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The Quick and the Dead, by Joy Williams
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Misanthropic Alice is a budding eco-terrorist; Corvus has dedicated herself to mourning; Annabel is desperate to pursue an ordinary American life of indulgences. Misfit and motherless, they share an American desert summer of darkly illuminating signs and portents. In locales as mirrored strange as a nursing home where the living dead are preserved, to a wildlife museum where the dead are presented as living, the girls attend to their future. A remarkable attendant cast of characters, including a stroke survivor whose soulmate is a vivisected monkey, an aging big-game hunter who finds spiritual renewal in his infatuation with an eight-year-old–the formidable Emily Bliss Pickles–and a widower whose wife continues to harangue him, populate this gloriously funny and wonderfully serious novel where the dead are forever infusing the living, and all creatures strive to participate in eternity.
- Sales Rank: #124795 in Books
- Published on: 2002-01-08
- Released on: 2002-01-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.60" w x 6.20" l, .57 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Amazon.com Review
Don't read Joy Williams if you're looking for Oprah-style stories of redemption--stories in which the human spirit triumphs. And don't look to her for a mirror of reality; with this author, there's never the sense that "I've been there" or "I identify." Williams creates novels and stories that operate under a tightly wound surrealist aesthetic. She distorts the world, but her distortions are subtle enough that you don't see them coming. You can't predict when the logic of dream will take over the logic of the text. Like the filmmaker David Lynch, Williams sees pathology and the ominous everywhere; she renders a world that looks familiar but is slightly off. Like Don DeLillo, she's a sprawling, ambitious writer whose characters often talk in a lovely, unbelievable poetry, as if they were prophets, or preachers, or ghosts.
The Quick and the Dead, Williams's fourth novel, follows a series of linked stories, all taking place in Arizona. Indeed, it could be called a desert epic, so dependent is its narrative momentum on the desert's eventual consumption of its inhabitants. These characters are consumed by thirst and mirages, by dry dreams of a lifeless landscape. They reside in a state of spiritual flatness and emptiness.
At the heart of the book, three motherless teenage girls befriend each other, go on camping trips, lay out in the sun by the rich girl's pool. Corvus, Alice, and Annabel are, respectively, spooky, apocalyptic, and prom-queen vain. In the course of things, they encounter, among others, a gay piano player named Sherwin who lives in a smelly apartment and constantly wears a tux, and a retirement-home nurse who entertains her patients with one-liners like: "Thoughts are infusorial" and "The set trap never tires of waiting." Perhaps most memorable is a cowboy-hatted stroke victim called Ray who believes a monkey lives in the back of his brain. Ray hitchhikes and steals credit cards. When he hasn't eaten for a while, the animal takes over: "The little monkey was climbing the walls in his head, making clear that it wanted out. Any avenue along the capillaries would do. There was an awful craving to get out. Ray didn't feel well."
Other lively phenomena interrupting the prevailing desert stillness: an injured deer leaping over a fence into a swimming pool in the middle of a party; a man shot in the desert by a couple of stoned guys shooting at cacti; a reappearing ghost called Ginger (Annabel's mother) who arrives every night to rail at her alcoholic widower husband, berating his clothes and his investment strategies.
