The Changeling

by Joy Williams

Forty years later, The Changeling is no less haunting and no less visionary than the day it was published, but it has only become clearer that Joy Williams is a virtuosic stylist and a singular thinker—a genius in every sense of the word.            

When we first meet Pearl—young in years but advanced in her drinking—she’s on the lam, sitting at a hotel bar in Florida, throwing back gin and tonics with her infant son cradled in the crook of her arm. But her escape is brief, and the relief she feels at having fled her abusive husband, and the Northeastern island his family calls home, doesn’t last for long. Soon she’s being shepherded back. The island, for Pearl, is a place of madness and pain, and her round-the-clock drinking spurs on the former even if it dulls the latter. And through this lens—Pearl’s fragile consciousness—readers encounter the horror and triumph of both childhood and motherhood in a new light.            

With language that flits between exuberance and elegy, the plainspoken and the poetic, Joy Williams has blended, as Rick Moody writes, “the arresting improbabilities of magic realism, with the surrealism of the folkloric revival . . . and with the modernist foreboding of Under the Volcano,” and created something entirely original and entirely consuming. 

Genres: Fiction, Magical Realism, Fantasy, Horror, Novels, Classics, Literary Fiction

201 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1978

About the author

Williams is the author of four novels. Her first, State of Grace (1973), was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Quick and the Dead (2000), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her first collection of short stories was Taking Care, published in 1982. A second collection, Escapes, followed in 1990. A 2001 essay collection, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Honored Guest, a collection of short stories, was published in 2004. A 30th anniversary reprint of The Changeling was issued in 2008 with an introduction by the American novelist Rick Moody.

Her stories and essays are frequently anthologized, and she has received many awards and honors, including the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rea Award for the Short Story.

Reviews

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is impossible to "review" - at least, for me. I don't have the skills. Full stop.

It's completely disorienting, distressing, fascinating.

It's transgressive. And just when I thought I had a grasp on what it was doing, it subverted my understanding.

Here's the best I can do:

Joy Williams' The Changeling is the estranged daughter of Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat, but add in a vat of wine, on ice. It also may be the hallucinogenic mother of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (still waiting on the DNA results).

It's brilliant and baffling, both. Iconic. Unforgettable. In the end, nothing short of symphonic.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you hate Joy Williams you will hate this book (and the book won't care). If you love Joy Williams, you will love this book (and still it probably won't care). Started off amazing, got a bit iffy, then transformed itself into a perpetual surprise machine. We learn that Pearl, main character, gets married, then turns into a klepto, then some dude catches her being a klepto, convinces her to come away with him, which she does, to this island where a bunch of children live, along with some adults, all of whom are totally out of their minds. Later: Pearl tries to escape! Then: an airplane crash! A witch! A magician! A hunter! A slaughterhouse! LOTS of drinking, thinking about drinking, thinking WHILE drinking. It reminded me of a. a true story one of my friends long ago told about going to live on an island when she was a kid, b. the Twilight Zone, and c. a character having a nightmare that she was trapped in a Joy Williams novel. Parts of this you can't help but be like, um, you really expect me to let you get away with that? And then you realize that you are a mere mortal whereas Joy Williams is a god and can do anything she wants.

[nastya · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dark, often eerie, fairy tale of transformation for adults. A pagan christian story. One character even says “Fuck Ovid” at one point. A very female story, the themes of mothering and nurturing, male violence and gaslighting are all over the text. Think of Shirley Jackson, The Driver’s seat by Muriel Spark and some of Angela Carter. Glimpses of mesmerizing body horror. Not as impressive as a whole, I wanted something smarter for the ending. Still, a reading experience to treasure.

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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."

Once upon a time a critic for some big time newspaper gave The Changeling a bad review and a once upon a time book eclipse lasted for thirty years. No fucking fair is the moral of this story.

