State of Grace

by Joy Williams

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEE • This "beautifully crafted" ( The New York Times Book Review), haunting, profoundly disquieting novel manages to be at once sparse and lush, to combine Biblical simplicity with Gothic intensity and strangeness.

It is the story of Kate, despised by her mother, bound to her father by ties stronger and darker than blood. It is the story of her attempted escapes—in detached sexual encounters, at a Southern college populated by spoiled and perverse beauties, and in a doomed marriage to a man who cannot understand what she is running from. Witty, erotic, searing acute, State of Grace bears the inimitable stamp of one of our finest and most provocative writers.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, American, The United States Of America, Womens, Book Club, Gothic

260 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

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

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Language is a poor medium to convey a nightmare. Dark memory is a rooted sorrow and we are incapable of excising those tendrils. Think of the last time you tried to convey the horror of a really bad nightmare to a loved one and recall how difficult is was to explain the dream, to explain your terror. That part of our mind is fettered. Perhaps for good reason.

Joy Williams' prose in State of Grace is the perfect unfurling of nightmare made cogent. In tight, staccato sentences that combined make an image that can barely be seen, Williams does something with a sad tale that makes it into a horror story. Whatever the last scary book I read didn't give me the willies like this one did.

The protagonist Kate exists in a hell that she only slightly realizes as hell. As the spectator, the reader, we are horrified at the events that shape her life. The book's three sections alternate between third person and first person narratives - and it's the section where Kate tells us her story in her own words that is the most heartbreaking.

Kate opines Nature is one vast mirage of infinite delusion. After reading her story, who am I to argue?

[Mala · Rating 4 out of 5]

State of Grace passes the page ninety test in that, if, like me, you too are initially put off by the rapid, staccato one-line sentences, hold on—because from that point onwards i.e. the Jaguar accident scene onwards this book proves big time why this NBA nominee made Joy Williams' reputation.
Book Two gave me the goosebumps. Reminded me of Faulkner & Hawthorne with its religious themes of sin & man's fallen state & a blind groping towards a state of grace.
This Paris Review excerpt quite captures the tone of this book:
"We are American writers, absorbing the American experience. We must absorb its heat, the recklessness and ruthlessness, the grotesqueries and cruelties. We must reflect the sprawl and smallness of America, its greedy optimism and dangerous sentimentality. And we must write with a pen—in Mark Twain’s phrase—warmed up in hell. We might have something then, worthy, necessary; a real literature instead of the Botox escapist lit told in the shiny prolix comedic style that has come to define us."*

One interesting parallel here is with Kay Boyle's The Crazy Hunter in that the mother character is never given a name—she is always "the mother" or simply "Mrs." A modern equivalent of "the mad woman in the attic,"—a complex character evoking both pathos & bafflement.
And just like the Boyle book, the sympathy existing between the father-daughter duo, which here, of course, takes a very sinister turn, provides layers of complexities. It's the stuff of nightmares:
"Everyone that has ever loved has loved this way.
There is no other way." (43)
How chilling those lines are when you realize the context!

Also identification is there with all those wounded, dying, dead animals—"Bryant's Beasts," whom Corinthian Brown tries reviving with his watchful concern but "Corinthian’s medicine of conscientious regard fails. It grieves him to think that his watching the animals doesn’t make any difference, that his eye seeing is worse than no eye at all because it has nowhere to turn but inward where the beasts, now twice bereft, vanish. They are suffering creatures, suffering his intrusion. And they go on. The continuing is all that remains to them. They have achieved what people think they themselves hope for. They cannot perish any more." (162)

Likewise, Kate Jackson is tied to her dark, disturbing past that no escape or confession of any sort could free her from:
"No possibilities are open to me. As I say, I wait. What is going to happen waits with me." (10)
"loving is good preparation for dying. I was the only one who learned this." (92)
"The falling hatchet loves the lamb and when bones ache, they ache for the breaking. It’s love that starves and makes us murderous." (93)
"He couldn’t imagine there were people like me who had answers to questions no one would ever ask, that there were those who lived without a life, like moths without stomachs, lived for years with their lives beyond them someplace, dangling useless on a gallows."(ibid)
"My life was slowing down. Nothing was feeding it any more. It was draining like a wound and there was a possibility that soon I might experience true freedom." (102)

There's plenty more stuff like that but you get the idea.

A GR friend here calls Joy Williams his "patron saint" which is what prompted me to read this book. I'm glad I've got many of her books with me & I intend to read them all.

(*) http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...

[Szplug · Rating 5 out of 5]

I paused some dozen or so pages into this book to reflect upon a couple of matters that had arisen and become wedged against the rhythmic current of the narrative—firstly, that I was struggling to grasp what exactly what taking place within the lilting snapshot vignettes of a wounded girl's life that had passed before me; and, immediate upon this, that the whole was comprised of sentences, of a peculiar cadence and texture, whose stricken beauty and enigmatic allure held me utterly enthralled. It dawned upon me that, provided Williams could maintain such a high level of fictional word-crafting, I didn't particularly need to fully understand the events uncovered through their artful allusion and linguistic liaison—I could be content merely to imbibe and admire the form they displayed in so doing. This is a writer who can deliver one haymaker of a sentence, both in isolation—ofttimes after setting it up with a diaphanous abstraction that unbalances the reader—or in continuous feed; and it wasn't long after I had stopped to contemplate this state of affairs that the story Williams intended, perhaps needed to tell began to coalesce with an urgency and raw precision that matched the prose in which it was set down.

