Escapes

by Joy Williams

These prize winning stories confirm what readers of 'State Of Grace' and 'Taking Care' already suspected: that Joy Williams is a writer of unparalleled empathy and emotional candor, who can render the 'hopeless and uncomprehending love' between a little girl and her alcoholic mother, the panicky restlessness of a couple trying to outrun the exhaustion of their marriage, or the quiet unease of a man watching a vintage car disintegrate in his living room with a sureness of pitch that it at once heartbreaking and elating.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, American, Short Story Collection, Womens, The United States Of America

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

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

[Mariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are twelve stories in Joy Williams's short story collection Escapes. My sincerest apologies from the bottom of the swampy cesspool that is my heart because I'm only going to write about a few of them. I might go back and add more later because writing not good enough Joy Williams reviews on goodreads is just something that I like to do. Okay! (Okay, some of you might be thinking "Just write something about all the stories in some neat paragraph thingy. No one wants to read that much about stories they are never going to read." These were published in various anthologies. They aren't exactly connected in any special way. What do you take me for, anyway? Some nut job on goodreads who writes super long reviews and habitually imposes on her goodreads friends? Never!)

(If you find you absolutely cannot forgive me for omissions here is a list of all the stories. Ask me about any of them and I'll do my thing (I don't expect that anyone will but you never know):
Escapes
Rot
The Skater
Lu-Lu
Gurdjieff in the Sunshine State
Bromeliads
The Little Winter
The Route
Health
White
The Blue Men
The Last Generation)

Escapes:
Houdini made an elephant disappear. He could make you go poof if he wanted to. If you wanted to escape and he was so inclined he could make you escape. Poof! Too bad he is dead and it's not going to happen. What if you couldn't reconcile this and you went back and forth between your kitchen where you pined to go poof and clubs where two-bit magicians who couldn't really saw anyone in half. If you asked them to do it they would say no. If you're one of these people you have that look in your eye. Maybe you have the tell tale signs of broken limbs for trying to jump off a bridge like Houdini. I have practiced Houdini poses myself. I have dreams of invincibility and feeling like a fraud. That's one of the things I find so darn interesting about the man. He defrauded other people and saw himself as a fraud. Man. So last year I wrote my own shitty story partly inspired by Frank Gilmore (Gary's dad) who was in prison and believed all his life that Houdini was his real father. I'm gonna do it! I'm gonna escape! Joy Williams is awesome. The longing and stale lights have long gone up and time to go home, folks, nothing to see here.

(I had one of those impossibly dorky moments of feeling like Joy Williams read my mind that she wrote about Houdini. Freaking retarded as this collection came out in 1990. I never said I was reasonable. I could list off tons of things like this but then I would come off as a total loser. Since I'm doing okay so far...)



Rot:
Twenty-four year old Dwight was going to marry Lucy when he saw her as a baby. What was so special about that baby, anyway? I thought the current girlfriend had a valid point there. What was so special about waiting and waiting while Dwight went off to pass the time with those who couldn't have and a future that couldn't have. Dwight doesn't want to drive his car, essentially. He gots a rotting t-bird and sticks it in their living room.Drive it, his friend who knows a lot about cars says. I thought he had a valid point. It's Dwight's place to think. What for? What is he going to do with any of those thoughts, anyway? Maybe the t-bird wanted to be driven. Lucy was a bit of an idiot, though. Maybe if the car could speak it would sound like Lucy. I don't want to share yoooooou. Think about me! Don't think in me. My own valid point is he just waited too much. I would prefer to put my ear to the hood of the car and listen to it. Did I ever tell you that I have prophetic car dreams? Okay, it was only once! But my dream predicted by own car troubles this year. True story.



