Honored Guest

by Joy Williams

With her singular brand of gorgeous dark humor, Joy Williams explores the various ways–comic, tragic, and unnerving—we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. A masseuse breaks her rich client's wrist bone, a friend visits at the hospital long after she is welcome, and a woman surrenders her husband to a creepily adoring student. From one of our most acclaimed writers, Honored Guest is a rich examination of our capacity for transformation and salvation.

Contents:
Honored Guest
Congress
Marabou
The Visiting Privilege
Substance
Anodyne
The Other Week
Claro
Charity
ACK
Hammer
Fortune

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, American, Literature, Collections

213 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

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

[Garima · Rating 5 out of 5]

"But your life’s center is on the periphery."

In the grand scheme of things, little things sometimes fail to become an indispensable part of the complete picture and inadvertently choose a different path for themselves. They walk alone, live through the day and quietly go to sleep without holding any promise of opening their eyes the next day. For me, short stories are made out of such ephemeral yet strong happenings. I approach them with almost zero expectations and whatever I receive in exchange for my time, I humbly accept it. Here is an obvious presence of some uncertain motive on my part but I have difficulty in defining its true nature. However it’s suffice to admit that I long to savor the flavor of different slices of life that these stories carry within them.

Even if she slurred her words when she thought, the lamp was able to follow her. There were tenses that human speech had yet to discover, and the lamp was able to incorporate these in its understanding as well.

And along comes Joy Williams with her Honored Guest. Without exaggeration, it is one perfect story collection I have read in a long time. It’s perfect in terms of writing, in executing unconventional ideas, in building an ambiguous atmosphere, in gathering a unique set of characters and perfect in keeping the interest of a reader till the very end. And even amidst so much perfection, there never crops up a sense of taking in too much and that’s precisely why this book has left an indelible mark on my psyche and I’ll strive to retain it in my memory bank.

“I suspect there’s only one thing to know about that other world … You don’t go to it when you’re dead. That other world exists only when you’re in this one.”

In the set of twelve splendid stories, death plays the part of a common protagonist though its identity is carefully wrapped in the translucent layers of subtlety. We get to know it only through a source it generally affects – living beings. A mother has few days left to live and her daughter is not exactly prepared for the same, a wife learns the fickle nature of love during her husband’s illness and finds solace in the surreal existence of an illuminating but inanimate object, a couple realize that they are past the age to discuss Kant’s philosophies, how the sense of being benevolent turns the table in unexpected direction and what happens when a deceased friend bequeaths odd things to his friends about which his friends are both curious and clueless.

There is a masterful but effortless examination of life which is about to take the last steps towards death and how these steps becomes the part of the journey of those who are left behind. It’s a sad book for apparent reasons but the way Williams has handled the narration with an ample dose of dark humor makes it an essential and entertaining read. There are not many out there who talks about death and life and convince us that after all both of them are nothing but partners in an inevitable crime.

“You’re too nostalgic, June,” Caroline said. “Nostalgia nauseates me. I lack the nostalgic gene, thank god.”

[Mariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not a particularly nice person, Dennis. I've had to admit that to myself, and I'll admit it to you as well. I might have been nice once but I get by the best I can now. I don't even know how you'd look at someone, at anything, with your whole heart. Why, you'd wear yourself out. You'd become nothing but a cinder. Life would become intolerable in no time. Now, it sounds as though you had a very fortunate childhood until you didn't. It's what I always think when I see cows grazing in the fields or standing in those pleasant little streams that wind through the fields or finding shade beneath the occasional tree, that they have a very nice life until they don't. An extreme analogy, perhaps- well, yes, forget that analogy, but you have to move on, Dennis. Your life's not assimilating your days and that's not good, Dennis."

It's either this or this "When I go, the dog goes. Promise me this." for my review intro quote. I can't decide.

