“I Liked Rex”: this is the title of the title story in Diane Williams’s new collection. These three words, subject, verb, and object, form a complete sentence, one that echoes a line from the famous mid-century primer See Spot Run. Spot was a dog. Might Rex be one, too? In a sense, he is: a sly dog, a dirty dog; a big, handsome, disreputable man, prone to wandering off in search of fresh adventure, then sniffing his way back home. When the narrator of “I Liked Rex” sees him again, after one of his long absences, she observes that he has dressed the part: “He wore a heavy wool suit I’d never seen before—a glen-plaid houndstooth check—and next, in bed, I thought his very pink privates were meant to be some cheery dessert.” How easy it is for Rex to cut through her sexual defenses. Against him, she has none.
What she has, instead, is a passion for detail and a savage talent for metaphor. That glen-plaid houndstooth check suit and, underneath it, those very pink privates—I imagine them as two melting scoops of strawberry ice cream—flesh out a man at once self-serious and impossible to take seriously. The effect of this finely wrought sentence is to depose Rex, to neuter this dog-man. His charms are consigned to the past tense. He elicits the mildest emotion, liking, not loving, even as the narrator pants in bed with him. Near the end of the story, she sits on a cliff and looks down at a seaside village while stroking another dog, her pet sheltie. She celebrates her freedom to perceive the world below however she wishes:
True, we are prone to sea storms and landslides, but this village also provides a panoramic view, amusements, and benefits, as well as a horrid gorge. But don’t let’s look at that. Let’s be happy.
Let us enjoy our holidays and let us fall for or swear by whatever we want to—because people really like to.
The marvelous fiction of Diane Williams is constructed on a single epic theme: “The loss of paradise keeps happening.” All the qualities that distinguish her stories follow from it. There is usually a woman in the story, its narrator, who risks being ruined by one man or torn between two, all with vaguely absurd names: “Rex” or “Fabio” or “Mr. Casanova.” There is a sexual encounter, a suspended moment of ecstasy, followed by a rude disappointment, the betrayal of an ideal—and, out of this betrayal, the revelation of a moral or a maxim, a solemn covenant forged between the narrator and her reader, like “let us fall for or swear by whatever we want to.” Paradise is regained. A state of languid serenity settles in—but it lasts only until the page is turned, and the next story greets us, with a bold, startling title. This is the ground that Williams has tilled for nearly forty years, from her first story collection, This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate, to I Liked Rex, her twelfth and, to my mind, her most balanced.
From this ground, her stories rise like so many private chapels, small, secretive, poised, and richly ornamented. Their architecture, her style, is their singular achievement. Her paragraphs are usually one sentence, sometimes two, rarely three. Her sentences are built around her uncommonly disciplined syntax; on nouns and adjectives of unique significance, joined to one another by plainspoken verbs, with almost no adverbs in sight, the exceptions being the casual comic intensifiers, such as Rex’s “very pink privates,” or little radiances of sexual and spiritual activity. The narrator of the story “Oh, to Be Able to Inspire Sex Love” arrives at an orgy, uninvited, only to fall asleep. When she leaves, she thinks, “I go out, most prayerfully, seductively.” Williams’s discipline falters only in matters typographical. There, she reveals her weakness for double and triple dashes, for italics, for exclamations and exclamation marks, scattered liberally across the page and with great charm. “Oh!” she gasps, over and over again. One feels that she is often surprised—or perhaps terrified—by the hidden currents of her own mind, and that her syntax lets those emotions find the surest path onto the page.
Nouns are the seat of Williams’s power, and they live at extremes; they are either wholly abstract or wholly particular. In her abstract mode, her stories are filled with scantily clad archetypes. “The man entered the lady’s house as if it were the most natural thing for him to do,” begins the story “There You Go.” Her narrators speak elliptically, whether from confusion or a sense of discretion, it is difficult to know. “Maybe I went with somebody I knew,” the central character of “Oh, to Be Able to Inspire Sex Love” recalls of the orgy she crashed. “I felt breath on the top of my head as someone dislodged himself.” They invoke dignity, bravery, truth, and love as if these concepts were as tangible and sturdy as my dining-room table. In the particular mode, her narrators fixate on proper nouns, on alliterative names, like “Seth Sharples” or “Miles Macbeth,” or luxurious brands: a Tiffany picture frame, a Chanel chiffon scarf, a Chloraseptic Max Wild Berry Sore Throat Lozenge. Often, a noun will press a parade of adjectives into its service, as if to insist that here—right here!—is where the reader must enter the sensual world of the story; where she can inhale the “pearly shell ginger blossoms” in a tropical garden; fiddle with the “lapis and carnelian” in a string of beads or the “gold-colored hairpins” in a woman’s updo; or fondle “a piece of a shell—veined, and slick as if lacquered—nearly a dugout-canoe shape” that a man finds in his pocket. These tightly bound noun phrases are where her impulse to describe meets the straitjacket of her style.
Their meeting is what gives her stories the flash and feeling of dreams. The hard, bright detail lifted to the light of consciousness gains its clarity from the shadows that loom behind it, from everything that must be repressed in waking life. Like dreams, the stories place their events in no natural order or proportion. They are free-associative, bounding between the past and the present, between the throwaway detail and the fatal outcry. “This is dreamland to her—although she does have, on her torso, that pesky parapsoriasis,” the narrator of the story “For Pity’s Sake” observes of an old woman called Mrs. Goodenough. Her narrators have little interest in creating believable characters—allegorical ones will do just fine—or in tracing the fixed causalities of plot. “Must there really be a need for harsh realism?” one of them wonders. Yet there is nothing chaotic about a story by Williams. Not an image feels false. Not a comma is out of place. From the first story to the last, her voice holds as steady as an oracle’s.