Once upon a time Pearl stood in her family home before a painting of a man who broke women like reeds all of the time. Winning is losing because the reed still has to stand up. Her father swallowed the trigger in his mouth when her consciousness couldn't come up with anything better than death doors and feathers. Mama says don't let the devil in that door (he won't use the welcome mat either) and don't walk down the garden path with wolves in men's clothing (dirty!). Assholes had assholes and opinions they never keep to themselves about the potential for crops in Pearl's mental soils. I'm of the mind that the top soil was a rich place, that the core was fascinating and all the layers in between kind of haunting. Sure she's hammered all of the time. I feel like I'm always asleep.

Once upon one hundred or so pages in I was thinking a lot about The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I always liked reading that as doing the exorcist head whip around to try and come up with any reason why the fucked up thing you just did wasn't your fault and never happened. The chasm ripped in your soul always rattles. I guess there are some big time critics for newspapers who would say it was sexual hysteria. Pearl is drunk all of the time. Once upon all of her times she is not responsible for any of her actions. Sleepwalking and I didn't know I was gonna say that at all. My son is not my son. He is a changeling. Peter Pan stole all of their shadows away and replaced them with ominous black shapes of the half thought thoughts I'm afraid to let in. Pearl, silly woman, we aren't hurting those kids. Here, have another.

Once upon a time my ex told me that children stared at me because they recognized me as one of them. Some asshole in this book could have easily told Pearl that same thing. Pearl lives on the forest within the island in the middle of the sea hidden behind that bright tourist attraction with the band of donkey and goat children harnessed for her dead husbands brother's interest in the unformed furthest away (well, supposedly) death of the being. Whatever that is called. Someone on goodreads once told me it was called "the virgin forest". That'll do because I'm not going to come up with any better if I tied myself to the stake in the middle of children as rabbits and mice as kids and babies as deer. I'm no hunter to save the day (or eat the heart) at the end of the tale. Consciousness and the hunger in the kids eyes for birth by destruction or is it just more destruction. Is it any closer to it if you don't know what to do about any of it either? I seem to remember being upset all of the time as a kid. It never seemed easy. (Reeds.)

Once upon a time it is a fairy tale of a warning. There is no warning and I have no idea when the time is. I have a hard time believing that childhood ever really ended.

Ignore that three star rating. It's not a tepid bath. It's shit that water is fucking cold and then hopping back in. I fucking love Joy Williams. This is my seventh of her books and I am going to read them all.

[Nate D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joy Williams has a cadence all her own. In any given paragraph, she will unexpectedly flip from the concrete, to the metaphysical, to the hallucinatory. Her special finesse lies in being able to do this seamlessly, writing in opposing epigrams without unduly straining her prose. Later novels, though specters of bleak reality hover in the periphery, tend more towards an absurd re-wiring of the hyper-mundane, but this 1978 masterpiece drips instead with the occult, the mythic, the oneiric. It is perhaps most arguably a horror novel, though one of exemplary insight and finesse. Buried upon release by a scathing New York Times review with sub-headings like AN ARBITRARY MUDDLE, it seems to have dropped into a void, only to be revived for reappraisal by the The Fairy Tale Review Press 30 years later. But it is also more than a fairytale, bursting with the potent, ambiguous ambition that seems so to have affronted that original 1978 review. Haunted and terrifying, this is also an exceedingly rich book, line-by-line. Were it not so hopelessly out of print again, I'd love to keep one of these on hand to extract random fragments of insight whenever needed.

Buying and having things seemed like a way of knowing who one was. One was an aggregate of interests and desires. People received energy and solace from wanting things and getting them.

[Debbie Y · Rating 5 out of 5]

All the stars. More thoughts to come.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was this a cult? A commune? Some sort of paedophile scheme? An extreme postpartum reaction? A drunken dream? Did Sam die? Was Pearl the grandmother? Was she a ghost? Did the first husband ever exist? Was Thomas and Walker the same person? What the hell...

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pearl drinks in the wake of tragedy. Her life a surrogate for what it could be. A rigid schedule of drinking—wine by day, gin by night. She lies by the pool. The children cluster around. They ask her questions. They utter the profound and the nonsensical.

Children were like drunkards really, determined to talk at great length and with great incoherence. Pearl more or less understood them in that regard.

