocence and their capacity for cruelty.
But what she really writes is something that is recognizable as fiction but is more akin to dark, absurdist tracts on our fallen world, marked by jarring detail and spiky, mordant humor.
In this almost essayistic vein, she mediates between the animal and human worlds, broods on the invincibility and inevitability of death, and charts the intrusions of that “cold elemental grace that knows us,” as she has written elsewhere, into the lives of her selfdeluding characters, bringing them moments of bleak clarity and insight.
One of the chief pleasures of the book is simply Williams prose itself, which has no real precedents in American fiction, Chatty and conversational on the surface, spare, almost minimalistic in places, it can veer suddenly into a higher register of sermonlike eloquence, and then slam to an abrupt stop with an exclamation point, one of Williams most characteristic syntactical devices.
Jittery and manic, full of badumdumching moments, it's a kind of standup comic's languagewritten by a standup comic who has read Meister Eckhart and Jakob Böhme.
Theres a series of chapters towards the end of the novel when Pearl and other members of the family are wandering around a Northeastern coastal resort town in summer, involving themselves in various absurd and discrediting incidents.
Pages and pages go by when Williams is more or less just riffing, in language that is always fresh and alive and free from any touch of the banal, showing us everything that is uncanny and darkly unsettling in this apparently benign setting.
Williams company is always worth keeping, even in this only fitfully successful novel, for such moments of visionary power and askew insight alone, Most likely a masterpiece although I'm still grappling with it in this first read, The Changeling reads as if it was hatched as a primordial egg in the same universe as Flannery O'Connor, Leonora Carrington and Jane Bowles the last of which Williams wrote an introduction for in the novel Two Serious Ladies all ladies after my own heart and whose writings have mostly been a huge influence on me.
Her sentences are spare and minimalistic but can often veer into the prophetic at the turn of a phrase, tunneling their way into the elemental mystery of the dark heart of our world.
This book is about motherhood, the occult, birth, death, and the quest for a truth that's far vaster and more terrifying than you can ever imagine.
It's also really funny. With this book, I felt as if I was not yet the reader it needed me to be, that I could not yet meet its demands.
May we meet again in some distant future,
He filled her glass by half, She curled her fingers around it but did not drink,Thrilling. No idea how to explain this book, it starts in Florida with a woman on the run with her child from a cult maybe, but the husband follows and takes her back to the island from which she escaped, an island that has long for USA, probably sinceth century been owned by a family and now they and their spouses and friends and hangers on live there with assorted children, some theirs, some adopted.
"I have never understood," she said, "how it happened anyway, Everyone acts as though they know, but I don't know, " More people fucked with the Devil than they did with the Lord, Wasn't that why nuns covered up their ears But that wasn't the answer, "Do you know" she demanded,
"Yes," he laughed,
"There were animals," Pearl said, "And then there were subhumans and animals and then there was that incredible change, that catastrophe, and then there were human beings, "
"A random phenomenon occurring when a vital urge was aroused, "
"But it didn't evolve," Pearl said, "It just happened. There wasn't time for it to evolve, There never would be enough time, "
"A species under great pressure or in great need producing acausal changes in its material form, "
"You don't know," Pearl sighed,
Weird things happen.
It's about God, children and drink,
Scary how Williams can let go and follow a hunch or so it seems, There's a surprise, a quotable
passage on each page some pasted below, The novel has the logic of erratically tutored children allowed to run wild as they are on the island: it lingers over big events like a plane crash an amazing chapter and small ordering a drink in a cafe on a rare visit to the mainland.
The children bug and engulf the main protagonist Pearl as she becomes estranged from her own child among them, They ask her opinion, offer up weird gifts as she lies by the pool drinking gin,
From my notebook: On with the beautiful God drenched pages of Joy Williams, run on sentences and breathless descriptions, The lightning making the sky like a cave Plato The endless pouring of gin,
Someone on goodreads said it was like reading different novels each time they picked it up, With me it was the same novel but my reactions varied widely absurd and ridiculous at one moment, sublime and soaring the next, Hard, sometimes, to know what to make of it, One thing a definite rebuff to patriarchy,
The book is a glittering splendour as well as a drunken oddity,
Some quotes:
'She had tried so earnestly once to be sane, But sanity, it was like holding onto a balloon, a balloon of the world, fragile, and full of petty secrets and desires, She would let it go, It was easy to let it go, '
'Children were like drunkards really, determined to talk at great length and with great incoherence, Pearl more or less understood them in that regard, '
'It was difficult to think about children for long, They were all fickle little nihilists and one was forever being forced to protect oneself from their murderousness, '
' “Kids are wonderful,' the man was saying, 'Our fouryearold, the things he says! The other night he wouldn't go to sleep, you know, He was making a little fuss and saying he was afraid of the dark and all and mother here says to him, "Don't be afraid of the dark.
God's in the room with you," and he says "I know God's here but I want somebody with skin on, "'
The woman started to laugh, She was plump and blond and smelled like a rising cake,
'Isn't that a kid though,' the bartender said,
Pearl put her hand out and held on to the bar, She thought that this was the most horrible story she had ever heard in her life, ” '.