In the hands of a lesser artist these various, often forcefully bizarre characters and events could have seemed like the work of someone out to impress with her weirdness. But Williams is the real thing, and The Quick and the Dead is her visionary world--a place so unmistakably doomed, it literally gives you the chills. --Emily White
From Publishers Weekly
"This was no place to be tonight for any of them, but this was the place they were." Set in the Texas desert, the first new fiction in 10 years from the much-praised Williams (States of Grace) examines the thoughts and hopes of three motherless 16-year-old girls, exploring their connections to one another, to a large cast of difficult adults and to the ghosts that populate their lives. Williams's first chapters introduce her three protagonistsAbeautiful, grief-stricken Corvus; zealous Alice, always looking for "something that would give her a little edge or obscure the edge she already had, she didn't know which"; and Annabel, whose preoccupations with skincare and sweaters seems practical by comparison. Around this trio, other characters form a web of dependence, trust and mistrustAa web repeatedly broken by sudden violence. Annabel's father, Carter, lusts after his young Buddhist gardener, but carries on drunken, hostile conversations with the vindictive ghost of his dead wife. There's also stroke victim Ray Webb, a poetic young drifter; Sherwin, a piano player with a death wish; wealthy and bored big-game hunter Stumpp and the object of his affections, precocious and articulate eight-year-old Emily. All of Williams's people have lost something important, and all of them are spending time and energy with people they would not have chosen. Williams's psychology is subtle, her attention to teen diction superb. Like the Midwestern novelist Wright Morris, Williams gives her detailed, poetic novel an episodic, meandering structure, and the book ends without much resolution. But these are deliberate choices, made by an artist attentive to real people's psychesAand to how even our smallest decisions matter to others in ways we may never know. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
"The dead are coming back. And it had to do with the diminishment of everything else." Williams, masterful short-story writer (Escapes , 1990) and novelist (Breaking and Entering, 1988), has set her parody of modern life in that quintessential land of barrenness, the desert, and peopled it with characters drawn to death in some way or another. The three central characters--perpetually mourning Corvus, lively but somewhat shallow Annabel, and socially conscious Alice--have all lost their mothers. Corvus is so defined by her loss that she surrounds herself with death, devoting much of her time to volunteering at the local nursing home. Annabel misses her mother, Ginger, but it is Annabel's father, Carter, that Ginger misses. In some of the most humorous scenes in the book, Ginger returns as a ghost to plague her befuddled husband, who finds her more alive in death than she was in life. As for Alice, confronted with the new symbol of social consciousness, the candlelight vigil, a character tells her that "concern is the new consumerism." For Alice, whose convictions and sentiments are genuine, it's the ultimate horror. Like the world her characters inhabit, Williams' novel is rough terrain, but it's well worth the trip. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Delightfully quirky
By DHARMANAUT
Episodes of Vonnegut-like observation, with language and turns of phrase that can be arresting: cognitive dissonance that is often visually or temporally incisive. A StarWars bar scene of characters we've all met or been. That said, it does occasionally drag a wee bit as described perhaps too harshly by another reviewer.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
A quirky and fastidious rant of a novel...
By wordtron
A quirky and fastidious rant of a novel about the life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert. Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents -- from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum -- accompanied by restless, confounded adults. A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old, the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless. With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent. Funny and serious, The Quick and the Dead limns the vagaries of love, the thirst for meaning, and the peculiar paths by which all creatures are led to their destiny. A panorama of contemporary life, endlessly surprising, vaguely apocalyptic, Williams' vision is unapologetically idiosyncratic, yet desperately relevant to our spiritual survival.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Death is no Falure
By Stephen Saunders
Having paid little regard to the literary careerist's rule of "publish early and publish often," Joy Williams tends to be underrated. Only four fiction titles stand in between her State of Grace, nominated for the 1974 National Book Award, and this new novel.
Williams is sometimes taken as an inheritor for Flannery O'Connor, who died in 1964. Both exhibit ferocious intellects that, for all their fascination, you wouldn't necessarily want as permanent next-door neighbours.
Corvus, Alice and Annabel are three motherless children pinned down in a harsh American desert landscape. The wraith of Annabel's mother pitilessly upbraids her father, all the while coyly inviting him into her "skeleton arms". Alice assists the still-living dead at the old folks' home, while Corvus tries her hand at arson.
As various characters explain helpfully, the human body is but a thief and a counterpart, while its annihilation is no failure, but merely "a night between two days ... the Radiant Coat". In The Quick and the Dead, death's personal business calls are inventive and grimly amusing.
Williams has lost none of her metaphysical skills but, structurally, her earlier novel Breaking and Entering is the more elegant.
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