The Quick and the Dead

by Joy Williams

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • From one of our most heralded writers comes the “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny” (The Washington Post Book World ) 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. Gloriously funny and wonderfully 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 and an endlessly surprising tour de penetrating and magical, ominous and comic, this is the most astonishing book yet in Joy Williams's illustrious career.

Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, "in the company of Céline, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood."

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Magical Realism, Literary Fiction, American, Literature

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

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

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh this is really good, like Lorrie Moore with a satanic streak or Ferrante if she'd been raised in an American desert. The story is deceptively simple - basically a summer novel about 3 girls who've each suffered loss - and the structure is notable. Each chapter is basically its own brief vignette, and Williams doesn't hesitate to jump into a supporting player's brain mid-sentence or have whole chapters with characters we'll never see again. As a result, this is a classic novel of accumulation: the more you read, the more you'll like it. There is also a Psycho style mislead with one of the characters, which is a trick I haven't often seen.

What stands out most is the humor - this is VERY funny - and the sharpness of her observation of character.

And the ghost is fantastic.

[Guille · Rating 3 out of 5]

Naturaleza muerta, un bodegón es lo que es esta novela, una imagen en la que unos cuantos seres interrelacionan sin llegar a tocarse con un muy apropiado desierto como paisaje de fondo y donde hay vivos que, si bien lo sospechan, aun no saben que están muertos, y muertos que, queriéndolo y sin querer, aun no han empezado a vivir, aunque (casi) todos se empecinen en seguir viviendo.

“Todo tenía pinchos o ganchos. Todo tenía hojas dentadas o puntiagudas. Todo crecía a la defensiva, con fiereza, obcecado en vivir.” 

Una letra muy interesante, cuya música no ha conseguido llegarme… aunque no descarto que simplemente se deba a que aún esté de camino. 

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked The Quick and the Dead a whole lot. I like it for the things that are hard to describe why I liked it a lot. Like, all of the characters, every single last one of them, speak as if they are in a novel where everyone speaks like they are in a novel. This could have irritated the fuck out of me. I hate it when authors use their characters to tell people about all of the stuff they wanted to say and never found one big place to do it all before. I really hate, pretty much more than anything else an author could do, when they just tell us what it is they want to say instead of doing it where I'll get to feel like a human being interacting with the precious innermost thoughts and feelings of other human beings (and animals). This happens in The Quick and the Dead BIG TIME. Even when they were five. If I was in a different mood I could have gone off and felt sour comparing five year old me to five year old Corvus. It's a pain in the ass to be me when it's touch and go if you can relate to book characters. If they are just too precious for words and I want to die because I could never live where they live. Well, I was in luck. This Arizona (and some even live in the same shitty state as I do, at times. Yes!) sucks. They are in an unforgiving painting that some dude copied off another dude on tv and planted on a cheap hotel wall in some dead end town (a cul de sac, even worse).

So it is messy and you step out of it a lot for people to say big time stuff. It's about big time stuff like being dead, too. Throwing yourself and stopping to look to see if you're doing right based on how the other assholes are doing it.

I loved that out of the messy and taking time to look meaningful times there are getting to know them stuff that seeps through the cracks or seams. I should say something like looking into the eyes of the dead armadillo (I've seen more of those than anyone should ever have to) on the side of the road as you drive past. This is that kind of atmospheric and Williams would absolutely care about the dead armadillo on the side of the road. [The precociously loveable and annoyingly precocious eight year old Emily stages a wonderful protest over the museum of stuffed animals. That's right! Because only evil people think that animals should be killed and stuffed for their entertainment! The proprietor objects to the last line in her protest poem. I thought it should have likened him to Hitler, or something.]