The Skater:
God, if there is such a person, fucked up and let a young girl choke on a piece of bread. It's probably some kind of trick question that the mother Annie hates so much. Annie is scared. She wants to send their other daughter, Molly, away to school so she won't grow up as scared as Annie. Molly invents stories about her sister and another dead kid at one of the schools to give her the future she never had. Tom doesn't know how to skate when he joins Annie on the ice. I don't know how to skate either but I thought there was grace in the way that Tom keeps on moving to meet them where they are. Molly remembers what she sees, giving futures in her memories. I thought this was lovely and sad. I want to remember and skate like they do. I don't understand that one author's blog that said NONE of the characters in these stories had a chance. They had each other. That's better than a trick question. One answer. They loved.



Bromeliads:
Williams quotes Rainer Maria Rilke a lot, I've noticed. I love him too. "Was it not with a thing that you first shared your heart, like a piece of bread that had to suffice for two? Was it not with a thing that you experienced, through it, through its existence, through its anyhow appearance, through its final smashing or enigmatic departure, all that is human, right into the depths of death?" Jones's daughter has a baby. The piece of bread wasn't enough in their mouths with her or her with her baby. This story was told in a way as the title story in her collection Taking Care. The wife was dying and the daughter leaves the baby (under different circumstances). Jones is in love in both and wanting to take care and share. I hope the baby will leave some of the bread for him when she grows up. Bromeliads are mentioned in other Williams's stories as the plant that people prefer because you don't have to take much care of it. That's not true! Jones looks like he needs a little bit of it himself.



The Little Winter:
This one might be my favorite.
"She wanted to say something but that wasn't even it. She didn't want to say anything. She wanted to realize something she couldn't say. She heard a voice, it must have been Gwendal's, in the bedroom. Gloria lay down in the tub. The water wasn't as warm as she expected. Your silence is no deterrent to me, Gloria, the voice said. She reached for the hot-water faucet but it rain in cold. If she let it run, it might get warm, she thought. That's what they say. Or again, that might not be it."
Gloria has run away with her friend's daughter Gwendal. The first they do is steal a dog because they are invincible after the first escape. But then the dog escapes and it's a deflated escape after that. Things were supposed to be different. Gloria doesn't know what to say after that and things pretty much blow up with Gwendal. I loved that. It made me think of the story Gloria tells about wanting her mom to have another baby. She feeds her dust because of the way that kids will take some random saying as god's honest truth. If that doesn't work, what will?



Health:
Her lungs are clear. She is not ill but has an illness. The germs are in her body, but in a resting state, still alive but rendered powerless, successfully overcome by her healthy body's strong defenses. Outwardly, she is the same, but within, a great drama has taken place and Pammy feels herself in possession of a bright, secret, and unspeakable knowledge."
A girl Pammy knows says she cured herself of warts by virtue of being a true Christian. Another boy, a skater, never falls because he respects the surfaces he would come into contact with. He could make another trick of it. I agree with Pammy that it was wonderful that the boy could convince himself that he's not going to fall like that. That's a trick too. How do you forget that you've got a disease?



I'm getting tired so only one more right now.


The Last Generation:
This is my other favorite other than The Little Winter and Escapes. Tommy's older brother goes around with a lot of girls. Tommy idolizes the current one, Audrey, and when she's no longer the current one she still hangs around little Tommy. I wonder if it was a coincidence that the boy shared a name with the boy in the short story 'Breakfast' and her novel Breaking and Entering. Audrey's interest in Tommy is more sinister secret club of I was scorned and let's nurse the thorns in our paws together. Tommy tells his father he doesn't love him. His father is a drunk never done well and kind of checking back in. If it can be believed, this time. His father decides that Audrey shouldn't come around anymore and then she doesn't. Tommy gets to be the last generation by himself.



I love Joy Williams and this book of stories because it's about trying to find places and people with whom to think. I love it because it's that little let down you feel in your heart when you mustered up your last bit of energy to do something, like an outpouring, and you felt it just wasn't good enough. I know how that is. Many, many reasons and maybe I'll get around to getting it all out if I untwist my tongue and talk about the rest of the stories. Man, it does suck to review short story collections. When I read them on goodreads, if I've read the book, I'm disappointed that no one says anything about my favorites. If I haven't read the book I don't want to know too much. I understand if you don't read all of that. Thanks, guys. :) (I'm trying to get over my guilt for posting these things. Short story collections are my favorites, unfortunately.)