I would still hesitate to recommend this book across the board—indeed, I could readily accept that others would find the entirety too dark and depressing, too esoteric and elliptical, too circular and sere to be worth the required investment of the reader's time and emotion. This is not a happy tale—there are no characters undamaged and undamaging, and even the halest of human attachments and connexions, in the hands of the talented Williams, are shorn of their glimmer and shine, strength and soundness; scrubbed down until the pallid bone and sickly flesh are all that remain, a flayed thing rendered dull and disquieting. Yet it spoke to me, powerfully and evocatively, if not always clearly. As a man who regularly chews upon the gristle of the past, worries purposelessly at the grim detritus of memory's tidal bore, I found that I could relate to the travails and follow the dilated gazes of Kate Jackson with a disturbing inherence—or, rather, as I understood the protagonist naïf through the author's presentation. Perhaps in fiction we are always finding some midpoint between the author's intent and our own adaptations at which to stake out our individual understanding.

In the alienating anticipation of heaven, life on earth is degraded to a hellishness; and in State of Grace it stands as a frozen Hell in Maine, a burning Hell in Florida. Everyone in the story is on a kinked path, lined with pathologies and secrets; and the worst is the secret of birth, wherein the fetus growing in the womb misshapes the mother's body in its kicking and demoniacal spasms, and misshapes her very life by the way that its entombed, unconscious dreams infiltrate and distort the awareness of the mother in real life. That most joyous of occasions, the birth of a child, is limned herein as a terrible burden, the demand to bear a wizened puppet attached, like a leech, at the breast, and allow it to drain whatever vestiges of willful purpose remain in one's mental reservoir after the daily allotment to a life straining against the circumferential pressures of nullity's deadening mass. The dichotomy between the sapping and imposing of wills, between parent and child, work in initiatory meme through Kate's mother and her madness, and her father in his cold and haughty piety. In the presence of rage one is discombobulated, but, ultimately, adaptable; it is the sense of being in the presence of one who possesses a secret, especially with an assured quality to the latter—whether infelicitous or benignant—that drives a restless resentment, a compulsion to inflict suffering. It is those who don't react in such a manner to her devastating secrets that Kate finds herself falling in love with, and thus, as she portends, sentencing to death. It seems Kate's innocence is intermingled with her guilt, her passivity with her continual movement in the service of subdued drives—in the world and in her mind. But both have the power to doom those whom she encounters that proffer her some form of love that is not God's Felon Fist.

Is the incest between Reverend and Kate Jackson actual or intimated? What comprised her tiptoed-around confession to Grady—he of the ear-pricked self-assurance and the uncomfortable love—that primed fate's gun to be triggered by her caressing fingers? How tenebrous is the connexion between the younger Kate, bound to the manse and her aphoristic explorations, and her elder self in perpetual flight? Who inflicted upon her such a vampiric pregnancy? Questions but peek from the darkened slats of the windows Kate brings into our vision, only to be shuttered within, unanswered, as an alternate one appears under her (mis)direction. You think that this vile confession that I have made is what I meant to say? To Williams, the innocent and the guilty differ not in the damage they cause, but merely in the degree or tenor of their culpability: for, whether one's action in or knowledge of the world, and the individual beings who inhabit its material environs, be sprung from haloed innocence or assuaging guilt, we cannot determine beforehand how they will affect or be received by those around us; and even the purest of motives can unleash the evilest of results. God cannot promise a world absent of evil because evil is determined by how we react to stimuli, internal and external, and these reactions are tainted by the weave of unknowing upon the loom of our dread unravelling into everything and nothing. We can work great harm in attempting great good, we can drive to the brink of madness those upon whom we desire naught but to provide succor and benefit: thus, innocence is harm without malice.

This is a story drenched in the inescapable complicity of Original Sin, where one's conscious life must, perforce, be beset with fears and flights, betrayals and impositions, where everything fragile shall, at last, be broken and the very act of love itself, its union between souls conjoining flesh and spirit, stand revealed in the mirror of the self as either a cold and mechanical exchange or the beastly satiation of an offshoot of murderous rage. This essence of sin has painted Kate into corners ever tighter and more constricting, until despair so overwhelms that it plateaus and she can actually make plans in the face of hopelessness. She wants nothing more than to reach that dearly longed for and promised State of Grace, and can only sense that there exists nothing more ineffably distant, further from her reach—for we cannot will ourselves into its presence, nor breach it through passivity; and though we strive to impose the speed and location wherein our stone punctures through the water's surface, we cannot control or direct the ripples it forms.

I thought State of Grace was near perfectly constructed, especially in the insertion into the middle portion of the novel of a third person authorial voice to counter the faltering recollections of the bookended sections as narrated by Kate; this removed narrator reveals the actions and thoughts of its target and her immediate family in a stronger light, one that makes fewer elisions and less allowance for the peregrinations of a young woman whose self-portrait of the past would be unbearable in more than quick peeks and glimpses. And the final stretch, broken once more into a string of island narratives, delivers the terrible blows of converging misfortune with a hermetic energy drained of all violence or vehemence. Kate's weariness has, by that point, affected the reader; I sat stone-faced while the lights were extinguished one-by-one, until, by the final page, I had returned with her to stand anew before the wind-scoured gates of an austere and parched temple, scrubbed of all but stern renunciation and rote litany, to anticipate the void.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

State of Grace, Joy Williams's first novel, was nominated for a National Book Award. I don't pay much attention to literary awards, but I think Williams's talent deserves formal recognition. It is the last of her novels that I've read and it bears certain hallmarks of her fiction that would follow. Namely, a peculiar-to-her strain of American Gothic replete with the desperation that comes with living in the dirty sweaty South⁠—with Williams, often Florida⁠—or just with living in general. Her characters always too smart and too broken to live 'normal' lives, they flail around dancing with death, instead seeking redemption in the company of other equally broken humans. It never really works out well for anyone involved, but why should it.