I loved that in between all of the posturing you get to see how it is hard to maintain the pose. There isn't glamour in being soul sick, grieved, crazy and wanting someone to follow you to somewhere else so you can like how you look better in the latest stance. Yeah, the stuff about the mouth pieces of the dead and are gonna die (that's all of us) didn't move me as much as what they already had to go through. I considered the bitter ghost Ginger to be a boring subplot until I realized near the end that she wasn't, er, a subplot. I don't care if The Quick and the Dead was about that. Williams can write as pretty as about any author I can think of. And I don't care about that and I love her even more for that. I was there for the ones that I couldn't help but care about. I will be there for everything Joy Williams has ever written if I get to be there like that. The way Alice sees herself juxtaposed with how (astute in a materialistic way) Anabel sees her (scary). Corvus' grief, held up as needed strength by Alice (it was downright touching how she reveres her) and is she going to break to everyone else. Lying inbetween each other. Ideals and ideas aloud to where they become those birthdway wishes spoken too soon. Everybody talking and talking and you can hear who isn't listening. I was really impressed with how Williams did this in spite of all the mouth piece stuff that I usually hate sooooo much. And she does it with nearly every apparition in the scene.

P.s. This is the third novel that centers around an old folk's home I've read about in a couple of months. Maybe my neighbors are influencing my reading choices with subliminal messages.

P.s.s. I read on wikipedia that Williams used to teach creative writing right where I live. I don't know if I like that. I'm going to imagine her students as these flip flop wearing t-shirted fools who only care about writing pretty. I wonder what she told them. I don't know if you could teach the good things about Joy Williams. Oh, and she wrote a book about Florida natural history. I'm definitely going to read that (she has my interests!). Okay, so that was an exciting wikipedia research day.

P.s.s.s. Alice reminds me of my friend and I don't mean that she killed all of those cats.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think I can review this book. I can't even decide if I liked it or hated it. The writing is exceptional, as Williams' always is. But the characters are unlikable and their lives almost incomprehensible.

The story is not "about" any one character. There are a group of people, some more tangential than others, who bump up against each other. The book begins and ends with Alice, a teenager who is against environmental destruction while simultaneously appearing to not care about anything. She has discovered that the people she thought were her parents are actually her grandparents. They are good people but in this book that doesn't seem to matter. In general, good and bad seem to be irrelevant.

Alice is friends with two other girls, Corvus and Annabel. Annabel's mother recently died and her ghost is haunting Anabel's father. Corvus just lost both her parents in an accident and, after a failed suicide attempt, seems to be drifting through life, half asleep, or, rather, either fully asleep or volunteering at Green Oaks, a particularly grim home for the aging or perhaps a hospice for the dying. Or some combination of both.

This girls seem to be friends from default rather than any particular liking. Affection and liking are mostly absent from this book, except in one rather creepy exception of an older man "liking" an 8 year old girl. All the children seem to be oddly grown up while being at the same time absolutely children.

I loved Joy Williams' 99 Stories of God. There too the humor was odd and often mixed with grimness but I found it exciting and intriguing; perhaps because of the very short length of the stories. The Quick and The Dead consists of a similar combination of sadness with a strange humor. I often found myself laughing despite also feeling sad at the story.

This is a realistic novel that is not actually very realistic. It takes place in the desert (in, I think, Arizona) (one of my favorite locales) but the desert is not presented as beautiful but rather both vast and heartless, a backdrop against which the characters play out their relationships and their stories.

In writing this review, I clarified for myself that I did like this book, quirky as it is. Williams is always unexpected and frequently hilarious. Maybe the unlikability of the characters makes it easier to laugh at the strangeness of their lives and interactions. People affect others in ways they never even know about and life seems to be as random (and perhaps as connected) as a pinball game. If the pinballs could talk and ruminate on their existence.

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know I said I wouldn’t rate books this year but this one deserves her flowers 💐

Absurd, morbid, dark, soooooo funny and amazingly electric. So many chapters had me in stitches, laughing so hard when I really felt like I shouldn’t.

Joy Williams has filled the Moshfegh sized hole in my heart. She is clearly a supremely underrated and overlooked writer. I can't wait to move on to her short stories!! Really was a one of a kind book for me and a new favorite.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Mariel approved and MJ disparaged, this is book full of lines delivered like lines in a novel (or film) where people speak as if they're in a novel (or film). Which might bug you. But to me, really, who needs naturalism? These lines each shine (the action too, not just the dialogue) like perfect fragments pithily conveying the absurdity of life and the moments that define it. It might all become a directionless wash of clever observations, but for the Joy Williams' ability to suffuse the entire thing with the nearness of death. Here, in the desert, characters dance along the edge of the mortal world, some crossing over, some sending back missives, everyone living their days in its shadow. And some live in both worlds simultaneously, like the lost souls in the limbo of the Green Palms retirement home. Joy Williams' voice and thematic single-mindedness really hold this together into something cohesive and essential, funny and desperate.