An honored guest is a sacrificial bear in an Ainu tribal ritual in the recesses of Japan. Loved like a pig in the silken webs of please don't slaughter him, daddy, and dressed in state farm beauty pageant prized ribbons. Let go with "He's gone to a better place" and ceremonial little black dresses. I'm going to regret this later. I will probably do that thing again where I beat myself up for not getting at the heart of things, nonsensical writing, my blah blah blah and I say it's something when it's much more than that. Honored Guest sounds about right as far as life until death is concerned. The tears afterwards and funeral parties sound about right too. Then it's like the scene in the Life of Brian about how different religious sects are formed. I'll take the layers of the onion and I'll take the parfait. "I don't know what to say." "He's gone to a better place." "How could you possibly know that?" "I've done this before and it's going to go like this." I don't feel any resentment towards the know how it is camp, or the things you have to say because I'm hardly different than they are. I've lost people who didn't feel like they ever belonged to me, or me to them, despite having large names like father. I love Joy Williams for not being one of those to wait for the impossible magical life changing words either. Honored Guest are not right words stories. The dead forget you. It's too late. Someone will probably say that stuff about you too. One of the characters quotes Beckett that "tears are liquefied brain". That's a right words moment there and then it's back into the being forgotten. I wish I could make it last and make the honored guest part a party to remember. Fatten the cow good and proper. Liquified brain. Damn, that's good. It's words that's changing things by making it something. Crying is doing something. I loved these stories so much because I never felt like anyone was being sacrificed. My anxiety is that there's not enough time. These stories are so rich that anything I say will be helpless now that they're gone whispers. Did I love them enough?! I hope that I did. Reading did feel like doing something. That's something.

My favorite stories:
Honored Guest
Congress
Marabou
The Visiting Privilege
The Other Week
Claro

I liked every story. I could add to this list. Favorite songs on albums change constantly, right? I'll write about some of the stories until I feel too stupid, like I'm not doing anything, and then I'll stop.

The Visiting Privilege is about this lady, Donna, who visits her friend Cynthia in a kind of rehab or mental place. She visits several times a day. Donna listens outside their group meetings. Her attempts to institutionalize herself to their hospital Jell-o flavors of institutionalization made me laugh, and then I felt kind of sick about it because they wouldn't want me there either. They got to give up and take time outside of life to cry and flail. Cynthia has two obese roommates that Donna cannot tell apart. They haaaaate Donna. One of them especially, although it's a 50/50 chance of which one could have scooped her eye out with a spoon. Everyone hates Donna, except for the dying old lady who probably saw the other woman as one of her tacky plug-in appliances back home. None of those were plugged in, though.

"Is anyone feeding him?" Donna said. "Does he have water?" She had found her vocation, she was sure of it. She could do this forever. She felt like a long-distance swimmer in that place long-distance swimmers go in their heads when they're good."
I feel a bit like Donna, actually, now that I think about it. I laughed while reading the story when Cynthia cries "That's easy for you to say!" when Donna tells her that we're all in a meaningless existence. I don't feel like the long distance swimmer when they're good except when I'm reading and I understand all of those under surface things I could never, ever get across outside of myself. Hanging around group meetings and people I can't tell apart. Then I'm Donna when she's on her street, banished from the home, listening to the dog cry. The dog that cries like the old lady's unplugged electronic dog. It sounds real for all that it's an unworking machine. The sound is caught inside of me and I could stand outside it.
It's a funny story, though, until I started feeling depressed about spending too much time around that feeling as it is. It could start setting up its own Jell-o trays.