But I was tired, so tired. It seems I could hardly keep my eyes open. All night, I would walk through the rooms. And I would hear the sounds of living, those unmistakable sounds of growing, you know, as all things do, toward their death. Obscure, obscene sounds. None of it ever spoke to me. They told me I would walk through the rooms the way that Mother used to. It surprises me now. What did we think was possible? What chance of finding anything that was ours? I'd never do it now, I'll tell you. I wasn't much of a child, to be truthful, even then.

[Markus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eigentlich sollte ich diesen Text, der mir so flüchtig, so ungreifbar wie Sand zwischen den Fingern zerrinnt, sofort und auf der Stelle ein zweites Mal lesen. Dabei ist die Sprache scharf und präzise, punktgenau und von gnadenloser Ehrlichkeit. Um gleich die Gnade zu bemühen, diese milde Gabe, die von Gott selbst oder einem Stellvertreter im Talar erteilt wird. Wie steht es mit dieser Gnade, wenn man aus der Welt gefallen ist und es keinen Gott und keinen Richter mehr gibt?

Kate ist die Tochter eines Reverends im schwarzen Anzug und weißen Kragen, weißhaarig, evangelikal. Er liebt Kate abgöttisch, seine Liebe beschützt sie vor der Welt, eine Liebe wie ein Würgegriff. Jetzt ist Kate auf der Flucht in den Süden, von einer kalten Insel in Neuengland nach Florida. Sie wohnt im Studentenheim einer eigenartigen Schwesternverbindung, sie heiratet einen seltsamen Typen, der mit seinem alten Jaguar in einem Wohnwagen im Wald lebt und ist mit einem Schwarzen befreundet, der an einer schrecklichen Hautkrankheit leidet. Es beginnt eigentlich recht harmlos, aber Stück für Stück wird das Ausmaß an gegenwärtigem wie vergangenem Unglück klar, das sich über Kate zusammenbraut und zusammengebraut hat.

Besonders befremdlich sind Kates Reaktionen darauf, oder besser ihre Nichtreaktion. Sie nimmt die Dinge wahr, nimmt aber keinen Anteil. Und nicht aus Ignoranz oder Bosheit, es ist, als wäre nur ihr Körper anwesend. Sie wurde in eine fremde, unverständliche Welt geworfen, die sie nichts angeht, zu der sie keinerlei kausale Beziehung hat, keine Erwartungen, keine Erklärungen, sie versucht nur zu tun, was von ihr erwartet wird. Im Grunde gelingt es ihr nie, aus der Umklammerung ihres irren Vaters aufzuwachen und in ihrer Welt anzukommen. Würde sie aufwachen, müsste sie zerbrechen. Vielleicht ist dieser Zustand eine Gnade.

Was auf den ersten Seiten unscheinbar begann, wurde für mich immer mehr zu einem beklemmenden und dunklen Gefühl der Unruhe. Das liegt vor allem auch an der Erzählweise, die jede Kontinuität und Verlässlichkeit untergräbt. Williams lässt ihre Erzählerin sprunghaft zwischen Realität, Erinnerung und Traum, zwischen Nähe und Distanz wechseln. Alles erscheint wie durch ein Prisma gebrochen, und die einzelnen Splitter setzen sich erst langsam zu einem Bild zusammen. Das Wesentliche, das sich zwischen den Zeilen versteckt, offenbart sich fast unmerklich, bis es, wie nebenbei erwähnt, mit voller Wucht zuschlägt. Diese Konstruktion ist äußerst kunstvoll und lädt den Text mit einer ungeheuren Spannung auf, die weniger auf Handlung beruht als auf deren Abwesenheit. Dabei sind die Sätze knapp, nüchtern und lakonisch, was eine nervöse Energie sowie eine eigenartige, latente Poesie erzeugt.

Joy Williams, bei uns mehr oder weniger unbekannt, ist in ihrem Heimatland längst Kult und gehört dort zu den pointiertesten und originellsten Stimmen. "State of Grace", ihr erster Roman, wurde erst 50 Jahre nach seinem Erscheinen ins Deutsche übersetzt, wodurch die Autorin auch hier etwas Aufmerksamkeit bekam. Für mich ist es eine ganz bemerkenswerte Entdeckung, die mich nicht nur emotional ziemlich gefordert hat, sondern die auch eine literarische Meisterleistung darstellt. Absolute Empfehlung!

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I still find it very difficult to articulate what it is about the stories and novels of Joy Williams that consumes me whole, petrifies me, pulverizes me, mends and unmends me. But I can say, for STATE OF GRACE, it is a book that does all of the above and more. It's viciously sad, desperately funny, solemn and strange, and atmospherically haunting in the way that all of her work is. But especially here, when reading this novel, one feels as if one is seeing the world for the first time as the way it really is, and for the last time the way it is not. The world of the novel is contagious, sticks to your skin like grease when it's done with you.

[Sorry if there's a lot of Joy spam in the days to come. I'll be rereading all of Joy's books in preparation for the Tin House Workshop, where I'll be studying with her should I not persistently faint every morning at the aforementioned prospect. I am terrified, off I go.]

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If he were free," he says aloud, nodding toward the leopard, "he'd be hunting incessantly." He says the word with astonishment. "Incessantly."

Did I tell you that my Jean Rhys kick of last month was because of Joy Williams? I shouldn't be surprised now, I guess. "Oh." State of Grace was Joy Williams' first novel, published in 1973, and it could be her own Jean Rhys novel if you squint hard enough at the very Jean Rhys cover of the woman on the couch to see the blood stains and ignored filth. (I feel a faded photograph of a tropical bird would have been a better choice. Something off of a cereal box. The toy surprise has already gone.) The couch doesn't cushion the back that has removed its own spine to get a better view of the empty windows. More bendable that way. Sometimes the couch is in daddy's bedroom, or in a husband on wheels trailer park, spreading their seed motels, or in a sorority house. It doesn't matter that much where.

