The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams

Donna looked out at the window at the street below. You couldn't open the windows. A tree outside was struggling to burst into bloom but had been compromised heavily by the parking area. Big chunks of its bark had been torn away by poorly parked cars. When she was a child, visiting Florida, she'd seen a palm tree burst into flames. It was beautiful! Then rats as long as her downy child's arm had rushed down the trunk. Later, she learned that it was not unusual for a palm tree to do this on occasion, given the proper circumstances. This tree didn't want to do anything like that, though. It couldn't. It just struggled along quietly.

The first of the "new" stories in Joy Williams' "New and Collected Stories" omnibus, The Visiting Privilege, is called "Brass." Unlike most of Williams' stories, it's in the first person, as if she's reminding us that she do it this way, too. The narrator of "Brass" is an irascible middle-aged man describing his relationship with his son, an odd kid that never seems able to fit in with the world. The narrator vacillates between pitying the son and defending him, and our response is twofold. First, we wonder if there might not be something more seriously wrong with the young man than the narrator is able to grasp, and second, we begin to think, well, you're no prize yourself, man. Only at the end does the narrator let the hammer fall, about the helicopter and the men who come looking for the son. "No, we were never afraid of him," he said. "Afraid of Jared?" That is, Jared Lee Loughner, the gunman who shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and killed 19 others in Tucson in 2011.

"Brass" is, in a way, a kind of "Where is the Voice Coming From?" for the 21st century, a story that tries to grapple with the nature of destruction and its practitioners. For Welty, the murderer of Medgar Evers is a small and petty man, confused in his thinking, lashing out of his smallness. By contrast, Williams has few answers for what animates someone like "Jared"; their proximity of death, their love for it, puts them outside the bounds of human knowing. It's a them she returns to again and again: There's May and her grandson Bomber in "The Blue Men," adrift but united by their father's execution. There's the support group in "Cats and Dogs" for mothers of convicted murderers. But dying puts one outside of the bounds of understanding, too, not merely killing: that's why so many of Williams' stories take place in hospitals and nursing homes. The title story, the very first of the bunch--and probably the weakest--begins in a hospital, where an elderly pastor finds himself saddled with both a dying wife and a newborn baby, and perhaps this provides the key for everything else that is to come.

Consider what might be my favorite story in the omnibus, "Congress," from the 2004 collection Honored Guest. Miriam is married to Jack, a forensic anthropologist, beloved by both his students and the family members of murder victims, who receive closure thanks to Jack's thorough identification of human remains. Jack takes up hunting with one of his students, and makes a little lamp out of the feet of a deer he kills. Later, Jack is wounded in a hunting accident and loses the ability to speak. The student, Carl, insinuates his way into Jack's life, becoming the only one who knows how to communicate with Jack, who is living a kind of death-in-life. (In a way Carl is a medium figure, like the young boy of "The Country" who has the ability to channel his dead mother and grandparents. And that boy in a way is an analog of the father in The Quick and the Dead who is haunted by the ghost of his controlling wife.) As Jack drifts away from her, Miriam becomes inextricably attached to the little deer-foot lamp. The four of them--Miriam, Jack, Carl, and lamp--go on vacation, but Miriam is abandoned by the two men, and stumbles into a museum of taxidermy whose devotees consider it a holy place. The taxidermist, discovering Miriam, bestows the museum on her.

What kind of story is this? What is it up to? How can it be so ridiculous, and yet work so perfectly? See how living things move out of our orbit by means of disaster and death, and yet must still be tended to: silent Jack, the deer-become-lamp, the many animals of the museum. Miriam loses her husband to a man who can pass through the barrier that injury has placed between them, but in return she is granted the role of high priestess, the woman who tends for dead things and keeps them alive. Or, if not keeps them alive, exhibits their death and makes it visible, approachable, understandable--holy. As another character says, in another story, "There's no fucking energy around anymore... You notice that? It's because death's energy, death's vital energy, is being ignored. It's not being utilized. The more and more death, the more it's wasted. People just let it evaporate. But not us."

On the dust jacket to The Visiting Privilege, Joy is wearing her trademark black sunglasses. She's got a wide-open smile, she's beaming; she looks every bit her name. The avatar of joy. She looks, in fact, like she's off on vacation, to Florida Keys or the Everglades or the Maine coast or Nantucket or White Sands National Park. These are the places her stories so often take place, vacation spots. Sometimes they feature people on vacation, and sometimes they feature "townies," the people who live lives, unconscionably, in the places you're not really supposed to live. Maybe it's too easy to say that Williams shows us that death haunts us even on vacation, as it's too easy to note the disjunction between her expression in the jacket photograph and the darkness at the heart of the stories. Maybe there is something about these vacation places that brings us closer to death, that frees us from the solace of the everyday routine--the comforting fiction that tomorrow will be like today. That it won't be something else, and maybe worse