A failed escape followed by a return to an island crawling with semi-feral children and her husband's weirdo family, dominated by her brother-in-law Thomas: an opaque, controlling polymath. A return to murky, cryptic family history distant from her own. A return to the large old house inhabited by a ghost. Or is it. Pearl hallucinates. Or does she. Is it the drink or something more.

She had tried so earnestly once to be sane. But sanity, it was like holding on to 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.

She lives on the island for so long, never certain of her place. Just playing a role. Just existing, filling space, serving as a figurehead for the children to direct their attention toward. She has nowhere else to go and no one else to be with.

This house was her home. It seemed improbable even after all these years. But it was the only one she had unless she could consider her body her home, a disheartening thought—this shabby tower of bones and water in which she more or less permanently resides, a lonely place and yet one always occupied to say nothing of visited continuously, shared with guests and occupied by travelers, full of tumult and disturbance and greed and sharing. Some visitors lingering only briefly, others staying a long, long time; one guest being fantastic, another quite dull. Prudes and incontinents, mommies and murderers, philosophers and mice. The body the home. One could entertain almost any notion there. Poor dump.

And what are the children up to. Led by her son, who scares her a bit in his strangeness. Who walks out of the evening shadows and frightens her. The nighttime when she feels the fear the strongest.

Night runs with its children, Sleep and Death, with its twins, the true dream and the false one.

Were they really hallucinations from the drink, after all. The story hovers on the fringes of magical realism. Pearl exists in the liminal space between drink world, dream world, and 'real' world. Or does she even exist at all.

Once she had thought that she was crazy and that she might get well. She thought that she had to be herself. But there was no self. There were just the dreams she dreamed, the dreams that prepared her for her waking life.

[nethescurial · Rating 5 out of 5]

Woah. Where has this been in literally every single discussion about "weird lit" (nebulous term as it is, as a book of this caliber proves) that I've participated in throughout my reading life? This is probably a book whose rediscovery would be met enthusiastically by a lot of people in a world where "elevated horror" (barf) is in vogue, though to call this strictly a horror novel may be reducing it down to genre fundamentals that aren't prepared to encompass everything that this book is. But though many would be on its wavelength, something about the nature of this book makes it feel like a best kept secret that I don't want too many people to find out about, because I can already hear all the complaints about this "not making any sense" or "having no plot" as though these things are some kind of inherent Hard Rules that Joy Williams is somehow unceremoniously breaking rather than being irreplaceable components of the novel's singular ethos. Beyond any categorizations I can foist on it, this thing is just a masterpiece of tone, of prose, of the kind of character depth that only novels are capable of. While most authors have at least one skill they hone in on that enriches their work, "The Changeling" is just one of those special books that really does practically everything right. It's a shame the reputation of such an obviously good book could be set back decades by a single negative review as I really strained to find anything I could specifically criticize here; it's just an extraordinarily considered work, as compassionate and tender as it is filled with dread and brutality, as mythic and inventively curious about the Things Beyond Us as it is firmly rooted in the experiences and labors that make up everyday experience. It's also very much about the horror of having a body, of being a woman with the capacity for birth, of which there are few horrors more relevant these days. In other words, it's an incredibly human novel while exploring humanity through the (in)human lens of the eternal indifferent universe that we're born to coexist with.

If it is a horror novel, then it is undoubtedly one of the best examples of the literary macabre I've ever read. Williams weaves through pretty much every spectrum of the human experience, but it's arguably the ineffable sense of dread that especially propels it, the constant swirling vortex of anxiety palpably portrayed through the trauma and doubts of the protagonist, and also the very nature of the world surrounding her. It's very Pagan in execution, concerned with witchcraft and femininity's association with darkness and the moon, and indeed generally interested in the cycles of the solar system and the celestial bodies; concerned with animal consciousness, metempsychosis, of the ancient conflict between our "civilized" selves and our inseparability from the chaotic wilderness surrounding our lives, and then some. Probably think someone like Machen or Blackwood in that the reverence and fear of wild nature is at the forefront here, though of course through Williams' own distinct (and distinctly feminine) voice and worldview, one which can't be classified by any reductive genre signifiers at the end of the day.