Now to immediately follow this with a very different contemplation of death: The Necrophiliac.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Those of you who liked Joy Williams' short stories (see, eg., The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories) should also like this novel. It's almost as if there are running stories spliced together here. And I mean that in a good way. There are familiar themes, settings, vignettes: an old age home, plenty of dogs, marriages crumbling or already crumbled, precocious children. Read this and you will recognize that we are all a little off. I do not think that Joy Williams would find me inappropriate; or, yes, inappropriate, but what else are we going to fill this zoo with.

The cover (at least of the hardbound edition) is bizarre enough that you can't say you weren't warned. And the title enigmatically warns that there will be death, a lot of death; although Williams is often amused by it. The county coroner, who had arrived with the ambulance, was not of the school that fed the foolish hope that a person could die instantly. Neither conciliatory nor compassionate, he had been educated by Jesuits and as such might as well have been raised by wolves.

At its core, the plot is about three teenage girls (a not quite harmless-looking group . . .) who, prior to meeting each other, lost their mothers, although one mother, Ginger, comes back nightly to torment her husband. This running dialogue and storyline will probably be the highlight of my reading year.

Things pop up when reading Joy Williams: snippets of philosophy and little primers on suicide, animal husbandry, medical conditions, botany. Plants were lucky because when they adapted it wasn't considered a compromise. It was more difficult for a human being, a girl.

Williams has this remarkable sense of detail. A couple can be having lunch in restaurant in the Arizona desert, the temperature 110 outside, but there on the wall, above their table is The Icebergs by Frederic Edwin Church:

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By Frederic Edwin Church - Dallas Museum of Art Uncrated, Public Domain, Link"/>

(Church added the wrecked masthead after no one liked the original painting. Now you know too.)

Emily, who is not one of the group of three girls, tells a man who asks if she is eight or nine that she is "a mature eight." She watches her still-alive mother spilling the dense gray matter in the vacuum bag over the living room floor:

"You're supposed to change that when it's no more than two-thirds full," she said. "Otherwise, you'll damage the machine. Steward, my colleague at school, the one who's retarded and likes to vacuum, he told me that."

"You don't have colleagues, you have classmates," her mother said. "Where does all this shit come from?"

There is dialogue like that on almost every page.

So, yes, this is highly recommended for the irreverent, the afternoon drinker, the sayer of inappropriate things.

You know who you are.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered Williams from an intro she did for Jane Bowles, so this may color my review slightly. But Williams is the heir apparent to the twisted comic crown once (briefly) worn by Bowles (who someone once called “the Buxter Poindexter of prose”). But like Bowles she is sui generis, but they definitely travel in the same park. Insane characters revealing themselves with deadpan confessions delivered in stylized dialogue is the main show here. The elliptical “plot” or “structure” is as open ended as “Two Serious Ladies”, and somewhat resembles a short story cycle with overlapping characters and themes. She puts enough ideas for several books by a lesser writer (and an arguably more restrained one) in an errant description or stray line of dialogue. But editing would have lost us even a moment of this odyssey through a rogues gallery of American impulses, obsessions, anxieties, and grotesques; a deluge of surreal banter and lunatics.