Miriam in Congress falls in love with the lamp her boyfriend, Jack, makes out of a deer's legs.
"Back in the room, the lamp was hovered over Moby-Dick. It would be deeply involved in it by now. It would be slamming down Melville like water. The shapeless maw of the undifferentiating sea! God as indifferent, insentient Being, composed of an infinitude of deaths! Nature, Gliding... bewitching... majestic... capable of universal catastrophe! The lamp was eating it up."
Jack has an accident hunting. His hunting buddy wipes his face, talks to him like a plant. Like the guy Miriam thinks about who grows the cactus plants without thorns and it doesn't bother him that the thorns stick to his caressing hands that cannot touch the plants. They go on a road trip and Miriam plugs in the lamp in place of all the hotel lamps. The deer leg lamps likes being plugged in the best. She reads by his light even though the poor light is bad for her eyes. It was only meant to be an accent lamp. Miriam loves the deer legs for its parts. It doesn't ever want to think about being the deer in the clearing either. They stop at a roadside attraction. People come to see this taxidermist. This story reminds me of my first Joy Williams novel (written before Honored Guest) The Quick and the Dead. She must think a lot, still, about sticking up former life on display and its talking points. Miriam could talk to the animals when she's not thinking of different answers to the same questions the people would always have about them. I would like to think of different answers to the same old questions too. This is a weird story to write about. I can see the deer legs under the shade and I probably would think that it was thinking all of those things about Moby-Dick... I relate to Joy Williams stories in ways that I don't know how to say.

"Space and time," she said. "Those used to be the requirements. Space and time or you cuoldn't get into the nightclub. Our senses establish the conditions for the world we see. Kant said our senses were like the nightclub doorkeeper who only let people in who were sensibly dressed, and the criteria for being properly dressed or respectably dressed, whatever, was that things had to be covered up in space and time."
This is the kind of shit that Francine's boyfriend Freddie says. Francine is just looking for her sheltie. They have a gardener, Dennis, who is looking for his Darla in everywhere and everything else. Freddie hasn't paid Dennis in years and still he comes to work because he thinks that Francine could be his Darla.This Darla who could leap higher than her shoulders. Darla who made a tape of herself practicing the piano that doesn't sound any different than you could imagine any piano playing practice tape could sound like. It's for practice and there's no audience. Francine cannot see Darla in herself, in that piano tape or in the memories of Dennis. I can't see her either. I felt bad for Dennis. I felt bad for Francine. She never learned either about her yearnings and there's no assimilation when they're gone.

She set to work while Lilly watched her raptly. She was learning ignorance, Lilly marveled. She had begun to be false, false to herself and others. Lilly would not allow this, she would not. This was the child of whom Barbara had said, "Why, she thinks you hung the moon!" She had a responsibility to this child."
Lilly in Claro doesn't like other people. People who learn how to close themselves off to other people and know, or pretend to know, that pretend language of socially appropriate expressions and distances. I wonder why it's a virtue to know how to do that. I feel a lot like I'm probably imposing on other people by not putting on fake facial expressions throughout the day. Smile, wave, have a nice day, how about that weather. Even mentioning stuff like feeling bad about stuff. I do it anyway and then I feel soooo bad about doing it. Why do I wish I knew how to do the normal closed off thing, anyway? I felt bad for the gardener's stout and solemn daughter, Stephanie. She drowns the family cat in the toilet, or at least her father says he did. I had the feeling her mother didn't want her at home and then her father didn't want to take her with him to his gardening job. Stephanie wants to color in the coloring book like before and go on talking with Lilly like before. Lilly wants her to own up to the cat and be up front at all times, never hiding the dark clouds carrying over from unloved everywhere else. But the kid just wanted to have a time to be seen as some nice little kid that a nice lady liked!

A psychiatrist asks his young patient if she prefers the manifest world or the unmanifest one. She looks them both up in the dictionary and declares the manifest one. Guess he's out of a job. I want the unmanifest one and I'm not good at either. I don't want to be Darla! What I wrote and wrote and wrote here isn't even what I had felt at all, really. Is it different to be able to write what you want to say? Does it feel any different? I have no idea what that is like. I'm in awe of Joy Williams ability to have both in her short stories. She's too good for me, that's what. I didn't even write about the Honored Guest story. The dying mother who cries out to her own name for help... Damn. I disown my Taking Care review but it does have the stuff about all of the dead dogs one has in their life that Honored Guest is about, so at least there's that. (In five minutes I'll disown this one too. Maybe not that long. How DO you look at anything with your whole heart and not feel sick and kind of dead about the whole thing, after a while?)