State of Grace is a dog that has been beaten to death. The dog is behind a booby trapped fence, not that it is getting up any time soon to look for a loop hole. The neighborhood psychopaths come along to stick their fingers into its color blind eyeballs, past the black and white brain mass. Wipe your hands on its pleasing fur. The dog is probably a lab. Labradors and dalmatians are like small children in that it takes two years for the soft spots on their skulls to fully form. Kate is an adult, a babe in her own belly, and that soft spot could be crushed by anything, still. Her brains are to be picked by anyone with a pointy thing in their pants. She's already dead. She will be back with daddy. I know this is so at all times. Her story is the hair growing past death. It's shiny like daddy likes it. Nails still painted too. There's nothing that anyone can do to save Kate. The corpse would fall to ashes in your arms if you tried to bury it some place nice. How about a nice farm with lots of room to run? Not gonna happen. Daddy's house would grow up right around it.

"And things were always out of my hands. I have always been grateful for that."

Have you heard that thing that cat people say when they talk about preferring cats to dogs? Blah blah cats won't put their tails between their legs and debase themselves for your affection? That thing. Does it have to do with feeling special if they like you? My cat will rub against my legs or hop in my lap when he's feeling lonely. That's not that often, really. If he wants to do his own thing that's cool too. My dogs have never had to perform like any kind of circus animal anything for me. Why does there have to be shame if they do want a hug the second I get home? I think Kate would probably agree with the cat people. There's such shame bleeding through like a preteen girl on her period for the first time and all of the boys see it and know what it means. Little Kate running towards her daddy with a big smile on her face, the prettiest Kate has ever been. This is the middle section of the book and not first person. No matter, the shame still feels Kates. There's the ass wagging too. What would it take to earn her affection? The analogy would get yet more cliched about this. Kate's not drawn far enough.

The sorority girls have bumps on their bums. The tops of their thighs have more unsightly bumps. I think I would gladly have done without any of the sorority girls cheese cake pictorial stuff. Kate the meat market. Men with life saver rolls for penises. I could have imagined any of this, anyway, and I just don't give a flying fuck if the hot girls have bumps on their asses. What the hell does that have to do with anything? Not blowing my mind. I got that Kate resented the sex status and would have rather have died than lose it. Beating my dead dog.

The truth is that I would have known all of it. From the perch on the stool in the dirty trailer park kitchen to the bus stop with her baby on the way back to daddy's. Teeth rotting from eating nothing but sugar crap if she weren't suspended as permanent baby. I don't want to know what daddy told her. I already know. Daddy's little girl. How did Kate disregard her mother telling her that she wished with all of her heart that it had been Kate who died instead of Kate's older sister? Because she "knew" that her mother was crazy? A dream of her mother asking her if her daddy touched her, a held hand... None of it ever happened. The wish dies before it could pack for the dark swim to life. He covered himself in her birthing blood and she stayed in his sperm for the rest of her life. Only daddy. The shadows under the hood of the guide for the River Styx of the death of every day of her life that gives up all choice. Kate ends up back in the sorority house without meaning too. She leaves her husband by telling him that there will always be daddy between them. Why wasn't there a "I wish this had never happened" instead of that she would want to be that sperm forever and ever? I mean, Christ. There was something important here and it was lost in the beating of what I got already that she was daddy's little sperm.

Some parts of the book later appear wholly in short stories of Williams. The "Action Man" advice phone line on the radio? That whole part was the first story in her collection Taking Care (1988). The girl who eats the maraschino cherries, and nothing else, even though they are very, very bad for her? That's in Honored Guest (2005). There's more than that, besides. I felt like Williams had some ideas that she wanted to use and they appear in Kate's story for no more reason than that. (This isn't the first time this has happened. Honored Guest accomplished what novel The Quick and the Dead didn't quite manage.) Kate's story could have brought me to my knees beside her inside out corpse on someone else's front lawn asking for help she is incapable of giving to herself. She wouldn't hunt if she were free. But I felt beaten myself. There's too many comets, oh wait I mean sperm, riding on the back of the sentences to knock this earth off its intended axis. I wasn't as moved as I could have been. Was there not yet life on this planet? Kate isn't born yet and all of the other people are walking around with their cliched good old southern boy husbands and this could be my last chance anyone else could make it with a guy like this.

I can't help but think of Jean Rhys and her spineless characters. They are wholly unwilling to help themselves. When Rhys is great it is because the story is about how they won't help themselves. The dark space in their cavities is where it takes place. When she's not great it is because it is what everyone else is doing that's to blame. Williams is by no means the empty lipstick tube that Kate Fucking Zambreno was in her Rhys "homage" Green Girl (I hate that book), though. I just think she was trying too hard to be pretty, again, like the weaker moments of her other two novels I've read, Breaking and Entering and The Quick and the Dead. The sun fades out too much for the stars. Williams has a much bigger world than this unborn one. You don't have to work so hard for me. Dance if you want to. You'll have to bring your own milk but I've got sugar cereals.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

From p120

"The Woman had given little cries. Her shanks were skinny, her shoulders gaunt. Her mouth had opened into a crooked O. Her teeth lay across it like tiny fishes waiting to be hatched. The Child had heard of this. Fishes born in their mothers' mouths, fleeing back there when in danger. The woman's mouth had closed with a moist sea sound. She had writhed briefly, she had straightened. Like a thick weed floating in the valley of the surf, her stomach plump and vulnerable as a seaweed's pod. The child had often thought at that point, for there had always been that point in the day at the edge of her mother's room, just before she, the child, would leave, the child had often thought that if she crept into the room, softly, so that the woman would not become aware of it, like an Indian, like a thief, clever and soundless as a hawk or a shark, that if she slipped into the room and embraced her, lightly, lightly and unbeknownst to the woman, if she encircled her waist with her own small arms as best she could and squeezed suddenly and very hard, the swollen stomach would pop like a blister of bladder wrack, it would crack like the grim Atlantic and all would be delivered and dispelled. The baby would rush to the floor in a flood. There would be a briny, shiny smell, and then the ceiling of the room and then the roof of the house would topple away leaving in the dull day, and then the winter sun, with its evaporating qualities, with its own mysteries, would drink up every drop. "

This pretty much sums up what I love about her writing, though some of its power is lost when removed from its context, and from the slow build-up of meaning that occurs.