[MJ Nicholls]

I tried 50pp of this novel but couldn’t find much to cling to. I think Mariel nails it in her review: the characters speak as if they were in a novel where everyone speaks as if they’re in a novel. I also found the prose heavy with those carefully crafted profound-sounding sentences where the author imparts profound sentiments in profound-sounding prose, where they reader is asked to step back and say, woah . . . heavy! This sounds churlish. I know. I loved some of these sentences but there was no emotional or intellectual connective tissue for me, i.e. the characters were ideologic constructs not people, and the profound sentiments built into the prose around them seemed to be searching for revelations about corporeal suffering or a deep internal trauma. So I needed to be closer to these people, I needed some semblance of reality to cling to. Instead I was being invited into a surreal Limbo not entirely unlike Flann O’Brien’s cyclical Hell in The Third Policeman—from what I inferred, the book will go on to paint a broader canvas of death and spirituality, only without the bicycles. But I only managed 50pp. The humour wasn’t something I responded too either. Plus only yesterday I read a novel with precocious children at the centre. Two in a row is tough. Apologies to Mariel.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fifth-highest community review of this book on Goodreads is by a gentleman who awarded it one star, alluding to its "lack of plot" and comparing it unfavourably to "Dan Brown's Robert Langdon series". I don't generally like to belittle other people's opinions, or to play the intellectual snobbery game, so I'll just note that the reader in question wasn't the target audience for this book, and might more profitably be directed toward a different section of the library altogether. But a wider statement about society on the whole being not quite clever enough, or reflective enough, to appreciate Joy Williams's caustic genius, wouldn't be out of place when reviewing a book sizzling with barely tamped down misanthropic rage.

At heart, this is something like an environmentalist novel, although its bleak vision doesn't really allow for messages of any type. It simply mirrors an America full of fast-food chains and tchotchkas, addicted to television and oblivious to death. It sprawls over natural habitats with tarmac and air-conditioning, placing its non-human victims in abattoirs, shelters or museums, while congratulating itself for its sophistication, drunk with venal stupidity. Ms. Williams's cool, precise prose combines Don DeLillo's alien-like coldness with Hunter S. Thompson's righteous anger.

The book's major characters are all teenage girls who have suffered tragedy. Alice, orphaned, lives with her slightly batty grandparents. Corvus's parents have drowned. Annabel has recently lost her mother in a car crash, and her father (the focus of the book's wittiest and most merciless scenes) is haunted by his late wife's ghost, who takes pleasure in running him down and ridiculing his budding romance with his gardener, Donald. In another side plot, an eight-year-old girl named Emily Bliss Pickless (sic) accidentally blows off her mother's boyfriend's genitals (and buries them) and befriends a billionaire.

Plot exposition seems like a waste of time here, though: what makes this book so great is how funny it is, and its trenchant, subtle intelligence. Classical references abound. Two cryptic passages begin parts one and three, providing plenty of symbolism for those keen to look deeper. Every page flows with a patter of sparkling one-liners which probe through modern day humanity's delusions of success, and skewer the bromides which make us feel we are special, kind gifts to this planet.

An aide at a retirement home for the especially decrepit, Nurse Daisy, encapsulates the book's theme in her stilted, oracular way:

“It’s better to be dumb,” the nurse said, “than to speak from a heart that’s all darkness and distraction. I’m agreeing with you. I suppose we should go in. Are you ready to enter our little charnel community, not as docent or guide but as a living member? Do you vow to keep your wits among the witless? Do you commit yourself to pondering ceaselessly the uselessness of caring, the uselessness of love, that great reality for which all else must be abandoned?”

[Andrew]

I had to wonder… did this emperor have any clothes?

This pains me – I love nonlinear novels, I love American weirdos, I love the vision of desert landscape as an echo chamber of failed dreams, I love a bitter and blasé sense of humor. This tried to be all four of those things, and failed on all four counts. The shaggy-dog story is never interesting enough to hold my attention, the weirdness feels just a little bit too lapidary in its execution to feel authentic, the desert landscape is nowhere near as rapturous as a DeLillo or a McCarthy could and did make it, and the sense of humor just felt contrived. For a group of fucked up orphans, they talk an awful lot like Iowa Writers Workshop MFA candidates.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having previously read and very much enjoyed some of Joy Williams’s short fiction, I’d been looking forward to reading this novel for a number of years. I’m not sure why it took me this long to reach for it (well, okay, books just tend to get buried in tbr lists). The central characters are a trio of teenage girls (Alice, Annabel, and Corvus), all three of them motherless and two of them parentless altogether. They are all portrayed in a somewhat one-dimensional way, each of them uniquely distant from her surroundings. These young women carry space around them that no one can fully penetrate, despite many varied attempts, both by each other and by the other people in their lives. Largely the book dwells on death, grief, and the ability to move past it or not. Characters either are obsessed with death, live isolated lives as a result of death, or quite simply die themselves.