P.s. If you want to read a Joy Williams short story collection, I recommend Taking Care first (it's the absolute best and one of my all-time favorites). Escapes is great but it is my third favorite. Honored Guest was a tough act to beat too. Viva Joy Williams!

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

So.
One of my most beloved reviewers on this lovely site goes by the name of Mariel. Every single one of the pieces she writes and posts on GR is a thing of great beauty. If you have not discovered her yet, go click on the name in the "recommended by" tag on this review and read some of her work. If they don't make you immediately start adding things to your TBR list then there is something wrong with you...

Anyway. She has long championed Joy Williams and, because of her reviews, I got hold of Taking Care about a year ago and have been working my way through the rest of her books since then.

Every single one is a goddamn masterpiece. I am grateful to have them in my life.

So this review is by way of a "thank you" and "you rock" to Mariel.

Oh and, in case you need more encouragement, here are some other comments about JW from writers I love:


William Gass: "Joy Williams is now the best at her business. She has put each piece together the way it should be put together: Pure, Perfect, Precise, Poetic."

Joseph McElroy has called her "marvelous".

So go read her.

[Raul · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Pammy will grow older, she is older already. But the world will remain as young as she was once, infinite in its possibilities, and uncaring.”

Joy Williams is a new writer to me. By that I mean that although I've heard of her, mostly in praise, before, this is the first book of hers I've read. It's always with a mixture of curiosity, dread (at being potentially disappointed), and openness (I'd like to think) that I encounter writers whose works are new to me. And it's with a mixture of awe, envy, and satiation that I finished the last words in this collection of short stories.

Every story collected here is compact, not as much as a word out of place. No ostentation, no showing off for the sake of it, just brilliantly crafted short stories that are as near to perfection as I think a short story could get. Of course not all stories are equal, as to be expected in any collection, but the heights to which the title story (Escapes), The Skater, Bromeliads (especially this), Health (and this too), and The Last Generation soared were utterly breathtaking. Right up there with the very best I've ever read. What these stories all have in common is the desolation the characters in them are in. People navigating through life with grief, feeling lost most times, on the cusp of or reaching realisation.

Sometimes, you encounter stories that actually make you feel glad that you're alive to have read them, and it truly seems that life, or part of its essence, has been distilled into fiction. A point of convergence hard to define or explain; where what the writer dedicated time and effort to melds exquisitely into what the reader perceives and understands to be truth when reading. It goes beyond relatability which is simply recognition of the familiar, it is perfect understanding as it needs no explanation. And I think this is the reason that I read. Not to escape life in its troubles or mundanity, not for excitement or for whatever stimulation we get from that which frightens, enthralls, saddens, or stirs passion and need, but to encounter all this which sounds mystical and rather foolish, but which I open each new book with the hope of finding again. And I'm glad I found it in this collection.

[Simon A. Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joy Williams is always doing two or three or four (amazing)things at once. She's simultaniously enchanting, delightful, disturbing, strange and twisted, but this somehow always leads to a pleasurable experience and she is never a dull read. This is one of her darker, sadder collections in many ways, and that suits me just fine. I think I have a bit of a crush on this wacky woman.

[E · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think Joy Williams is quite for me, although I thought this book of stories was quite good. The stories I didn't like weren't bad or badly written, but they were perhaps about people whose stories I didn't care much about reading (the story White is a good example of this). This is not the fault of Joy Williams.

I should also mention that I read Health first, and then I went back and read the whole book in order. I liked Health a great deal but I think it gave me some misapprehensions about what the rest of the book might be like.

The stories that are hits are very satisfying: Bromeliads, The Little Winter, Health, and The Blue Men were all favourites of mine. I also thought The Last Generation was excellent, although I don't think I'd call it a favourite, if only because it made me feel so sad. Maybe it will become a favourite when the sting has gone out of it a little.