I am particularly fond of "pop like a blister of bladder wrack " – not only is this a perfect image, but the music of it is wonderful.

Anyway, what can I say about her? There are some great reviews up here already. William Gaddis mentions in his letters that he thought it an excellent piece of work. Personally I prefer to let JW speak for herself, and I think the quote above should be sufficient.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars may be a little high for this first novel, it is confusing and difficult, but I’m in love with her beautiful prose and its lovely oddities. Quotes:

The leopard shuts its eyes, deep in an animal music.

Galloping horseless toward her life, which is up past the hill, in the parsonage, in the winding halls, in the rooms gone to storage, in this silence, this requirement, this breeding place of dreams..

Her mouth had opened into a crooked O. Her teeth lay across it like tiny fishes waiting to be hatched. The Child had heard of this. Fishes born in their mothers' mouths, fleeing back there when in danger. The woman's mouth had closed with a moist sea sound.

I can’t understand why God made every tiny snowflake different and all these men the same.

I walk through an arc of bougainvillaea. The sky is bloody with flowers. The petals on the ground are as delicate as rice paper. I try not to step on them. I make every effort to avoid the sound of breakage.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

I associate Joy Williams partly with her ear for idiosyncratic dialogue, but that kicked into full gear a little later. Here, in her 1973 first novel, the story accrues not so much through the interactions of its characters as through a slow sedimentation of details: bits of setting and scenery, vivid sensoria, snatches of overheard words, fragmentary memories impinging on the present moment. In fact Williams spends so much of the story's length circling back through time to piece together how her protagonist got here that it scarcely moves forward at all. Which is somewhat fitting, as Kate is at a point of stasis, waiting out a pregnancy that doesn't seem to have been intended, slipping in and out of college classes she barely attends anymore, adrift on the heavy heat of Florida's panhandle Gulf Coast, disconnected from her past and her future and her own life.

This inertia, this lack of present might have run against my preference for immediacy if the whole story didn't feel not so much retrospective as instantaneous and simultaneous. All details are weighed down by the others that connect them in an inescapable web. Each moment contains every moment. And all that may be occurs, when it does, in a flash of devastation from which nothing may be altered or escapes.

State of Grace is a pervasive stifling mood in which nothing and everything transpires, and the most critical events slide off the page and disappear. Borderline southern gothic, borderline horror, but instead of genre something disconcerting and nebulous of its own.

[nethescurial · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The child can achieve all worlds but this one."

Just gotta admit I'm defeated, I cannot fucking talk about this all without feeling like I was diminishing the novel lmao, had a whole big thing written here and it was so lame I just scrapped it. Which is a bit shocking because I at the very least can say I did not expect to be half a dozen books through my ongoing Joy Williams dive and finding this debut to be in many ways the richest and most boundary-defying novel she's ever penned, but if reading Williams' work has taught me anything it's to expect the unexpected, and boy what a fucking shock to the senses. Williams at her most maniacally creative and carnivalesque but still so subtle, endlessly flourishing dark beauty and ambiguity suffusing and sustaining every inch of this mind-bogglingly creative hurricane of a narrative... a book not about staring into the abyss but about diving headfirst into it full fucking throttle because that's the only way we can understand why and how the personal is the spiritual is the infinite. Like all Williams, speaks for itself while also being completely and utterly indescribable, as titanic in the implications of what it leaves out as what it shows directly, and penned with some of the most stirring prose ever written in English. A tragic-comic-empathic journey through time and memory to just completely drown yourself in. How we're not singing Joy Williams names from the mountaintops at this point is beyond me, but god how lucky we are to be existing in a universe where she's writing at all. Top shelf fiction.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

reread this for book club and it’s just as devastating and beautiful as it was the first time and also still solidly in my top 5 novels of all time

[Anne Sanow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Torrid, gorgeous, challenging, frustrating, stunning. I'm just going to reproduce the opening paragraph below:

"There is no warning of daylight here. It is strange to know that it is only twenty miles to the Gulf of Mexico and all that dizzying impossible white light, for here there is such darkness. Here when one can see the sky, it is almost always blue, but the trees are so thick nothing can make its way through them. Not the sun or the wind. And the ground never dries. The yard is rich mud with no definition between it and the riverbank. Tiny fish swim in the marks our feet make. The trees are tall and always look wet as though they'd been dipped in grease. Many of them are magnolias and oaks. Pods, nuts and Spanish moss hang in wide festoons. The river is the perfect representation of a southern river, thin and blond, swampy, sloppy and warm. It is in everyone's geography book. I was not shocked at all when I saw it. I was not pleased, although it is quite pretty."

I am always trying to write an opening paragraph that is that good.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

About 10% of the sentences in State of Grace don't make sense in a way I can parse, but the sound and arrangement of words is so hypnotic it hardly seems to matter. I would dip into this book on occasion and listen to the language croon its spare and cruel melody. And try not to recoil at the savage and squalid imagery it spawns.

Part I & Part III could perhaps be described as the prose embodiment of wading through a polluted swamp. (Suffocating humidity; swarms of mosquitoes; dark sludge oozing with blood; the knowledge the muck you’re covered in also covers decomposing bodies). Part II, set in the frigid past of narrator Kate’s childhood in the wintery north, is the prose-embodiment of freezing to death due to exposure on a mountain slope.