It’s an odd book. At times it read to me like it was written by a skilled short story writer transitioning to novel form, and yet Williams had written three previous novels so surely she would have figured the process out by this one. I can’t comment on those other novels, though, because I haven’t read them. The plot starts and stops, typically following one character for a chapter or two before switching to a different character. The plot never goes anywhere, which is not always a problem in a book. But at times it read like short stories sewn loosely into the larger text. Again, not necessarily a problem, except here it didn’t work for me because the sidetracks followed characters I wasn’t interested in. Williams introduces some of these characters past the halfway mark of the book, when I was just getting warmed up to the existing slate. I had a hard time caring for these people, and wished for the story to stay with the primary characters.

Other GR reviewers have noted the formal nature of the dialogue, which distracted me a little at the start, chiefly in conversations between Alice and Corvus, but I grew used to it. Williams does a good job of showing us the American Southwest—at times rolling out the desert before us through a cinematic wide angle lens. She makes her points about environmentalism, the questionability of its effectiveness and the varied motivations of its adherents. It’s an open text and there is a lot one could take out of it. Perhaps Williams intended it to be this way. Perhaps she left that space around the characters so that there would be room for different types of readers to reach toward them. Unfortunately for me, despite my long reach, I could not get close enough to them. It’s been a long time since I felt so disappointed over not being able to fully connect to a book, over being so close yet ultimately leaving unfulfilled. It feels strange and unsettling, and yet that’s still something to take away from a book.

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book by accident, or at least without any intent: it literally fell into my lap a few months back when it appeared mysteriously on my Kindle. There is no record that I bought it or that anyone bought it for me, it showed up on only one of our three Kindle devices (the oldest one), and is not listed in our Kindle library on Amazon. I dipped into it and was immediately hooked by the writing.

Given its mysterious antecedents, the fact that it turned out to be such a great fit for me could be viewed as proof of the benevolence of the universe (proof which lately has been woefully scarce).

The main characters, Alice, Corvus, and Annabelle -- three motherless girls who are not quite friends, but not quite not-friends either -- wander through a strange Southwestern desert landscape of odd events, peculiar people, and animals wild and domestic. Things happen, and yet there's a kind of timelessness to the narrative, a free-floating trippiness, a dreamlike feeling of inertia that seems to grip most of the characters. Countering this is the creative, energetic, almost profligate use of language: the author juggles words the way a circus performer juggles knives or flaming torches. (One reviewer has complained that all the characters in this novel talk as if they're in a novel, not like real people; this is true, but as far as I'm concerned it works brilliantly.)

For example, as the book opens Alice has a job babysitting two neighbor kids:

[Alice]did not find the children at all interesting. They cried frequently, indulged themselves in boring, interminable narratives, were sentimental and cruel, and when frustrated would bite. They had a pet rabbit that Alice feared for. She made them stop giving it baths all the time and tried to interest them in giving themselves baths, although in this she was not successful. She assisted them with special projects for school. It was never too early for investigative reporting. They should not be dissuaded by their teacher's discomfort; to discomfort teachers was one's duty. They were not too young to be informed about the evils of farm subsidies, monoculture, and overproduction...[T]hey should know how things come into being, like ponies, say, and how they're taken out of being and made into handbags and coats.

Or this, after the children's mother has refused to pay her and she's meditating what to do next:

She'd like to be one of those birds, those warblers that fly from Maine to Venzuela without water, food, or rest. The moment came when they wanted to be twenty-five hundred miles from the place they were and didn't know how else to do it...

She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She'd remain outside the public sector. She'd be an anarchist, she'd travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She'd fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. She'd really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. She'd have different names, aka Snake, aka Snow -- no, that was juvenile. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter...