In two of these stories there are total reversals, sudden movements from what you think the story will be about to, well, something else.

Bromeliads opens this way: "Jones's grandchild is eight days old. He and his wife have not been sent a picture of the baby and although they have spoken with their daughter several times on the telephone they do not have a very good idea of what the child looks like. It seems very difficult to describe a new baby.... Jones and his wife had no idea that their daughter was going to have a baby. They had seen her six months ago and she had mentioned nothing about a baby. Several days after the birth, her husband had called them with the news."

As you can imagine, things go even more off-kilter and Jones and his wife visit their daughter and granddaughter. The daughter runs off during the visit, and Jones and his wife take the baby. Meanwhile, Jones's wife is ill and being tested in the hospital. They hold her for days and will not release her, despite that, "They do not know what is wrong, but it is not the worst! The first tests have been negative. It is bad but it is not the worst. What can the worst have been? She no longer needs to fear it."

The Little Winter is about a dying woman who goes to visit a friend who doesn't know she's dying. The dying woman absconds with the friend's 12-year-old daughter, and they go on an aimless road trip together while the 12-year-old tries, in the most lackadaisical manner, to extract information so she can write the biography of the dying woman.

Health is about a 12-year-old girl named Pammy who wants to be a speed skater. She has TB but isn't ill. She has an ambiguous but troubling encountering in a tanning salon that nudges her a little bit closer toward adulthood.

In the The Blue Men, Bomber and his grandmother May have moved to a bland little town after Bomber's convict father dies by lethal injection. They manage to accumulate another misfit, a girl named Edith who Bomber falls in love with. Excerpt: "The last things May had brought her son were a dark suit and a white shirt. They told her she could if she wished, and she had. She had brought him many things in the two years before he died – candy and cigarettes and batteries, books on all subjects – and lastly she had brought these things. She had bought the shirt new and then washed it at home several times so it was soft and then she had driven over to that place. It was a cool, misty morning and the air smelled of chemicals from the mills miles away."

[Jameson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Escapes and The Blue Men were the best stories from a well-written, funny collection. I think Williams' stories can be like drinking a cold glass of ginger ale after reading too much, say, Lorrie Moore. Williams can be one hilarious writer and these two stories are the funniest of the bunch. Rot and The Skater are also very good. Since the book is on loan from the library I think I'm going to go upstairs and photocopy Escapes, just so I can have it until I buy a copy.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm embarrassed to resort to a dopey cliche but Joy Williams really has "the magic touch." I loved all these stories with the exception of "The Route."

Otherwise I can't help but mention that the drawing adorning the cover was an unfortunate choice. Really bad. Oh well, no reflection on the stories.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used to enjoy listening to Joe Frank's show "Work in Progress" on NPR and Joy Williams' work reminds me a lot of those disturbing broadcasts. I liked the one about the gutted out decaying car in the living room and the husband who wouldn't talk to his wife unless she sat in that stupid car. Great stuff.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh these are very good. I just finished the final story “The Last Generation.” I’m awed by the pacing. As well as for the preceding one “The Blue Men.” Such a powerful employment of time in her storytelling. Or maybe it’s how time is rendered, how it feels, that impresses me.

From the story “White” in a scene where a woman is interacting with another I wrote down this excerpt:

‘This was the way it was supposed to be, she thought. Memory and conversation, clarification and semblance, miscalculation and repentance, skim and rest.’