Really, I'm okay.

This is a book that stings. On one hand the language is thrilling, but you can’t apply the word “pretty” or “beautiful” to any part of this book. (So much decay, so much corruption). The ending made me upset in the minutes immediately after turning the last page. It was the irrefutable proof that I'd been willfully misreading the novel all along. A day later, and I can accept the ending and the form this novel takes without rancor. The mistake I made was believing, hoping—lured by the intense, lyrical prose—that narrator Kate was viable, her heart beating with life the way her language does. But in fact she was long dead. She completes a circle in the prescribed path of her life and the bodies—of people who would love or interact with her— fall down around her, stricken.

I wouldn’t recommend this novel to just anyone. It takes a certain tolerance: you have to not mind filth. It’s leaves that same soiled feeling you get from reading the perversities of Angela Carter, while the prose achieved a rhythm that, for me, recalled Sylvia Plath’s poetry better than Plath’s prose.

Maybe I am getting too effusive but I haven’t read anything for a long time as bracing for the English language as what Joy Williams creates in State of Grace. I can deal with some putrefaction for prose as alive as this.

***
Have many quotes:

" … The important thing is to consider the significance of things and not to worry about their authenticity. ”

“It’s difficult to tell at the end of the day whether it was theory or need that got you through it.”

"All those trees being made into publishable lies, I say."

"I can’t understand why God made every tiny snowflake different and all these men the same.”

"Yes, I'm deep as the Styx."

"Most people that later one discovers are significant to one’s living are met through glimpse and carelessness, through stumbling brush and grope.”

“If I begin the story and do not finish it or if I begin it and do not tell it properly in the way it happened, in the time and the place and the circumstance, in the correct sequence of results, will it not then persist like a drowned man, going on to haunt the sea?”

" Your daddy told your mama to raise you so that you would love that which was good and hate that which was evil and you grew up hating and loving all the right things in all the right places and that’s dandy but it doesn’t seem to work out in the long run.”

“ I feel uneasily that his discoveries are the same as mine, that the methods he has chosen to get through the days, the weeks and into the years that he can put behind him are no different from my methods. The result’s the same—we trample people in the eagerness to get on with our dying.”

“It’s love that starves and makes us murderous. ”

“There was dead ice and living ice, her father had told her. One was white and one was blue. Everything was living and dead together. There was always some part of you that was dead.”

“And I would hear the sounds of living, those unmistakable sounds of growing, you know, as all things do, toward their death. ”

“I walk through an arc of bougainvillaea. The sky is bloody with flowers. The petals on the ground are as delicate as rice paper. I try not to step on them. I make every effort to avoid the sound of breakage.”

[alyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm paralyzed by what I might say here. This is my favorite book. I think I first read it in 2011. I'm not usually good with time, but I think I'm right. I reread it to confirm that it's truly as ugly and as beautiful as I remembered.

"I can't understand why God made every tiny snowflake different and all these men the same."

"I want to have him love me. The fact that he does already troubles both of us."

"He couldn't imagine that there were people like me who had answers to questions no one would ever ask, that there were those who lived without a life, like moths without stomachs, lived for years with their lives beyond them someplace, dangling useless on a gallows."

"When Grady was at school, I spent hours in utter solitude and didn't learn a thing. At first I was alarmed, but then I realized that it was what I wanted all the time. My life was slowing down. Nothing was feeding it anymore. It was draining like a wound and there was a possibility that soon I would experience true freedom."

"The child believes that her life is behind the door. She believes that the door will become lighter as she grows until just before she dies it will have no weight or substance to it than a scrap of paper. She'll be able to fall right through it. She watches it every day and it never changes."

"Being in love is not what he had expected it to be. She has taken away his energy and replaced it with premonition. He had imagined a different woman. Often he had imagined no woman at all for this was not necessary to him. He could make his way with nothing. Now he is involved with the nothingness within her."

"But I was a simple child. One incident is very clear. I was swimming with Daddy, splashing in the shallows while he watched, and little fish swam into my hair and caught there, you know, in my tangled hair, for Father did not always brush my hair, and the little fish had died by the time that we discovered them. It's very clear. It seems I was unconsolable."

"People go, you know. It's only you that remains. That's the way it will be. That's certain at least.
It takes years to learn to be still."

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this novel in my graduate school years and I couldn't tell you what it was about. I just remember that I had a religious experience with it. That it was frightening and amazing, and that I felt shaken during and after, frequently, when I was reading it.

A week ago I was in a friend's guest room and found it again. I picked it up and flipped it open, and I could feel, with a sort of weird feeling, what a profound impact this book had on my work. There are other works I could point to, where the influence is more directly obvious to me: Deborah Eisenberg's Under The 82nd Airborne, Anne Carson's Kinds of Water essay and her Autobiography of Red. But this book, and Joy Williams in particular, is apparently as or more important than they were.

This novel isn't like any of her other novels or stories, not even a little, in style. Re-reading it is interesting--I can read a few pages at a time. But I love the density of it and I feel like this time I may actually understand what I read, because I don't think I did the last time.

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was thinking about giving this three stars while reading the first section (of three) because I'm not always into the super descriptive biblically-tinged Southern Gothic style that she is operating in, but by the second section it had really grown on me and by the third I was totally blown away. Joy Williams is a sorcerer and every single word in this book is haunting and lonely and painfully beautiful! Emphasis on painful because it's beyond brutal, a story that jumps back and forth constantly and slowly constructs a narrative of death and abuse and emotional wreckage around its main character Kate as she grows up and feels powerless against men and nature. Williams writes in a really abrupt style full of short punchy sentences, but every word and phrase feels carefully chosen to lodge deep into your brain and heart. Gorgeous and heartbreaking!