I would say that this book has a kind of savage glitter.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this is a disturbing book, it is very absorbing.
The only reason it doesn't get 5 stars is because it jumps, chapter to chapter, between several characters. Each of them is interesting in their own way and have a strange quirk that plays into their unusual actions and reactions. The dialogue is disarming while at the same time charming. It is Williams at her best, and also a book worth a second read.
The stories are interconnected but the narrative is most powerful when the focus is on one character, their inner conflicts and skewed perspective. As long as the style doesn't grate on you, this book will impress the pants off you.
I happen to find the author's style addictive.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Take three parts Ghost World; dash in a quarter helping of Welcome to the Dollhouse; shake very liberally; and serve over iced tropes of teenage ennui with an existential wedge for garnish.

Had Williams let a judicious editor prune just 20 percent…well, what could have been. What IS is much fun drawn over too many pages. Nothing less than enjoyable, anything but original. Hey, shit, high class pulp gets Pulitzer nom; no one need heed me.

(Just try to read this fucking thing without imagining Brendan Sexton III as Rick. Go.)

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

If Joy Williams were just a little less brilliant and withering, I'd hate her. Blatantly unrealistic, overblown dialogue, tangential approach to story/narrative (no rapid page-turning here, really; and even the strength of the writing wasn't enough to keep me from turning to other novels occasionally), cynical ruthlessness towards her own characters along with a stubborn resistance to portraying any successful/hopeful connection between humans.

But, I get the comparisons to Flannery O'Connor. They couldn't be more apt. That tightrope walk between disdain for humanity and respect for her characters...they may be unhappy, wrong, ruthless, completely adrift in their own lives--but they speak like prophets with doctorates, even, or especially, the 'lowest' among them (the five year olds, the brain damaged, the bored teenagers, the truck drivers, the dogs, the otherwise entirely unenlightened). Williams isn't dealing in realism, she's building an impression of the real as it might be built by someone at a distance from their humanity, someone dead or half-dead, or someone who is an animal--at a distance from our usual excuses for and sympathies with the terrible things we casually do, and even from our own useless horror at the terrible things we do as a species (there's some brutal black humor at the expense of leftist activists here, even though that's unquestionably where Williams' sympathies lie--but then, Flannery O'Connor wrote obscene religious characters, though her overall perspective was decidedly devout).

Dead animals, as a group, might as well be considered a major collective character. Williams spends time on them and gives each an undeniable, unsettling presence that rivals every human character consciousness we're allowed to invade. And invade we do--Williams uses completely omniscient perspective and jumps into the heads not only of the major characters, but also the ones we meet only for a page, often offering up a jarring impression from the mind of a 'stranger' that we're never allowed to later plumb or revisit.

She's very funny, in a blackest of black humor way. I had to put it down occasionally just because the hopeless cynicism was starting to affect my consciousness in a negative way (it's kind of a default of mine that I have to fight for balance, so your mileage may vary--if your thoughts trend negative, depressive, morbid, cynical, you might want to have something light on hand too). But it works. It's pitch perfect. It's balanced by moments of beauty and profundity that never veer into preciousness. I read most of this in a window seat on a connecting flight from North Carolina to Arizona, then out. I feel like that helped, seeing the craters, the Barry Goldwater memorial parking deck.

Pay attention to the roadkill you passed. Pay attention to that strangely revolting kitsch in the road stop, that dead-end job, that place you stuck your father when he got old, that stupid protest nobody cared about that you passed on the way to work. And that roadkill. They are this story, too. Maybe more than you.

[Ryan Schumacher · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate giving up on books. I will usually trudge through one until the end, even if I'm not particularly enjoying it. But I couldn't make it with this one. Hence the one star. It's too bad because I actually think that the author is extremely talented. There were some passages or paragraphs that I reread a couple times because I thought they were brilliant. But there was no story. I made it about half way through the novel, and I had no idea why I was reading about these people. I felt like I was just reading about people going through their not very exciting and extremely repetitive days. Maybe that was the point, but if it was then I just didn't get it and didn't care for it.