[Lisa (NY) · Rating 3 out of 5]

[2.5] Ironic, melancholic stories about disconnected people. I like Williams' crisp writing and sense of absurdity but the stories feel pointless. I skipped the last few.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joy Williams is just genius. I want to plagiarize it all. The elliptical “plots”(or parody of plots), the savage humor, surreal dialogue, the palpable threat in nearly every line, absurd situations, her unsettling and painfully convincing vision of life, and her handling of death, anxiety, sickness, and ecology and our place in the natural world. If you are fan of Jane Bowles and the films of David Lynch you must read Williams.

[Bilal Y. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edebiyatın diğer şeylere göre bana daha fazla şey öğrettiği konusunda bir kez daha düşünmüş oldum bu yeni okuma macerasını sonlandırırken. Hem öykülerin kuruluşu bakımından hem de bana düşündürttüğü şeyler bakımından sanırım benim için özel bir kitap olacak.  Ayrı temalar ve ayrı kurgular nedeniyle öykülerden bütünlüklü bir yorum çıkarmakta zorlanacağım. Ama hayatı ve dünyayı bütünlüklü algılayan filozofça bir bakış sezdiğimi söyleyebilirim.  Bu bakımdan küçük aydınlanışlar ve farkındalıklar yaşadığımı itiraf edebilirim. En sevdiğim Öteki Hafta adlı öyküde yoksul çiftin içinde bulundukları duruma açıklık getirmek için Kant felsefesinden yardım almaları da bu tezimi destekleyen bir şey. Hepsinde olmasa da öykülerin birçoğunda kitaba adını veren durum hakim.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection reaffirmed my opinion that Williams is at her best in the short form. And she really is extraordinary, with a sharp eye for the oddest details. Her characters are mostly lost or adrift, dying or barely living, socially inept, quirky and strange. The only story here that didn't work for me was 'Fortune,' which follows a group of privileged twenty-somethings living aimlessly in Guatemala who have recently been descended upon by their rich parents. The characters were all pretty flat and indifferent, the dialogue was mostly banal, and there was virtually none of Williams' bizarre humor. It reminded me too much of certain annoying people in real life. Unfortunately this story is longer than most and the last one in the collection. So it ended on a low point for me, but still did little to tarnish my overall experience. Favorite story was probably 'Congress,' which showcases Williams at her slightly surreal and off-kilter best.

[George Ilsley · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection started out interesting but lost me. It is an accomplishment, having characters saying something completely unexpected, but this feat did not draw me in. After a time, it had the opposite effect.

Williams is obviously a talented writer, yet these stories flew past without touching me. If only I were more clever . . .

[Merl Fluin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I ought to have something pithy, perspicacious and erudite to say about these stories. I really ought. But I'm afraid I'm just sitting here with a stunned expression on my face.

Stunned.

Yeah.

Just gonna sit here for a while.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5) Joy is not the first thing you think of when you read one of Joy Williams’s short stories, but it’s not quite the opposite. Neither joyful or morbid, the stories in this volume are mostly about circumstances in life; each wave of nausea coming in, the torrent of neurasthenia and a melancholic nuisance the mind provides; how our emotions provide comfort against our fears, but also have the tendency to implode on themselves when we need that barrier, that wall of safety at the most opportune of times. Our eventual demise is imminent, but the scenarios that lead up to our existence-meets-non-existence are a culmination of what’s perceived by others, what footprints we leave behind to be frozen in time or blown away by nature, to be forgotten, left to dwell in its banal insignificance.

[Sarah]

Given how much I adored Ill Nature and how into short stories I am at the moment I’m surprised and disappointed that I didn’t like this more.

