The Quick and the Dead

i love this messy novel where all the characters r crudely constructed from the random horrors of human melancholy, grief, boredom, & (targetless) revenge. everyone's a little unbelievable--caricatures & voids--which somehow fell more on the side of delight than eyerolly anguish for me. the plot never shows up but who can blame it & i didnt much mind cos the writing is so good ur willing to live in the exposition.

Joy Williams is probably an acquired taste -- acquired by those who savor gallows humor and tenuous connections between life and death. Generally speaking her characters are not the kind of souls one would want to spend much time with, but they do tease the mind for a couple of afternoon or evening reads. The Quick and the Dead takes place during one summer in an unidentified Southwestern desert town. The main characters are three motherless sixteen year-old girls.

Alice, the central character, has been raised by her Granny and Poppa as her mother decamped shortly after she was born. Her school friend, Corvus, has recently lost both her parents in a freak flash flood. Annabel, a newcomer to the town, has arrived from New England with her show more father Carter, who is literally haunted during the night by his late wife, Ginger. Alice wants to live a singular life, and although she sees earth-threatening calamities around every corner, she is the most daring. Corvus is buried in grieving and unsure how to proceed. While trying to remember and memorialize her mother, Annabel hates the desert and longs for the "normal" life she has been dragged from.

Peripheral characters include the founder the a Wildlife Museum populated by the stuffed animals he has hunted all over the world, a piano player who wears a tuxedo all the time, an eight-year old girl who despises the man her mother is seeing, a seductive gardener who enchants Annabel's father, and a drifter -- a young stroke victim -- who believes a monkey lives in his brain.

The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is brilliantly written, as are all Williams' novels (I haven't read her short story collections). Williams's landscapes contribute to or counterpoint the bizarre and bleak vision she has of the modern society. show less

in an interview with bob dylan on his songwriting process, i remember reading that for him, songwriting was about taking a story and "turning it on its head." i think that phrase aptly describes williams's writing as well. she has a knack for taking an ordinary phrase, turning it on its head, and crafting a truly beautiful sentence. i agree with the goodreads review where it says that her characters don't speak ordinary dialogue, but instead talk like prophets. and especially the retirement home nurse. (i'm obsessed with her axiom: ivory soap is the madeleine of our country's innocence.) centered around three motherless teenage girls, the book is magic realism, set in the desert of the american southwest. it has been awhile since i've show more read any tom robbins, but i'm tempted to recommend this to fans of his writing. we'll see if the five star rating holds up, but i loved it while reading it. show less

Well, everyone in this book is crazy...some of them are alive, some dead, some barely conscious...but all freaking crazy.

You know how when you read Catch 22, and you think, everyone's crazy to show the craziness of war? Well, it's kinda that way here...but there is no war. Some sort of attack on society, perhaps?

In any event, there is some very funny stuff, very horrific stuff, very confusing stuff--but a fun overall book. :)

While this is a disturbing book, it is very absorbing.
The only reason it doesn't get 5 stars is because it jumps, chapter to chapter, between several characters. Each of them is interesting in their own way and have a strange quirk that plays into their unusual actions and reactions. The dialogue is disarming while at the same time charming. It is Williams at her best, and also a book worth a second read.
The stories are interconnected but the narrative is most powerful when the focus is on one character, their inner conflicts and skewed perspective. As long as the style doesn't grate on you, this book will impress the pants off you.
I happen to find the author's style addictive.

I don't know what to say about this book. It's overwhelming, surreal, beautiful, hysterical, huge in every sense of the word (except length, but it felt like it took me forever to read it), and I didn't know what the hell was going on most of the time. It's like walking around in a surrealist painting that was about to explode.

This is the second book I've read on tao lin's recommendation (not personal, he just mentioned it in his blog), the first being Anagrams. Funnily enough, I've never read any of his books...

Anyhoo, both recommendations were excellent. I was in and out of this one, however. The main character, Alice, I adored, and the long introductory description of the big game hunter was excellent. But some characters were a bit over the top and simply too obvious, such as Ray with the monkey in his brain. Williams has a simple, honest voice that beguiled me with its humor into believing there was a plot somewhere, that the reader wasn't stuck in some sort of purgatory of a novel where nothing matters, no one cares and nothing is revealed..."Concern is show more the new consumerism." I would like to be able to turn a phrase a like Williams.

I will reread this some day along with Anagrams.

P.S. This reminded me quite a bit of the movie Ghost World in some ways. Alice, and Sherwin as the Buscemi character...I dunno... show less