The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories

To read a Joy Williams story is to devote yourself to a study in contrasts, to be challenged, confronted, unsettled.

Surreal yet grounded, bleak yet funny, straightforward yet abtruse. Many, if not all, require immediate second readings, long mid-story pauses, as well as long hiatuses in between stories. I suspect that rereading her will be a pleasure that matures with age.

Joy Williams has long been regarded as a master storyteller in the short fiction format. In The Visiting Privilege, we get about four dozen short stories spanning the length of her remarkable career, including thirteen that are new with this volume. Overall, it is a compelling collection that explores the complexities of human nature and personal relationships with equal parts humor, insight, and raw emotion. Williams delves into a wide variety of topics, frequently blurring the lines between the mundane and the surreal while considering the plight of ordinary people as they struggle with both everyday challenges as well as more bizarre and unsettling situations. These are largely tales of broken, downtrodden, or lonely people who are show more facing demons that are often of their own design. Alcohol consumption and death play prominent roles in the entire book and most of the stories include a dog, although seldom as a main character. Throughout, the author's prose is elegant but spare, usually capturing the essence of a moment with just a few highly evocative words and phrases.

While the stories themselves are brief—most of them are around 8-12 pages in length—they are not necessarily easy reading, given the difficult subject matter they cover. Still, each is well worth the effort, if only for their poignant observations and dark wit. The author has an effective narrative style that allows her to consistently create characters who may not be likeable, but nevertheless elicit a strong reaction from the reader—sometimes empathy, but more often discomfort. The Visiting Privilege does not really contain a weak story (an amazing feat in itself), but there were definitely a few that stood out: "The Farm", “Honored Guest”, “The Visiting Privilege (title story)”, “Hammer”, “Cats and Dogs”, and “The Mother Cell” would rank high on the list of the ones that affected me the most. Despite its intensity, this was a very gratifying book to consume. I only wish that I had done my consuming in smaller sips rather than the large gulps that I took! show less

Joy Williams’ stories tend to the poetic, with sentences densely packed with image and meaning and characters equally opaque and unpredictable. They need to be read slowly, considered, and often read a second time. With a collection this large — 46 stories in all — it will take some time. But time in the company of Joy Williams’ prose is time well spent.

There were many stories here that I found remarkable. The first from the “Collected Stories” section of the book entitled “Taking Care,” and its companion piece, the last from that section, entitled “Bromeliads,” are startlingly good, though sad, very sad. In the “New Stories” section, I particularly like “Another Season.”

It is very easy to recommend this show more collection to others. show less

In this remarkable collection, Joy Williams breaks all the rules: abrupt time shifts, inconsistent points of view, unfinished vignettes, you name it. The stories are nearly all intimate familial scenes that are simultaneously busy and cacophonous: characters talking at cross purposes, little fits of imperfectly explained laughter, hopeless oddballs, insufferable children, parents awkwardly dying. Frequently set in Maine and Florida, the characters are adrift, loosed from one home and not yet found a place in another, abandoned by loved ones, carried along by outside forces and unable to find a foothold to root themselves. Somehow, across dozens of tales, Williams manages to draw sympathetic and distinct characters who are -- even when show more insufferable -- oddly appealing. show less

In a weird distinction, I thought the stories in this collection were really well done, but didn't enjoy the experience of reading it. I think because it was a library book, and I felt a certain pressure to soldier through it, when I would have really liked to read one or two at a time and put the book down for a bit to absorb them. Each one was so dense and unsettling–as I think I said earlier (but will go ahead and say again because I amuse myself), it was kind of like eating a flourless chocolate, but more depressing.

Still, glad I read it, and thinking maybe I'll revisit some of the work another time.

There are a lot of good stories in this collection. The new content comprises about 100 pages, while the old stories take up 380. There appear to be 7 stories missing from the collections Taking Care, Escapes, and Honored Guest. The best stories are included, and unless one is a completionist, this volume should give one a well-rounded and plenty thorough dose of Joy Williams.

To me it had a "gogolizing" effect. While reading Gogol one begins to see everything through a strange, tinted lens. Nabokov described this as being "gogolized." The same thing occurs in the case of this author. I suppose any writer whose prose properly casts a spell over the reader begins to taint their perception of reality.

Be that as it may, the qualification show more for a good story in my mind is to create a willingness to revisit it. And these examples certainly qualify. show less

Realistically I may never finish this book, but I'm going to give it five stars because every story in here makes me want to be more thoughtful, more observant, smarter and better, so I can be more like Joy Williams. Also every story has a dog, it's fantastic. Joy Williams is so cool it kills me.