[Mykle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wonder why I don't give this more stars. It's absolutely gorgeous writing, with a great sense of weirdness and detail and dialogue. Cameron Pierce lent me this specifically so I could read "Congress," the story about the deer-foot lamp -- and I loved it!

I guess I hoped the rest of the book would be equally surreal and unhinged, but instead the rest of the stories have convinced me that the weirdness of "Congress" is more a depiction of the heroine's mental illness than a step into impossible worlds. These characters are all about curious outward symptoms hinting at severe inner wreckage.

"A woman, cracking up from anguish and trauma inflicted by loved ones, starts behaving strangely in some desert or wasteland setting, while denying that she is behaving strangely or cracking up, Hilarity or pathos ensues, or both." Which story in this book am I describing? All of them. That is the formula that Joy WIlliams follows. (Except perhaps in the last two stories I didn't read.) And they're brilliant stories, magically done.

But I just can't follow that arc over and over without growing numb to these well-drawn women and their poignant problems. None of these stories end with completion or resolution -- which is totally fine, i'm not like the guy on IMDB who complained that the ending of Casablanca was "gay" and should have been more like 007: Golden Eye -- but the weird result of my reading this all in one afternoon is that I remain vaguely worried about, and annoyed with, the fates of a whole basket of dysfunctional non-existent women who define themselves through other people.

Which is a testament, I think, to the quality of the writing: haunting is the right word.

But honestly, there are so many other arcs in the world for a writer this good to trace. I feel the same way about this as about George Saunders: you are way too good a writer to be re-writing the same story over and over like this. Maybe her novels are different? Recommendations appreciated.

[Emmkay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can tell these short stories are well-written - their opaque literariness is a dead giveaway. I found the first pair especially interesting. In the titular story, a dying single mother and her teenage daughter are unable to communicate meaningfully, while in "Congress," which was beautifully bizarre, a woman's most meaningful relationship ends up being with a lamp she becomes emotionally attached to. But as I moved through the collection, I was increasingly alienated. So much "wait, what?", such unrelenting isolation, lack of meaning, lack of connection. I didn't really 'like' most of it, but those first two were well worth it. Maybe 2.5 stars? But giving stars seems as meaningless and uncommunicative as, you know, the entire world if we lived in a Joy Williams story. Hey, wait...

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

the best expression of joy williams' unique genius that i can think of is this: if "congress," the second story in this collection, can be said to have any sort of center, it is a world-renowned taxidermy museum in an otherwise middle-of-nowhere town that the protagonists stumble onto in the middle of their road trip. before it's introduced, though, we see another, smaller museum, one containing "only a petrified wedding cake, a petrified cat, some rocks and old clothes." it is never mentioned again. the detail is so marginalized that it evaporates into the narrative as a whole. this is what joy williams does, a technique so unique to her work that she can't even be said to do it best, as she's the only writer i know of who thinks to do it in the first place. she has an instinctual knowledge of what marginal details will make her central details absolutely sing.

and this is just part of some larger alchemical narrative system that she's privy to and that remains invisible to the rest of us. she's spoken against craft before, specifically the teaching of craft, and, while it's not a universal truth that craft is unhelpful, it makes perfect sense as her own philosophy given the emotive, instinctual, associative nature of her work. her stories are without center, and latching onto a theme in one of them feels as satisfying as solving the mystery before the detective does.

in lieu of legible themes, she has motifs. animals, especially cruelty to animals or neglect of animals (if there's a dog, which there usually is, it will only be called "the dog" or "it"); injury; fictional-sounding ethnographies delivered in dialogue; children; the non-sequitur ramblings of stranger. these various elements will exist alongside each other but never quite coalesce, making instead a loose cloud of narrative. you can't interpret or deconstruct these pieces, only feel them; they operate on a purely emotional level, and do so, somehow, entirely without sentiment.

