Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams

Liberty and Willie were wanderers, they were young but they had wandered for years, as though through a wilderness, staying for days or weeks or months or towns with names like Coy or Peachburg or Diamondhead or Hurley. Then larger towns, cities, still as through a wilderness, for there was no path for them or way--West Palm, Jacksonville, Sarasota. There was always a little work, a little place to stay, and then there was this other thing, this thing that was like an enchantment, this energy that kept them somehow going, this adopted, perverse skill of inhabiting the space others had made for themselves. For they themselves were not preparing for anything, they were not building anything, they were just moving along, and Liberty was aware that this house thing, this breaking and entering thing--time for the thing, they'd say, let's do the thing--became more frequent, accelerated, just before they left a town.

Liberty and Willie are wanderers. They have a home of their own in a trailer-park town on Florida's Gulf Coast, but they make their way into the homes of the wealthy, charming security guards, replacing the locks, living among other people's things, going to their country club parties. Willie uses his magnetism to insinuate his way into these places; he is handsome and speaks wholly in aphorisms. His wife Liberty has a simmering kind of ambivalence to their breaking and entering, that sits just beneath the surface of her life. In their town, she has become attached to two more or less abandoned children: barely verbal Little Dot, and Teddy, whose stepmother keeps him at bay by signing him up for a dozen educational classes a day. Liberty's feelings for these children may be a latent desire to settle down, to care for something--made more potent by, we learn late in the book, a child of Liberty and Willie's that did not manage to be born. And yet, she cannot tear herself from Willie, who drifts away from her, and then pulls her back, as if on a string.

Some writers make me want to get up and get writing immediately. Joy Williams makes me want to give up writing forever. Though I liked Breaking and Entering a little bit less than The Quick and the Dead, every sentence bristles with tension and imagery; everything fits but everything surprises. Who else could write: "She floated, looking upward, a little breathless as though she had climbed many, many steps, and the terrible put peaceful image came to her of her beating heart being seized from her breast, being plucked like a carp from a pond, wriggling and rising into the night, becoming a star?" Who else could describe a filthy Florida river as a "spiritual and biological abbatoir?" Williams' ability to write at levels of spiritual, metaphysical, ecological abstraction, while retaining an eye for the perfect image--a pelican, its beak sawed off by a malcontent--to ground it all?

About that pelican: from this to 99 Stories of God to The Quick and the Dead to especially Harrow, ecological disaster is one of Williams' great themes. It's no coincidence, I think, that she likes to write about places like Florida and Arizona, some of the Western hemisphere's most outrageous landscapes,  deviled by the outrages of human development. When Liberty stops to tend fruitlessly to a great blue heron caught in a wire, we understand it as an analogue for her own deep need to care for someone else. But for Williams, these things aren't metaphors; the heron is as abused and abandoned as Little Dot, or Teddy, or Liberty herself; human cruelties take their toll on the human and non-human alike.

For Willie, moving from house to house is not really a kind of play-acting, not a way of pretending to live someone else's life, but a way of living no life at all. Lives move forward, get rooted and troubled, but Willie has discovered a way of floating above it or perhaps through it, as he floats across keys by merely sitting in the water and letting himself be taken. We learn through several flashbacks how the two met as children, when Liberty's family essentially abandoned her to live with Teddy's own parents. Willie persuades Liberty to attempt suicide with him: "If I died, would you follow me?" The suicide doesn't take, though it kills the baby-to-be. Breaking and entering, then, is a kind of surrogate suicide, a way of living as if dead, as if nowhere. Liberty follows Willie into this kind of non-life, but what if what she wants is actually to live?

Like The Quick and the Dead and Harrow, Breaking and Entering is filled out with a cast of weirdos and grotesques. One of the most tense and thrilling moments comes when Liberty and Willie discover they have broken into a house that is, for once, occupied--by a 75-year old bodybuilder named Poe. What Poe wants from her sudden captives ("She's going to ask us a favor," Willie says with his usual prescience) is frightening because it is mysterious, then frightening for the watershed moment it represents in Willie and Liberty's relationship. There's a creepy self-help guru named Mr. Bobby whose phone number just happens to be one number off of Liberty's, and an alcoholic Cajun real estate agency who wants her to run away with him. They are Floridians through and through; one of them is named Duane, but in another, more spiritual way, they are all Duanes. The people of Williams' novels remind me of the down-and-outs Denis Johnson wrote about, but without the innocent certainty that among them are saints or angels. They are people you might meet, if you make a wrong turn in the resort towns outside the Everglades, or if you drop into the gulf and let the current take you.