So much of that dread comes out not only through the supernatural dreaminess of the setpieces and prose but, importantly, through the core themes as hinted at above. So fair word of warning, this is a dark, dark book, heeding topics such as cult mentalities, child abuse, sexual assault and the primordial horror of pregnancy, alcoholism and addiction, and then some. But it's the kind of dark whose substance is so carefully and empathically considered, so perfectly integrated with every other building block of the narrative that it never comes across anything even approaching tasteless. Even in scenes where this approaches some of the most disturbing content I've ever encountered in a book, Williams' writing has the kind of artful subtlety and grace that is capable of honoring the darkness she immerses her universe in. In turn, the power of the writing only intensifies the dread effect.

There's so much here that scratches the mythic, fantastical itch that I'm more or less always coming to fiction for primarily, no matter the style or time period. Haunted histories and isolated islands where something below the water breathes and pulses out of sight. Shapeshifting children, shapeshifting animals, the calls of wild things in the woods... But the exploration of the Other here is also so existential and so much more than just reinterpretations of folklore and arch fables, and marches to the beat of its own oblique spiritual ethos. Much of the novel, and Pearl's character trajectory, seems to hang on the cusp of a cosmic revelation that the particulars of are never quite made clear, but ultimately the potent effect is what matters. The eternal turn of the wheel of nature is a big theme here, and our place in that wheel, one which we may never be able to really understand, but never stops us from searching for an answer anyway. Things are constantly in flux, nothing ever stays the same, and reality is forever in a state of metamorphoses because of how all of our perspectives are eternally shifting... in that case the novel makes a case for its own suprarealism (not that I really think supernaturalism in books has to be justified anyway, but I digress); in a world where Change is the deepest substance of everything, then the possibilities of the stories and fables we can imagine are limitless, perhaps just as "real", as the flesh and blood world in which we read them.

This is no doubt an inevitable reread, and of course getting my paws on the rest of Williams' ouevre... this is just too inventive, too considered on a sentence-by-sentence level to not dive back into and explore its deeper intricacies more than once. I would definitely recommend this to all enjoyers of Weird things, no matter of any specific labels you could place on it; though if one doesn't like ambiguity in their fiction, then I'd recommend avoiding this. For those who click with something like this however, then this will be an incredibly special experience, at least if you're anything like me.

8/30/24:

Had to reread it sooner than later and my enjoyment not only surpassed that of read #1, it's solidified my gradually increasing belief in Joy Williams as one of the unsung masters of American letters. I touched on the themes she's getting at here serviceably enough in my initial review, so I'll keep this short, but the things I said about it initially are really only scratching the surface, and this is a book that does what all the best works of art do - that of being something infinitely rereadable, infinitely re-interpretable, and something that could never expend its full wealth of secrets even if it was the only book you reread for the rest of your life [circularity and Endless Movement being lynchpin motifs, and one could argue the entire narrative is structured like a mobius strip of sorts]. A master of character writing and a dark magician of prose [often some of the best you'll ever encounter in English, period], and an incredible balance of tone somehow struck between the inherent suffering of having to exist in the horror of a limited physical form that is paradoxically boundless and wild and free as the night itself, no matter how encircled one feels in the endless present. Cannot fucking believe it exists tbh, I rarely ever read authors' works super close in succession but this has me genuinely thinking I might just speedrun her entire bibliography for the remaining months of the year. I probably won't do that, as I'd rather savor, but just that I'm even considering it is testament to Joy Williams' literary talents. I know I've said this before but it really bears repeating - Goddamn Books Man

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't believe how many books I've read recently that feel like this book made me feel, and it's got to just be coincidence seeing as this book is 40 years old. (Die, My Love, from the Man Booker International Prize longlist, which I hated/loved/couldn't stop thinking about and The Chandelier, which was too oppressive and I quit, for now).... The similarities have to do with motherhood and being trapped and in this case, Pearl has escaped her husband only to lose him in a plane accident, and to be left to raise a child she's not sure is really her child, back on the island of crazy situations and feral children that her dead husband's brother seems to run. Nobody is normal, nobody is healthy, as a reader it is hard to know what is real, and just when you think you get it, BAM that ending! Plus she is drinking throughout everything, so her grip on reality is suspect.