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joy Williams writes well, which doesn’t mean everything is clear in her first novel, A STATE OF GRACE. Most of the book is told by the protagonist who hints at a tragic past and lives in a present that feels destined to doom. Her language is both over-ripe like a fat juicy piece of fruit that hangs heavy from a tree, but it’s never sickly sweet - almost mythic in its power. The bits of plot or really episodes that made it through the sentences, which are revealing and protective at the same time, land if not perfectly in place but with a satisfactory thud by the end. I can’t say I looked forward to picking up the book, but I found reading it a wonder. There’s an awe to the story that sticks around long after the last beautiful word is ended by the shot of a final period.

[RP · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I held off on this for so long because the description makes it sound sort of conventional, but it is NOT CONVENTIONAL, and I should have known better. We're talking about Joy here! This is a brilliant, inventive, strange, sometimes brutal, darkly funny novel. A novel which lives in the past, present, and future simultaneously. This is how we all live, with the past invading, the specter of death hanging over our present lives. Kate is disturbed, in great trouble, and this trouble propels the narrative forward, without holding our hand. This is a novel that teaches you how to read it as you go.

In her forward to the Collected Works of Jane Bowles, Joy writes: "Of course, this is the most important thing a writer can learn—the necessity of finding one's own dangerous, inimitable, and lonely place, and writing from there."

I think Joy Williams is the perfect example of a writer succeeding at this, and STATE OF GRACE is her first expression of it.

[Bouman · Rating 4 out of 5]

En la novela Joy Williams habla de la vida, a mi entender del fracaso de la misma, por cumplir unos cánones autoimpuestos que parece nunca llegan a realizarse del todo. No son los que marca la sociedad, tal vez por ello sea más costoso conseguirlo. Al margen de la realidad Kate, la protagonista de Estado de gracia, no deja nunca de creer, de pensar que todo puede llegar a ser perfecto, a su manera. Ella debe desobedecer y alejarse de su padre, un Padre religioso que...more

[Sarahc Caflisch · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are reading something that isn't "State of Grace," and not written by Joy Williams and you think, "Now the revolution has begun." You are wrong, what you are reading is only a dim echo of the revolution.

[Chris Gager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got this on an inter-library loan today so I'll have to start reading it tonight along with Great Expectations.

Well ... I'm a ways into this after last night. I had to stop when I unconsciously slipped into skimming the stream of consciousness narration. Reading this made me think of William Faulkner, William H. Gass, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, Michael Chabon(obscure wordism), Walker Percy, Alice Adams and Carson McCullers. Probably a few more will pop up as I continue. I suppose I'll be as committed to reading this as I was to reading "The Sound and the Fury" although I can't say that I'm having much fun. It ain't no "Great Expectations," though it does bear a rough kinship to CD's coming of age(under duress) narratives. If this were 500 pages or so I couldn't bear it. Think "Lolita" crossed with "Outer Dark" if you will. Weird? Yup!

The story actually gets told but it's not so easy top follow. Kate has gone off to college, leaving behind an incestuous relationship with her bible-squeezing, narcissistic, sex-addicted father. He IS a fine one! He comes to retrieve her and she limply goes off with him for a few months before coming back to a one-nighter with a guy who gallantly winds up marrying her when she announces her pregnancy. The bio-father? Could be Daddy of course. Kate herself has been a bit of a slut before this, pretty much sleeping with any guy who asks. This is not an uncommon fate for survivors of incest - it's pretty well documented these days. Bad sexual boundaries and all that. That plus a pile of mush where a personality ought to be. This comes from being dominated by a loony, heavily controlling parent for many years and un-protected by the other parent. In Kate's case that "other parent" would be Mother. The story bears a general similarity to my own family history so there's that to keep me tuned in.

- phronemaphobic - ?, ablepharous - ? couldn't find 'em in my dictionary!

- Cords is an interesting character, but ... a small southern college girl???

- Yashika s.b. Yashica = a brand of camera I once owned myself and gave to my sister when I got out of the Navy. I took some nice pictures with it but had no motivation to continue, nor much motivation to do anything else. My own "case" is similar to Kate's - tough to survive and thrive in an adult world if you're not an adult!

Well into Book II now and the backstory, which takes place in Maine. Ina word - DREARY! But easier to read... As in "The Sound and the Fury" different parts of the book are written differently: Book I is first person(spacey Kate), while Book II is third person as Kate is a little girl. NOtes:

- Why didn't the mother get some help? It was the 1950's, not the middle ages.

- Speaking of the mother ... she's was another gone-one, like in "Plainsong" and "The Sound and the Fury." Women whose temperament made them lousy adults and parents. Like Blanche Dubois ... flighty and dreamy.

- As with the accident in Book I the mother's deterioration goes on and on.

- Book II reminds me a bit of "Housekeeping."

- The 7-year-old Kate seems a bit too verbally precocious to me.

Moving on and back to a more recent past and Kate's time at college and her meeting with Grady. I confess that I've become both bored and exasperated with the spacey Kate and her dysfunctional families woes(these are severe and depressing). I assume that there will come more illumination of her relationship with her odious father in the years after the twin disasters that occur when Kate is about seven-eight years old. Her parents are both nuts, of course and her father was obviously getting into her head and twisting it before Mom and Sis both died. Whether he actually incested her the old-fashioned way(sexual intercourse) is almost beside the point. Seems as clear as the author can make it(not very) that he may have been touchy-feely with both of the girls but Ms. Williams can't come at anything in a straightforward way. He reached out to Kate in childhood and took control of her little self and filled her brain with his own version of Biblical wisdom - UGH! Again comes the reminder of "Lolita" ... It's possible to feel great compassion for someone and still be exasperated with them. I think of my own life, with a somewhat similar arc as Kate's.