I talked to people before about which is more important in books: the writing itself or the story. I use Dan Brown's Robert Langdon series as an example. I don't think Brown is a talented writer, but the guy can write a story. I've really enjoyed all the Langdon books because of the story despite not feeling Dan Brown's writing ability is anything great at all. My feelings on this Joy Williams is just the opposite. Some of the pages I read bordered on brilliance in my opinion. I reread entire pages because they hit just right. But there was no story. I got bored. I didn't know why I was reading about these people after almost 200 pages. I found myself reading less and less until I just had to give up on it and move on to something else. So I guess for me, the ability of the author to write a fantastic story vastly outweighs the author's actually writing ability.

[Edan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Quick and the Dead is easily one of the oddest books I've ever read, and one of the most inspiring: oh the glorious things language can do! This novel is fairly short, but it took me weeks to get through it as there's not much narrative drive to speak of. Once I understood this, I simply reveled in Williams' stunning imagination and her comic lovely prose. 3 teenaged girls, a bitch of a ghost, and the cruel, apathetic desert. Fuck, this is awesome.

"A truck tore by on the road above them, its immense length rimmed in lights, with a cargo of acids or blood or veal calves. A cargo of caskets or pirated videos and perfumes, or those dolls that were the technological sensation of the coming season, that would spit at a child if their circuitry determined that not enough attention was being paid to it. The driver was smoking, tuned to the libertarian station, half asleep."

[Paul Dembina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Initially I thought this was pretty good. Wacky characters spouting amusing verbiage. But this got tiring after a while

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Show me a novel better than this one and I'll eat my shoes. Joy Williams has a peerless command over language, and the acrobatics she performs throughout this book with her words is really something to behold. What I mean is that I went through three highlighters reading this book, wanting to yellow up every page. The characters—especially the three young girls who own much of the novel's time—have stayed with me ever since I first read this book a few years ago. Alice's misanthropic, misguided activism; Corvus's dedication to grief and mourning; Annabel's desirable simplicity and unawareness; Carter's pitiful pining; Sherwin's mealy-mouthed philosophies; Emily's precociousness that in turn causes Stumpp to reconsider his life; J.C. and his god complex; Nurse Daisy and those fantastic tangents she goes on.

The scenes in Green Palms are among the most unnerving, disconcerting scenes in anything I've encountered. The way that death hovers in the margins of this book when it's not in the lines themselves-- it's that preoccupation that makes this novel equally difficult and rewarding. Thank goodness for Joy's humor, which is dark as dark gets.

"Life needs predators to be in balance."
"Memory does not grant extensions."

[Sub_zero · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5

A través de su prosa terriblemente ingeniosa, perversa y sofisticada (con fuertes influencias de Emily Dickinson y su oscuro romanticismo), Joy Williams ha tejido un extraordinario entramado de historias que crece ante nuestros propios ojos como un organismo autosuficiente y dotado de voluntad propia, un conglomerado poliédrico de escenarios casi mitológicos, poderosas voces narrativas y situaciones del todo inverosímiles donde el límite entre la realidad y el mero espejismo está más difuso que nunca. Los personajes que transitan esta emblemática novela de Williams tienen programada en su hoja de ruta lugares cuyo simbólico exotismo reside precisamente en la dicotomía expresada en el título: casas poseídas por la presencia de espíritus vengativos, un museo con salas llenas de animales disecados o una residencia de ancianos regentada por una enfermera misántropa que administra cuidados paliativos. La vida y la muerte, juntas, mezcladas en una extravagante amalgama en la que todo es posible y donde las reglas que creíamos haber asimilado cobran de repente una dimensión radicalmente extraña.

Reseña completa: http://generacionreader.blogspot.com....

[Merl Fluin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, she thought she didn't dream, but one morning she was going to wake up, yes, she would wake from the dream even the most reluctant and particular have but once, the one where four animals arrive to carry you off for the moment. You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such great care that you think it will never end, you long for it not to end, and then you wake and know that, indeed, they have not brought you back.

[Jemppu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Satisfyingly full of character and completely its own thing.