Gorgeous cover, clearly I need to read more Joy Williams (I felt tepid about her flash fiction 99 Stories of God and never tried anything else), and clearly that was a wrong move.

Thanks to the publisher for providing early access to this title through Edelweiss. The 40th anniversary edition came out April 10, 2018.

[Tony]

Mothers, in Joy Williams's creations, sit somewhere on the scale between detached and dysfunctional, invariably with a gin in their hand. So, I was not surprised at this opening familiarity:

There was a young woman sitting in the bar. Her name was Pearl. She was drinking gin and tonics and she held an infant in the crook of her right arm.

Pearl was the kind of Mom that someone would say to her: If you were lost in a blizzard, you would probably be taken in by wolves.

This was dark and irreverent (which I usually like) and at times fantastical (which I usually don't), and at the end just a little too weird for my tastes.

We are told, in an Introduction by Karen Russell, that: Williams's novel is concerned with time's tyranny. We live under its sorcery, trapped by a sort of Looney Tunes physics: we're heavily burdened by our substance-less memories, while equidistant at every instant from an imaginary future. That was not the clarity I was hunting.

[Emmeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chapeau.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feral children, an irresponsible and post-partum mother, a kind of weird commune on an island that may have been started by a witch. These are the things that typically make a great novel to me. And with Joy Williams at the helm, I was ready to be rocked dead by this book—after all, her The Quick and the Dead is sincerely one of the best novels I've ever read. However, something falls flat here for me, which made the disappointment double like a shadow under a solar eclipse.

From the start, I think the prose style here does disservice to the form and characters of this novel. It's a sleepy fable style but without any of the mesmerism of wonderful fairy tales or surrealist unsettling. There are surreal moments, but they're eluded by lackadaisical or lackluster thoroughness. Pearl's desires, motivations, interiority are never more than a shade of a fog of a suggestion, and that turns into a problem when it seems she has absolutely no agency—and I'm not convinced that there's larger meaning implied in that lack of agency, other than that she's to serve as drunken observer to the goings on on the island.

There were moments and images in the book I enjoyed—particularly striking were the moments when Pearl focuses on the animality of the feral children, and of the overriding idea that her own child is a changeling, a replacement put before her. But there's nothing to pay off of hang onto in these moments.

Finally, the closing chapter, a kind of free verse prose poem riffing on certain words and ideas in the novel, is completely confounding and useless and not at all very interesting. It reads like someone selecting predictive text words from their iPhone; incoherent, void of meaning except for the reader's ability to string the random-order words together into some kind of pattern.

This sounds a lot worse than it is, and I think that gets to the disappointment factor—Williams's novel is whimsical and haunting and weird and surely the kind of thing I think more people should be reading, and could be reading, but it's a pale shade to some of her other work.

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED this - it's strange, eerie, disturbing and confusing. it reminded me of those folk horror films from the 70s - that mix of innocence and creepiness and kinda evil. am not 100% sure what went down in the end... but feel that might be ok!

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 since 18th 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. 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?) Are there dead people on the floor, do the children become little animals and bite chunks out of the bodies? Is a child transformed into a horse running along a shore breaking white foam? And another into a deer shuffling back into the bushes? Eyes behind eyes (the puppet head over a girl the eye holes not quite lining up with her eyes). 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 four-year-old, 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.” '

[Steph Post · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most haunting, disturbing and yet, eerily familiar books I've ever read.

[Kate Savage · Rating 5 out of 5]

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, beast-children yipping their chatter over each other.

Note: don't read the introduction. Full of spoilers and the kind of hard-edged analysis that feels at odds with the spirit of the book.