Why was I struck? I’m still working it out. But. : It’s learned behavior in socializing humans and the way Williams describes it reminds me that we’re animals acting in a prescribed way. As adults it’s easy to forget this, I think, and believe we’re acting upon free will more than perhaps we are. This thinking has the potential to harmfully separate us from nature. Likewise there are characters in this collection and in other of Williams’ writings that appear who subvert these expectations often taking the form of morose children or weirdo-fringe types or alcoholics. At the same time it seems everyone is a weirdo and so much socializing is hollow and we each escape in our idiosyncratic, lonely ways. Sometimes lucky enough to find partners/kindreds. Maybe I’m putting too fine a point on it all and flattening it. Just read it. Joy Williams is one of my all time favorites.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Williams definitely falls into the Raymond Carver category but with a good female twist (and minus Gordon Lish's editorializing, making it not as minimalist as Carver). The functional alcoholics are often deadpan funny; the children are precocious and weird in way that you can't quite stop reading about them, especially since the adults seem to find them annoying, as well. I agree with other readers who found the first half of this book a bit better than the second. In flipping back through the book just now to try to come up with which stories I liked best, I suddenly ran across a lot of odd images and themes that I'd forgotten ran throughout the collection. Goodness knows what they all mean, though!

[Lady R.E. Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Clouds aren't as pretty as they used to be. That's a known fact."

One of the best lines from one of the best stories ("The Last Generation") from one of the best short story writers ever. (Sadly, Williams' novels just don't do it for me in the same way, though some people really like them.)

This collection, however, is excellent. There are, perhaps, one or two misses, but all the rest of them are pure beauty. I really like "The Skater" and the title story. And "The Farm," which may be in this book, or come to think of it, may be in her earlier collection "Taking Care." I can't remember and don't have a copy of other on me. Be on the safe side: read both!

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the cover, Harold Brodkey blurbs: "Joy Williams is now the most gifted writer of her generation." Hard to disagree with Harold Brodkey. So many fine stories here. Favorites include: "Health," "The Little Winter," "The Blue Men," and "Escapes." Also love "Rot" and "The Last Generation."

[Tao · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like this book.

I like the second story very much. I like the last story and many of the other stories.

[Peter Allum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Top-notch short-story collection: Surreal take on the American underbelly.

Twelve stories, previously published in various journals, released together in this 1990 volume.

Underlying themes:

The natural world sullied by humans. Snorkeling in the Yucatan, "Some of the coves were so popular that the fish could scarcely be seen for all the suntan oil floating in the water.” (Rot)

Grieving. Tom and Annie are parents visiting boarding schools with their daughter, Molly. "Molly is their living child. Tom and Annie’s other child, Martha, has been dead a year.” (The Skater)

Soulless America. "The health spa is in a small, concrete block building with white columns, salvaged from the wrecking of a mansion, adorning the front. There are gift shops, palmists and all-night restaurants along the street, as well as an exterminating company that has a huge fiberglass bug with Xs for eyes on the roof.” (Health)

and...

"A winding old road ran parallel to the highway and Gloria turned off and drove along it until she came to a group of cabins. They were white with little porches but the office was in a structure built to resemble a tepee. There was a dilapidated miniature-golf course and a wooden tower from the top of which you could see into three states. But the tower leaned and the handrail curving optimistically upward was splintered and warped, and only five steps from the ground a rusted chain prevented further ascension. Gloria liked places like this. (The Little Winter)

Williams presents a world that we recognize, but which would avoid, if at all possible (the suntan-spoiled waters, the concrete-block health spa, the cabins with dilapidated facilities). As in The Little Winter, Williams does not offer ascension to sweeping views (from the wooden tower); instead, we are rooted in the day-to-day, held back by the rusted chain.

This suggests that Williams could be a depressing read. Certainly, she does not offer easy resolution of grief, sickness, anxiety. There is satisfaction, though, in the honesty of her writing, and her characters are often seen to be groping toward a better place. And amid the prosaic, Williams offers shocks of surreal humor.

Highly recommended.

Other Joy Williams reviews:
Honored Guest : Stories (2004) 4*
Ninety-Nine Stories of God (2013) 3*

[James Horn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I continue my journey through Joy Williams short fiction and have completed Escapes; and I must say it’s so subtle in it’s genius, that it would be so easy to overlook the depth in these stories.