- A character, as in Great Expectations, who can close only one eye!

Finished last night with Book III and a return to the first person narration of spacey Kate. The whole thing ends in a multi-faceted disaster. Very depressing, as others have pointed out. So ... what's the point? One: people suffering from heavy-duty child abuse, mental/physical/emotional are gonna have a tough time surviving in the "real" world. The author makes Kate's story particularly awful so one might complain that it was all a bit over-determined but it's a novel so ...
The other point was for Ms. Williams to make a literary splash writing something Faulkner-esque. I'd say she accomplished both pretty well, though I can't say I had a lot of fun reading this and won't read any more of her stuff any time soon. A very tough book to rate. I guess if you're into that dreamy-streamy poetic prose stuff you might give this a 4* or 5* rating. Plenty of people have. And I DO like that sometimes: Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy come to mind. I gave "The Sound and the Fury" a 4* rating even though it was a struggle to read. This one gets a 3.5*(rounds down to 3*) for the overall haunting feeling I got from reading it. In its own way it's pretty good.

- The leopard disaster - a bit obvious how that was going to work out eh?

- A "Chinatown" kind of ending...

- What does the author think of human culture and society? Not much!!

- Cords is a fantasy human, like all the rest of the characters in this book.

- This book skirts the line between "Already Dead" and "The Stars at Noon" - both by Denis Johnson. In fact, I wonder if DJ read this before he wrote "The Stars at Noon," his own dreamy-streamy hot damp lost drunk young woman in love novel. Pretty darned similar!

- The overabundance of literary references is annoying. Kinugasa's "Crossways"????? It's grad school/workshop-Chabon stuff.

- Kate is ruinously detached, a dead undead person TRYING and failing badly to live like normal person. Finally she gives up and returns to the safety of her abuser/controller(Daddy)'s world.

[John Treat · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first, the story of Katie, then Daddy, then Grady— but there are more people to know about , including a young man with a tiger and a baby never given a name. What power there is in Williams’ language. You think it odd at first, but immediately realize it is perfect. It never should have taken me this long to discover this book. I think that not only my writing, but even my life, might have been different had I known this book when I was young.

[Kavish Harjai · Rating 5 out of 5]

do not read this in the dark under your comforter. find somewhere sunny and where there are flowers because there is nothing joyful about this book! though i only knew what was going on 60% of the time, i still think state of grace is beautifully written. a beautifully written drawn-out episode of despair

[Io Perl-Strahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

she is the best........... the darkness enfolds you and reveals that it can be lived in too.. each sentence is deeply creative, I imagine her writing them in bursts of inspiration, fits of purpose, unable to do anything else in that moment. I don't imagine her editing which is not to say the book is untidy, the plot is an impressive web, nonlinear narrative that must have been painstakingly crafted, but still I can't imagine it ever having been any way other than the way it is.

[Alika · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writing/language throughout was stunning, many lines were highlighted just because of the language. Overall the story left me with a cold, sad, intense feeling--a kind of mourning. So many people died, it seemed. Even though there was new life at the end. And a feeling of stillness, peace, letting go, hope. But that was only for a few pages. The rest was pretty bleak. But still, good writing. Interesting use of the first person in the first and last section, but omniscient in the middle section. At first it put me off (I don’t usually like changing from first to third, especially omniscient, because by then I’ve gotten into the rhythm of the first person voice). But after I started reading, I did really like that section. And it offered some new things, needed information, change of tone. It was also perhaps the most humorous section. Anyway, overall a great book, but I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I frequently have nightmares. They take two inarticulatable forms. There are no images in them at all. They are pure fear and dismay, a sense of the tremendous strength of the dark, a sense that I have not done what it was I knew I should have done.

[Simon A. Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a HUGE fan of Joy's short stories but this novel didn't work for me. Sustaining that capricious, magical, lyrical style throughout 300 pages... I just think her style is better suited to the short story.

[Javier Avilés · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leedla. Y luego releedla. Es magistral.
Estado de gracia, de Joy Williams

[Ancla Müller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Komplex!

**** Worum geht es? ****
Eine Flucht vor dem Predigervater, eine Liebelei um sich neu zu orientieren und das Leben das im Erwachsenwerden, emotionaler Verantwortungen und der Vergangenheit zu versinken droht.

**** Mein Eindruck ****
Die Erzählung der Protagonistin kann auf den ersten Blick verwirrend und durcheinander wirken. Weder chronologisch noch zielorientiert verfolgte ich die Gedanken und Handlungen der Protagonistin. Joy Williams ist für mich eine Autorin, die man entweder mag oder mit der man sonst so gar nichts anfangen kann. Der Aufbau dieser Erzählung ist komplex und erfordert viel Konzentration und Geduld. Lohnt die Essenz, das was am Ende bleibt, um sich „dadurch zu wühlen“? Ja, denn ich erlebte in Gänze, die von mir geschätzte Kunst der Autorin. Ihre Sicht auf die Welt ist ansteckend. Der Blick für die Details, die Wortgewandtheit und die kurzen prägnanten Sätze sind durchweg einnehmend. Eine ganz eigene Tonität und Umsetzung. Der Einblick in das Leben der Protagonistin war verstörend und schmerzhaft, ein Kampf um das frei sein, eine Flucht aus der Welt des Missbrauchs und ein Blick auf eine Vergangenheit, die stets hinter einem lauert. Ich konnte der Erzählung viel abgewinnen, hätte mir trotzdem manchmal mehr Struktur gewünscht und insgesamt etwas weniger Text, längst nicht alles war wichtig um der Essenz folgen zu können.

**** Empfehlung? ****
Hier bekommt man bewusst unstrukturierte Literatur mit Schliff. Ein Stil den man mag oder nicht. Es lohnt sich hier, das herauszufinden.