her dialogue is realistic, funny, and characterizing when she wants it to be, but she rarely wants it to be. instead, we get characters speaking in paragraphs, using lofty, archaic language, telling nested stories. it would not work in stories with center, with direct themes, but in these loose networks it does. every stranger seems willing to share their life story, or their personal philosophy, or the history of a place that they are either from or have never been to. it never rings quite right. there's not one instance of dialogue that makes you feel more comfortable with a character, or that you understand them more. even when they say something verifiably true, either about the world of the story or our own, it feels like they're lying. they might say a line that tells you that they think about violence quite a lot, another that lets you know that they, personally, are capable of it, and a third that tells you that their mechanisms of interpreting reality are on such a different axis than our own that it will be impossible to tell what might cause them to act violently. not that violence ever comes; each of the many injuries in this collection (the ones suffered by humans, at least) are either self-inflicted or accidental. but an unnamed an implacable threat continues to build.

it's really a deeply moving, humbling experience to read her stories. sometimes you think that what you're trying to do with your own writing is somewhat original, that you're not there yet but what you have in mind is unique and interesting, and then you read someone who not only does that same thing but does it without trying and only in passing on the way to an even higher goal that you didn't even think to try, couldn't even imagine. i'm speaking too abstractly. in short, i didn't realize that narrative could have so much mystery while still being legible, didn't understand how many aspects of narrative could be held in suspense. i could rarely track the evolution of a theme or even a protagonist's emotional arc, but, on some level, it was working; something was keeping me reading.

read the stories and then read the review quotes on the inside. i don't mean to call these reviews inadequate--they're not; this book is very difficult to review; they do a better job of explaining it in a few words than i am in too many--but you come away feeling like they're telling you that a cormac mccarthy book has horses in it.according to the quotes (as decontextualized by the publisher), this collection is about "the pliability of the human heart, its marvelous ability to withstand adversity," "melancholia," "the inevitability of death." which, yes, all of those things appear in most of the stories, but they're not what it's about. i didn't come away understanding any of these ideas more clearly. instead, these stories withhold their "about-ness," which i didn't even realize was a valid goal. i'd like to try it, but i don't know that it can be learned.

i don't really use goodreads anymore. i especially don't like star ratings. but what else could i do? i didn't even know this book could exist.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny and you had to be careful in this milieu which was eleventh grade because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke. They had left the notes everywhere and they were full of misspellings and pretensions. Theirs had been a false show. Then this year a girl had taken an overdose of Tylenol which of course did nothing at all, but word of it got out and when she came back to school her locker had been broken into and was full of tylenol, just jammed with it. Like, you moron."

This is the first paragraph I ever read by Joy Williams, at a Barnes and Noble in West Virginia, and that was when I knew I would love her. Her prose stings, but it also shows the truth masterfully in a way that is surprising. More than anyone else, she captures the rarity of a moment, turns it on its head and shows us the truth behind it.

I know, I know. Gushing is probably the quickest way to turn someone off whichever writer or book you happen to be blabbing about, but Joy Williams induces this sort of cult-like infatuation. Someone suggest an antidote.

[Banu Yıldıran Genç · Rating 3 out of 5]

karısını terk eden adamlar, kocasını benzincide kaybeden kadınlar, annesinden nefret eden kızlar, yalnızlıktan her allahın günü hastane ziyaretine gidenler, ölmüş oğlunun arkadaşlarını eve toplayıp parti veren anneler...
o bildik amerikan rüyasını tersyüz ediyor joy williams. carver ve cheever ayarında bir öykücü.
favorim kitaba adını veren öykü.

[Alvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wildly original and disturbing tales of social disconnection and psychic dislocation.

[Elizabeth Halprin]

Women 👏🏼 own 👏🏼 the 👏🏼 short 👏🏼 story 👏🏼

[A. Raca · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Melekler, bir yerden ayrılma zamanının geldiğini orayı sizden önce terk ederek söylerler diye duymuştu bir yerden."