Williams is a single-minded writer, faithful to her particular form and her themes. Recently, in a used book store, I found a galley of her first collection, This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate, from 1990. The title was borrowed from a book she found on her shelf, The Origins of European Thought: About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate. Using it declared her high ambition, she told me—her intent to “piss with the big dogs,” including her former teacher, Gordon Lish. The second story in the collection is called “The Nature of the Miracle.” Here is its beginning:
The green glass bottle rolled into, rolled out of my arms, out of my hands, and then exploded, just as it should, when it hits our bluestone floor, and spreads itself, and sparkling water, on the territory it was able to cover from our refrigerator to the back door.
The bottle used to fit tightly in my hand, easily, by the neck, and the way one thing leads to another in my mind, this means I should run away from my marriage.
Why one thing leads to another in one’s mind is often mysterious. There is, of course, no logical reason why a bottle slipping out of your hand means that you should run away from your marriage. But if the image of that bottle rolling, exploding, and spreading itself is rendered with sufficient violence and awe, then it imposes its own meaning. “Everything means something, or it does not,” Williams writes in “The Uncanny.” This has been her aim in each collection: to make everything, no matter how trivial, mean something. As her style has become more assured, she has taken greater risks. She has stretched the connection between her images and what they mean to the breaking point, courting a kind of mysticism, and, at times, a madness.
Williams and I have been friends since I wrote about her collected stories for this magazine. I like to visit her at home, where we drink tea and talk, and she lends me her books; I have her copy of Hotel du Lac and intend to return it one day very soon. Some of my happiest moments have been spent watching her work as an editor of NOON, the annual magazine of short fiction that she founded in 2000. She works as if in a trance, with an absorbed and exacting confidence. I have seen her carve, from a slab of a text, a single paragraph or sentence, chiseling its language into a state of muscular perfection. The first time it happened, I was reminded of an apocryphal story about a famous sculptor. He claimed that the marble blocks he hauled from the quarry already contained his figures inside; his only task was to liberate them. To liberate the essence of a story from its padding—the who, what, where, when, and why of exposition—is a delicate undertaking. It risks insensitivity, cruelty even. But, in Williams’s hands, it is an invitation for the writer to look the reader dead in the eye and speak the naked truth. And her writers, I suspect, must welcome the pleasure of supplication, the abandonment of their ego to the forceful, but careful, will of another.
Under her editorship, a distinct strain of contemporary writing has emerged from the pages of NOON, which has featured the work of Lydia Davis, Christine Schutt, Dawn Raffel, Danielle Dutton, Kathryn Scanlan, Lucie Elven, Deb Olin Unferth, Rita Bullwinkel, and many others I admire. Some have called it minimalism, thinking, perhaps, of the cold shadow cast by Lish over the short story. But the stories that Williams edits have little in common with the bare, withholding style of, for instance, Raymond Carver, or his obsession with a wounded American masculinity; the loss of paradise in NOON is, primarily if not exclusively, a wise woman’s concern. Others have described Williams as the “godmother of flash fiction.” But that term has no discernible meaning, no purchase on the aesthetic features of these stories or the experience of reading them. They are intricate and demanding, fastidious to the point of being fussy—at moments self-consciously, humorously so. Their humor hinges on the sharp sense of disproportion between the stories’ parts and their whole. The details they lavish their attentions on appear too specific, too extravagant, and too dazzling for the narrative that encloses them, which, by comparison, appears undeveloped in the conventional terms of character and plot. Their narrators tend to speak in epigrams and aphorisms, to dispatch prophecies to the reader and prayers to someone up above. They aim to capture both the gorgeous surfaces of human life and the mysterious worlds beyond, squeezing the universe into a page or two that contains at once too much and not enough. This is not minimalism; far from it. Call it miniaturism.
In NOON’s miniaturism, one can hear the last laugh of modernism’s avant-garde, a comic blend of Gertrude Stein’s rigor, Djuna Barnes’s decadence, and Wallace Stevens’s philosophical grandeur, laced with a cheerful sexual frankness that belongs to Williams, and Williams alone. But one can also detect notes of anxiety, especially in her stories’ metafictional eruptions. “Yes, okay, but this story, as yet—is just not good enough!” a narrator exclaims. “Oh, just sum it up!” cries another. The story “The Greatest Experience” anticipates that its readers will want characters with more transparent motives: “In this chapter, at some point, we should seek to understand these people, as if we could say to them—We have been talking about you. Mind if we ask you a few questions?” The story “Diane!” begins with bafflement and alarm about how characters are created:
What in the world will her name be? Diane!
I should not hurt anybody else I know with this story.
I hope she is not too fake.
The narrators of these stories ventriloquize the typically anxious editor, the person responsible for worrying that the reader might want more—more backstory, more interiority, more sympathy, more reality. But there is no need to worry. There is more than enough harsh realism to go around. There are plenty of conventional people and plenty of conventional stories about the loss of paradise. Most of us live through it at least once, if not twice, and it usually lasts longer than we would like. Let it be brief and shocking and full of wonder, Williams says. Then, let us move on to the next story, and the next one, and the one after that!