I mentioned in my review of Taking Care that I am reading The Visiting Privilege which is comprised of much of her early short fiction, and realized I only only needed to read a handful of excluded stories to complete the original individual collections. I am truly having fun guessing at their reason for exclusion, and am only really commenting on the excluded ones, though there are some amazing pieces here particularly The titular story “Escapes”, “Rot”, “Bromeliads”, and “The Last Generation”, which I felt hints at what is to come with her most recent novel Harrow. These stories manage to capture such complex combinations of emotions without ever sinking to melodrama. I find this extremely refreshing.

The first excluded story is “Gurdjieff in the Sunshine State” which was not particularly memorable to me beyond seeming experimental and a little inane. This would have been my first choice so far for cutting room fodder had I been in charge of collecting her works.

The other exclusion however was much more puzzling to me. “The Route” may have been my favorite of this collection, with brusque style and flippant narration. I found it such a treat; the kind of story that makes you want to write. That said, it did feel enough of a departure from her style to maybe warrant omission.

A couple of the others fell slightly flat for me, but maybe only because the others were so amazing, or maybe I read them to fast in my excitement and missed some nuance, but regardless of this, this collection is essential JW, and not to be missed.

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful, brilliant, always interesting

It's hard to say what Joy Williams's stories are about. Despair. Dissatisfaction. Indefinite yearnings. Alienation, maybe. They are populated with the unglamourous, the unstylish. Typically there is a central female character who is usually young, or at least younger than the other characters. She can be a little girl, as in the title story, "Escapes," or a teen as in "The Skater," or a woman in the last years of her youth as in "The Little Winter." Often she is being or has been raised by grandparents. Sometimes she is married to an older man, sometimes twice her age or more. She drinks hard liquor out of cups or a thermos, or martinis. Sometimes she's an alcoholic. She makes many observations, some startling. The men are always a bit bizarre or off center or not exactly right. Animals are often mentioned and make appearances, and technical language from biology is used in bits and pieces. Usually the girl wants to go somewhere or is going somewhere, but the destination isn't important, or maybe it is.

Four of the twelve stories, "Bromeliads," "The Skater," "Health," and "The Blue Men" made The Best American Short Stories in 1978, 1985, 1986 and 1987. "Rot" appeared in Prize Stories 1988: The O. Henry Awards. Clearly, Joy Williams is at the top of her calling.

I didn't understand all of the stories. This is nothing unusual. Short stories from the postmodern oeuvre as served up in Granta or The Antioch Review, or The Cornell Review, where some of these stories first appeared, or even in The Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker, sometimes leave me wondering if I missed something. Sometimes I re-read the story and I'm still not sure. Sometimes I realize something has happened, something has changed, just slightly, like a displacement in a distant landscape, and I feel a sense of significance. Or sometimes I don't.

But something definitely happens in a Joy Williams story. It is revealed from deep within the story, or come upon, or realized en route. Thus we find that Gloria in "The Little Winter" is dying. This is revealed directly midway through. She is dying amidst a banal and boring existence, visiting a boring friend with many ex-husbands and her boring daughter. In "Lu-Lu" (the name for a rather large pet snake--the story has an element that reminds me distantly of Steinbeck's "A Snake of One's Own") Heather is leaving something behind ("an ugly nightie with its yearnings"), heading for a new life with Lu-Lu, whom the old couple she has been drinking with, have to let go. Like Gloria she is going off in an automobile with something vaguely grotesque, yet it is better than being by herself. Molly, from California, in "The Skater" is being shown New England prep schools where she is going to be sent. She is somehow symbolically or emotionally, or practically, going to the same place her tragically dead sister Martha went. Maybe. For some reason. In "Rot" Lucy's much older husband who is still friendly with his several ex-wives, buys a black Ford Thunderbird that is rusting from the inside out. He takes out a wall and places it in the living room. Lucy has reluctantly agreed to this, but then realizes that the car will be there obtrusively in her life forever, like Dwight's ex-wives.

