state of grace

State of Grace by Joy Williams (Scribner Signature Editions, 1986)

It seems odd that I never read this book before —  I’ve had this copy for years, and of course always been aware of how admired Joy Williams is among writers, but something kept me away.  Perhaps I started it once and was put-off by its sometimes difficult eccentricity, but this time I fell right into it and read eagerly.  Williams’ prose is incandescent and (sometimes) willfully quirky, and reading this book is an almost tactile experience: it seems considerably more alive and textured and surprising than most novels.  Part of that effect is a result of deliberate oddity: everything about it — the narrator (a rather stunted college girl who’s dropped out to pursue an affair with Grady, a cryptic, sexy golden boy), the setting (Florida [the Everglades?]), and the form, which moves  unchronologically back and forth through time in a  way that flattens and conflates the past and present — is odd.  Although some of these choices seemed made to heighten and enhance the book’s Gothic weirdness, Williams is brilliant enough to make it all work, although unlike Flannery O’Connor, whose fiction this books often resembles, there seems something deliberate and chosen, rather than inevitable, about it all.  Nevertheless, it is a vivid, original, smart, and funny book that delighted me.