______
The reading updates say as much.

[Goatllama · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hmm. I definitely enjoyed this, aside from the ending. It seemed like multiple devilish characters popped up near the end (and one devil revealed itself) but... I feel like there should have been more. It recalls the end of Blood Meridian, but in that case the final revel feels earned and chilling rather than empty and unfulfilling. I probably need to let this one simmer and congeal, anyhow.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Quick and the Dead is a story of modern America and all its neuroses. There are a lot of characters in the story, and story lines that sometimes interact, but other times remain fairly isolated. Of the characters, the three teenage girls, Alice, Annabel, and Corvus are fairly memorable. Alice's environmental, vegetarian self-righteousness; Annabel's upper-class materialism and propriety, and Corvus' emptiness. From these characters, we are linked to Carter, Annabel's dad whose dead wife appears to him in his favorite room and who fantasizes about the gardener, Donald. There's also Sherwin, the sorta deadbeat piano player who just wants someone to be interested in him. Emily the precocious 8 year-old who protests the local museum full of taxidermied animals, likes the feel of sand in her hair, and who often pretends she is less intelligent than she is; her desperate mother trying to find a man, and J.C. her loser of a boyfriend who compares himself to another J.C., Jesus Christ. The list goes on..

The plot itself is not easy to reproduce, and meanders quite a bit. However, that's part of the story's charm. The dialogue is good, often funny, and the personality traits of the characters are easy to identify with or correlate to "characters" in real life. Williams has an interesting and fairly honest take on America without trying to teach us anything. She is also considered by some to be the heir of Flannery O'Connor's style and while that doesn't immediately come to mind for me, it's not a comparison without merit.

[Will]

Slow read but so funny and insane she was just saying shit

[Max Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who am I to think I could explain this to you?

[Ken-ichi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't a book with a plot, nor is it one populated with realish people, but those not-quite-realish people are differentiated and fun to listen to. Sadly, the central cast are the least fun: Alice (monotonous), Corvus (hardly there at all), Annabel (vapid), Carter (occasionally amusing but disappointingly spineless), and Ginger (too spiny). Much preferable was the company of Emily Bliss Pickless (mature 8-year-old skeptic and feeder of lizards), Nurse Daisy (apocalyptic nursing home attendant), and Stumpp (involutionally contemplative yet dissatisfied 1% former big game hunter), but alas they're merely side characters adorning the second half. I did like the writing. Maybe I'd like her short stories.

There were, however, some unambiguously choice words I didn't know:

ischemic (adj): related to ischemia, a restriction of blood supply to tissue (p. 57)

telluric (adj): related to the earth or soil (p. 70)

maenad (n): one of the Bacchante, the wild women followers of Dionysus who dismembered Orpheus (thanks, Sandman) (p. 102)

clerestory (n): high section of a wall with windows, traditionally above the nave in a Christian church (p. 224)

doxological (adj): pertaining to doxology, i.e. praising God (p. 224)

hecatomb (n): a sacrifice in ancient Greece or Rome involving 100 oxen or more; a large-scale slaughter or sacrifice (p. 252)

horripilatory (adj): pertaining to bristled hair or goosebumps (p. 269)

FWIW, I was inspired to read this by A.O. Scott's gushing essay about her in the Times last year.

[helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

in an interview with bob dylan on his songwriting process, i remember reading that for him, songwriting was about taking a story and "turning it on its head." i think that phrase aptly describes williams's writing as well. she has a knack for taking an ordinary phrase, turning it on its head, and crafting a truly beautiful sentence. i agree with the goodreads review where it says that her characters don't speak ordinary dialogue, but instead talk like prophets. and especially the retirement home nurse. (i'm obsessed with her axiom: ivory soap is the madeleine of our country's innocence.) centered around three motherless teenage girls, the book is magic realism, set in the desert of the american southwest. it has been awhile since i've read any tom robbins, but i'm tempted to recommend this to fans of his writing. we'll see if the five star rating holds up, but i loved it while reading it.

[Rupert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always loved Joy Williams' stories, but her novels have always felt too fractured or like over-extended short stories. This one, though, is brilliant with poetic bending of syntax, compelling characters (more allegorical than flesh and blood, though), uniquely dark humor and a deep but not self righteous sensitivity to the vanishing natural world. The kind of book that has many segments that made me want to run and read it out loud to friends. But then I remembered I am trapped in a giant sewer pipe beneath Brooklyn.