Some of the stories have an element of the surreal. Katherine Mansfield and Friedrich Nietzsche appear with "G." in "Gurdjieff in the Sunshine State." In "The Skater" Tom, the father, skates on ice "wearing a suit and tie, his good shoes" but without skates.

Sometimes people are dying. Mothers disappear, children left to be raised by their grandparents. A beautiful young woman finds herself kinkily enthralled with her husband, a middle aged chemist who talks of sharks and things biological while she wears him out sexually on "The Route" to the Florida Keys.

Part of the power of Williams's writing comes from the wonderful way she has with detail, detail of all sorts, details about the way things look, the way people talk, what they think about, cultural details, the way things feel and smell and taste. It looks easy, it reads easily, but remember the dictum, "easy writing makes for hard reading," and vice-versa. Williams works hard on her prose. She makes the details telling.

I particularly enjoyed the last story, "The Last Generation" which is about the relationship between 15-year-old Audrey and 9-year-old Tommy. She has befriended him after being dumped by his older brother. It is a way of maintaining or of getting even. She instructs Tommy in how to think about the world. They are "the last generation." She says things like, "That's what true love is. Wanting something that's missing." Or, "Clouds aren't as pretty as they used to be. That's a known fact." (p. 156) She tells him about monks: "They love solitude more than anything. When monks started out, long, long ago, they were waiting for the end of time." (p. 162) "Monks live in a cool, crystalline half-darkness of mind and heart." (p. 164)

I also very much liked "Health" in which the teenager Pammy goes to a tanning salon and is accidentally observed naked for the first time by a man. That's what the story is about. Williams tells it with a kind of discovery as we go along, as though she and we together are discovering what the story is about. It's an illusion. It's technique, artistry. She has Pammy recall an interview with a "radical skater," a boy who is asked why he doesn't fall. He says, "I don't fall...because I've got a deep respect for the concrete surface and because when I make a miscalculation, instead of falling I turn it into a new trick."

I think this is the way Joy Williams writes.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “Novels and Other Fictions”

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading the short stories of Joy Williams always makes me want to write Joy Williams-esque short stories. This always results in a me churning out a handful of awful imitation first drafts, the message (and moral) being that I can not (see also: no one can) write like Joy Williams. For that, we are grateful. We put on our sunglasses. We applaud.

[Ashley T · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny, sometimes dreamy, sometimes disorienting stories. It is a delight to read more of Williams’ writing.

[Chenglin Lee]

"They were the last generation, the ones who would see everything for the last time. That's what the last generation does."

[Giovanni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous, sad to have to finish reading it

[Eddie · Rating 3 out of 5]

One story in this book is called "Escapes," about a young girl's love for her depressed, alcoholic mother (and her mother's love for her only companion, the girl). The language and storytelling are simultaneously tactful and childlike. There are marvelous little visions and surprising metaphors that manage to avoid being oppressive as an overt style or authorial voice. All except for the final paragraph, which becomes too elegiac and self-consciously wise. This is the second-to-last paragraph, where it should have ended:

"His kindness made me feel he had tied us up with rope. At last he left us and my mother laid her head down upon the table and fell asleep. I had never seen my mother sleeping and I watched her as she must once have watched me, the same way everyone watches a sleeping thing, not knowing how it would turn out or when. Then slowly I began to eat the donut with my mittened hands. The sour hair of the wool mingled with the tasteless crumbs and this utterly absorbed my attention. I pretended someone was feeding me."

The imaginative moments all belong to the girl, even though they are more eloquent than she could have been at that age: tied up with rope, not knowing how "it" would turn out or when, the sour hair, pretending to be fed. She understands more about her mother, and the sadness of their relationship, than she lets on, and this understanding spills into her imagining. She understands the little thing behind a stranger's kindness that is ominous and binding, and why her mother would feel shamed by it. She sees how their roles are already being reversed, how she is already warding over her mother, and the kind of uncertainty this drives between them - thus, she already knows love in its adult form. And that last line (or what I wish was the last line) installs pretending - or imagining, or substitution, or fantasy, desire, metaphor, writing? - as the way she will engage the world, the way she will find nourishment. What I love is how these things are represented in the story by compact images that have very specific, realistic existences too, and could, after all, be interpreted entirely otherwise.