[Raquel Casas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hay libros que cuando terminas de leerlos piensas: tenía algo importante que decirme pero no acabo de saber bien qué. Pues este es uno de esos libros. Una alegoría postfeminista escrita en los 70 en la que una mujer alcohólica vive en una isla rodeada de una docena de niños. Mientras los hombres son los que trabajan, las mujeres se dedican a cocinar y coser pero la única que da afecto y pasa tiempo con los niños es Pearl, una madre que pasa su día bebiendo de forma mecánica pero ordenada observando a los críos, autosuficientes, libres y creativos pulular a su alrededor.
Es como si la autora nos dijese: la única forma de sobrevivir como madre a esta sociedad capitalista patriarcal es bebiendo sin parar.
Nihilismo, desesperanza, indolencia, son los sentimientos que destilan esta novela, donde la importancia argumental se difumina en una prosa preciosa, original y atrevida, mezcla de diálogo de besugos y monólogos de borrachos pero con observaciones muy interesantes sobre la maternidad, la infancia libre y salvaje, y la transformación de esos niños en adultos complacientes.
Recomendable si se desea degustar un estilo narrativo preciosista, barroco y elaborado. No recomendable si se busca una trama lineal al uso o una "buena historia".
¿Quieres saber más? Mi reseña completa aquí: http://elmomentoderaquel.blogspot.com...

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a strange book! Joy Williams's The Changeling looks at life through the eyes of a woman named Pearl who waltzes into a marriage and -- after losing her husband and child in an air crash, is rescued with another infant who is not her own. She ends up on an island with her brother-in-law, three adults, and twelve strange children. And ... and a seemingly endless quantity of gin.

The children are like the children who hang out around Titorelli, the court painter in Kafka's The Trial. They are downright feral, but they adopt Pearl as one of her own. It all ends strangely in a sort of Walpurgisnacht in which all the adults but Pearl end up dead. She is left alone with the children ... and her gin.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Chthonic.’ Williams knows its meaning and makes goddam sure you will too by reading this wonderfully odd little fable.

[Eugene · Rating 3 out of 5]

the book doesn't really begin until the plane trip back home--but a great red herring of an opener had me unprepared for that fact. i thought i was getting into a woman-on-the-run picaresque (like jaimy gordon's great SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING) but instead slowly realized i was reading a devastating and much more static portraiture of a unique drunk--a depressed mother whose deep-but-unorthodox vision of childhood ripens to rot after she quasi-survives exiting her own.

often beautiful, uneven, and heroically unresolving, THE CHANGELING is indeed a pagan meditation on childhood, with a radical, almost menacing take on its state of innocence: "...obviously it was improper for her to think that a child could offer her any salvation whatsoever. Little children were too innocent to provide salvation. Indeed, little children were always leading their elders right into the teeth of death" (211).

its plot is so organically arisen that it's hard to call it contrived. it seems more an accident or an inevitability developing naturally from williams' initial tragic characterization and observations. we meander, but mostly stall. or sink. scene changes are abrupt -- by blackout or harsh cut. i think its lack of momentum works particularly well as it dovetails thematically with the aching stillness of pearl's depression:
"Are you coming with me, Pearl?" Miriam asked.

"Oh goodness," Pearl said. "It's too early in the day yet for me to make decisions." She laughed as though she had been joking (199).

but pearl is an observant drunk--and what gives THE CHANGELING its stature is the frankness of its observations and the back-door way its sentences get at truths:

One of the children farted.

"That was Tracker," yelped Franny. "Tracker let the Devil out!"

Tracker leapt up, his arms flailing, but Franny danced nimbly out of his range. She was a humorous, coquettish child. She did a cartwheel out of sheer, mocking joy.

Tracker took several steps after her, but it was a movement apparently without threat, for he squatted on the ground abruptly and assumed a peaceful, far-away look... He flopped on his back in the grass.

Tracker was rowdy and probably cruel, but what could Pearl do about that? Sam was an ever-increasing influence on all of them but what could Pearl do about that? She herself was a weak and evil woman. She was evil because she was unbalanced, she mistook appearance for reality, and she was empty as a sucked egg (133).

[Emily Coffee and Commentary · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Night runs with its children, Sleep and Death, with its twins, the true Dream and the false one.”
🦌
An eerily surreal examination of the fragility of the psyche when under immense societal pressures. A dark, uncanny modern classic, The Changeling turns the expectation of motherhood and family dynamics on its head, asking: to whom do we turn when there’s no one left to trust, least of all ourselves? With its dreamy prose and use of growing unease, this novel creates a disarming ripple effect of disassociation and discovery, of childlike innocence to cold disillusionment; it is a claustrophobic look into the heart of toxic codependency and gender dynamics. A nuanced and compelling dissection of the internal mind, and how we transform in ways that can even confound ourselves.