[Till Raether · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this a lot, and the opening paragraphs of the title story are absolutely spectacular (they're what brought me here, someone posting them on social media).

My problem is that the stories tend to blend into each other, paradoxically because of their (for lack of a better word) quirkiness, the bizarre details, the idiosyncratic behavior of the characters. I had the same problem with Ann Beattie a while ago. It's strange how such an unusual voice can became so samey after a while. So I think it would be better not to rush through this book.

The content matter is very dark overall.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joy Williams is one of those writers who teaches you how to read her as you read her. In other words, one of the great writers. And here we have one of the great writers writing about death. In other words, writing about life after death. In other words, about the lives of the living after the death of a loved-one or less-than-loved-one. In other words, everyone. All life is life after death. It's only a matter of proximity.

[James Horn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Phase Three of my trek through the short stories of Joy Williams, I have made my way through Honored Guest; and so far, it’s my least favorite. This is not to say these stories are bad (many are excellent), their were just not quite as many that were as deeply intriguing and affecting to me as the other collections.

The book starts off very strong. The titular story, Congress, and Marabou are all outstanding and you can read many others on here going deeper into them, particularly Congress. I may talk a bit more in depth about some of these in my review of The Visiting Privilege, but for now I’ll move it along.

That story, “The Visiting Privilege” initially published in this collection, was my least favorite due to its fat-phobic content. Again, I plan to go into a bit more detail about it in my other review, but it just bothers the hell out of me when skinny women (or anyone for that matter) write fat characters and only depict them as fat and negative. It sours the whole experience for me. Not only did this story do that, but it left the two women nameless for much of the story simply calling them the fat twins, then the main character nicknamed them (negative) and then continued to just identity them by their body type. Yuck.

If I am being honest with myself, I found much of the rest of this collection was kind of unmemorable. Maybe I was annoyed by the previous story but, I just didn’t connect with them. I did however notice the sort of jaded disconnection in the characters, that really made Harrow work for me. Particularly in “Fortune”and “Substance” but the rest as well. The other collection hinted at this, but here it seems to have become a style point for Ms Williams.

As I have been doing with these collections in other reviews, I’d like to go a bit deeper on the omissions from the Visiting Privilege. In this case we only lost one story “Claro” which I cannot for the life of me understand why they would leave this out. For me it was the highlight of the book. It also feels so Joy Williams, that it would have fit perfectly in a demonstrative omnibus, it’s not overlong or too short, and it really does not feel derivative. It did remind me of Juan Rulfo’s work, but not in an homage kind of way. Simply in the “Life for Life’s sake, and life can be cruel” way this story unfolds, which is not unlike many of her others. This has been the biggest oversight in the exclusions.

So for me this collection is absolutely still worth reading just that some are “good not great” but “good not great” for Joy Williams is still exceptional. If fat-phobia bothers you like it does me, skip TVP.

[Cleo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sending segments of this book to my partner as a way of flirting

[Christy Agrawal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Irreverent and strange. A perfect mirror of the world we live in.

Joy’s voice gets in your head like a weird sound some unknown appliance in your home is making that takes time to materialize in your conscious mind even though once it does you realize it’s been making it for days, and maybe something’s broken, but it can’t be that serious because it’s been days after all.

She builds a scene effortlessly, in so few words. Her dialogue reads like a conversation turned inside out - all organ and no skin. I thought she almost gave herself away in the second to last story as being Chekhov’s man with a hammer herself.

I dare you to try three sentences and not go for the fourth. I had to take a break and read another book in the midst of this one though - if you’re not careful an author like this will set you too loose in your own mind.

[Haley z · Rating 3 out of 5]

such interesting prose and imaginative stories but the majority of them felt sort of pointless, like i was brought into this little world but couldn’t bring anything away from it; i found the titular story especially disappointing in this way.