The other stories I've read in this book so far are similarly exquisite.

[Matthew Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Williams is a supreme conveyer of mood. Her short stories are dark and poignant, but also often quietly funny. She writes beautifully clear, natural prose, drawing you easily into her vignettes of lives rocked by events past or overshadowed by coming storms. The stories are measured, poised, nuanced, and always loaded with suggestion. Always an enjoyable read.

Very occasionally, I would question some editing choices, but she wrote these stories at a time when it was all the rage to be freer with the rules. The variances are so slight and rare they are likely to be invisible to all but writers and editors. I only note them because these things matter to me as both.

Her skills as a storyteller are phenomenal. This is a book I will keep and return to, to remind myself how to do mood and suggestion, and humour in darkness. I would recommend this to anyone, because, I suppose, her subject is humanity and the human condition and so ought to appeal to anyone human, and her writing is just so damn beautiful.

[Matthew Peck · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There was truly terrifying about girls on the verge of puberty, Gloria thought."
Now this is the kind of book that inspires me to write. Williams' first story collection was very good, but in ESCAPES her voice is more assured and unmistakable. Except for one brief esoteric joke-story called "Gurdjieff In The Sunshine State" (I had to consult ol' Wikipedia), the 11 stories are just about perfect. Centering usually on families affected by divorce, death, a move, or stepparents, and with alcoholic young women or spookily precocious teens as their protagonists. Williams has a knack for casting the mundane amd everyday in a strange and surprising glow (and vice versa). The stories are realistic while the dialogue and characters veer into the surreal and quasi-spiritual. I don't know how she does it, and I hope there's more to come, because I'm almost through her oeuvre...

[Aneesa · Rating 3 out of 5]

My library copy is inscribed: "For Chris and Kipp (nice sound!) Joy Williams Chicago 1991."

It is possible I've read this entire book before and don't remember. Although many of the stories here confused and bored me, the title story is excellent and unique (especially compared to Room, which I recently read) in that it's from a woman's point of view remembering her childhood in a close and childlike way, but using high language. An example: "Lady... the magician said, and I thought a dog might appear for I knew a dog named Lady who had a collection of colored balls."

[Heather Hasselle · Rating 4 out of 5]

SHE'S JUST SO GOOD!

"Pammy coughs. She doesn't want to hear other people's voices. It is as though they are throwing away junk, the way some people use words, as though one word was good as another."

Throwing away words is one thing Joy Williams does not do. Every word is everything that's needed.

"Walter rubbed his head with his hands. He looked around the room, at some milk on the floor that Tommy had spilled. The house was empty except for them. There were no animals around, nothing. It was all beyond what was possible, he knew."

[Trever Polak · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was less consistent than Honored Guest, but some of theses stories are even better than any from that book. "Health" and "The Last Generation" I particularly admired, as well as "Rot", "Escapes", "The Skater", and "The Blue Men." But "Gurdjieff in the Sunshine State" made no sense and "The Route" was pretty bad. I'm still going with 4 stars, though, because the good ones here were really good.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's something to be said for the Gordon Lish influenced minimalism of writers of this generation, and Williams's stories are sparse, direct, emotionally objective in that way. Although I can admire the gaunt plots and characters who sometimes seem like they're standing aslant (or trying to stand straight in a slanted world), I've hit the place in my reading life where I want more....

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the stories in this book, particularly the first half, were utterly brilliant in innovative form and startling content. And then there were some disappointments. Despite the unevenness, I had to admire the daring.

[Jason Arias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joy Williams is an amazing writer. This collection of a dozen short stories is another testament to her talent. I really enjoyed most of the stories in this book, but for me, the title story and the last story in the book, appropriately titled The Last Generation, were the standouts here.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The smell of the meat loaf was now clangorous."