[Troy]

honestly: too weird for words. this is joy williams at perhaps her most inaccessible but also i very much enjoyed the slippage into total insanity and nonsense? otherworldly creepy kids, the worst hangover you will ever have, the stuff of nightmares

[Bob Wake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joy Williams’s remarkable 1978 novel The Changeling (the followup to her 1973 National Book Award-nominated debut, State of Grace) was notoriously torpedoed by Anatole Broyard in a New York Times review (“startlingly bad,” Broyard declared). Absent today’s social media pushback, The Changeling sold poorly and went quickly out of print, finally to be rescued and reprinted in 2008 by Fairy Tale Review Press. The story opens in a Florida bar where 20-year-old alcoholic Pearl and her newborn have fled an abusive relationship and a sinister coastal-island commune that is conjured for us as equal parts Peter Pan and The Island of Doctor Moreau. There are indeed fairy-tale components to The Changeling, but because Williams was inspired in part by Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (Pearl sees herself as “the drunkest person in the world”), the novel seems at every turn refracted through a shot-glass prism of delerium tremens (“Joe’s place had been taken by this whinnying, blasphemous thing, all hoofs and teeth in the instant it took before the eye could see it was a boy again, laughing and cursing them”). The final chapter is composed in a feverish stream-of-consciousness that leaves readers stranded along with Pearl in a no-exit maze of dark mythologies and hallucinations.

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the beginning, the beautiful language of this book completely drew me in. Joy Williams has a way of constructing sentences that is truly mesmerising and fitting for a magical realism story. I was intrigued by this woman running away from her past.
But then the book began to drag. The events became more and more bizarre, started resembling a fever dream that corresponded with the protagonist's constant intoxication. I know this was intentional but it became too tedious for me. There were also several instances of sexual abuse which I found very hard to read because the whole hazy narration made it seem like it was supposed to be whimsical when it was just horrible.
Overall, it started out strong but then went into directions I didn't really like. I can understand why Williams is an acclaimed author and I would be curious to read more by her.

[Ben Loory · Rating 3 out of 5]

The woman on Pearl's left was now eating something brown. Pearl heard her companion say, "We were playing that dreadful game Diplomacy with the Joneses and the Foleys and the Prinns, and John got up and went out with Penny for one of those diplomacy periods, you know, where they haggle for supply centers, John had Turkey, and Penny, the bitch, had Austria-Hungary, and they were gone for one half hour, which was acceptable enough as far as the rules of the game went but when they came back John had a stain on his pants the size of goddamn England and I just left. Like that I left. I walked out of that goddamn room with her goddamn crudités and her goddamn fake brick and I called my lawyer and I've been a happy woman ever since."

[Jack Tripper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh to bring back the days when stars spoke at the mouths of caves.

To go back to those times when one could not know, for the darkness, in what ways they had lost their former selves …

Though it’s been several years since I read The Changeling, that quote has always stuck with me. I need to read it again so I can do a proper review, but for now I’ll just say that, whether you consider this book to be literary fiction, horror, weird fiction, magical realism, etc., there’s not much out there on this level as far as unsettling, disorienting fairy tale nightmares go. And what little there is that might be close is definitely not this beautifully written.

[Jennifer · Rating 1 out of 5]

I managed to make it halfway through this before I just had to admit that it was too terrible to finish. This was my first Joy Williams and it’ll likely be the last. It’s a shame really as she’s the sort of writer I feel I should like but it’s all too pretentious and nonsensical that I had to throw in the towel so I could move onto something that isn’t such a chore to read.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

God I loved this book. was invigorated by its strange, dark magic and trippy alcoholic consciousness. I’ve been thinking about it since I read it a year ago and have meandered to one book club or novel lent to me after another but I will get to more joy Williams soon.

[Krys · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

"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.