Congress was my absolute favorite of the lot and proof of what joy williams is capable of 🤧🤧 sad and off-kilter, and seemingly meandering until the end when everything is brought full circle. so well done.

[Matthew Peck · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third of William's story collections that I've read, and it's my favorite. As in the career arc of Cormac McCarthy, her move to the American Southwest seems to have opened up new channels of imagination. Her earlier collections were all about fractured families and alienated young women. The protagonists still run along those lines in 'Honored Guest', but it's death that's creeping in every tale here, overtly or covertly. Williams reminds the reader of how fragile and absurd human existence is over the course of these 12 perfect stories, which never, ever head in the expected direction, in terms of both plot and characterization. In 'Congress' a forensic anthropologist takes up hunting and fashions a lamp out of four deer legs; his wife becomes enthralled by this lamp and attributes to it animate, conscious qualities; after the husband suffers profound brain damage from falling asleep in a deer stand and driving his own arrow through his brain, they embark on a road trip to a taxidermy museum with a cultishly adored proprietor, who spontaneously names the wife as his successor...you know, that tired old story.
Other favorites: the haunting, sad title story, the blackly comic 'Charity', 'Visiting Priveleges'. These stories are both carefully controlled and crazy, and, as any Joy Williams fan will tell you: addictive. Take the advice of those fans and the many writers that esteem her so highly, and read 'Honored Guest' or 'The Quick And The Dead', already. You can meet children like this:

"I think of God as a magician," ZoeBella whispered, looking closely at Janice. "A rich magician who has a great many sheep who he hypnotizes so he won't have to pay for shepherds or fences to keep them from running away. The sheep know that eventually the magician wants to kill them because he wants their flesh and skin. So first the magician hypnotizes them into thinking that they're immortal and that no harm is being done to them when they get skinned, that on the contrary it will be very good for them and even pleasant. Then he hypnotizes them into thinking that the magician is their good master who loves them. Then he hypnotizes them into thinking that they're not sheep at all. And after all this, they never run away but quietly wait until the magician requires their flesh and their skin."

[Tatiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of Joy Williams' talent for story-crafting, I am in awe. I've often seen quotes taken from her works, and the beauty of those excerpts led me to Honored Guest, a collection of her short stories.

Sure enough, the prose is breathtaking: direct, flowing, and observational. The bleak, depressing mood will haunt you for days. The first few stories even gave me the urge to write, which is rare.

My major misgivings are that plot devices were repeated and several stories lacked resolution. The latter especially bothered me. I know high lit likes to think it's quirky for leaving the "point" to the reader to infer, but sometimes the story didn't travel far enough for there to be a point.

Overall, it was a dark wandering that I enjoyed. I will pick up more from Joy Williams in the future.

[Manzoid · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title story, about a teenage girl whose mother is dying, is fantastic. The "five stages of grief" turn into five hundred, the abyss yawns and waits behind every aggressively empty line that the mom utters. The atmosphere crackles with danger.

Four stars for that story alone.

The rest of the stories: meh. The loopy, dangerously-giddy, we-are-alone-in-a-universe-of-entropy-and-minor-madness tone gets old as more and more quirky characters parade before us and have random, often violent stuff happen to them (like a guy who falls out of a tree and stabs himself in the eye with an arrow). It just gets too random. But man, what a great opener.

[Adam Dalva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strong, slightly uneven collection of short stories that boast Williams's characteristic blend of absurdity and Americana, detachment and pathos. While it doesn't reach the heights of THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, I read quickly and with pleasure. In her dark humor, she is reminiscent of Lorrie Moore gone Wicca.

[Chaserrrr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Littered with dogs and perfumed with death, this is a collection of short stories like no other. Sometimes surreal, sometimes perplexing, never predictable. This is my first taste of Joy and I can't wait for more.

[Luke]

Someone donated all their Joy Williams (and by all I mean two books) except for the one I've been looking for for a while, so I did what I usually do and grabbed other works by a long chased author when the opportunity arose.