JOY WILLIAMS // THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

PRICE WAS OBLITERATION, WHICH WAS UNACCEPTABLE. THOUGH ONLY ON ONE LEVEL; ON ANOTHER LEVEL, PERFECTLY OKAY.

// DEC 23, 2024-JAN 9, 2025 //

“What a story is, is devious,” Joy Williams has said. “It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.”

I’ve read Joy Williams before—two novels and a collection of short stories. When I chose The Quick and the Dead as my last read of 2024, I assumed I was making a safe choice. I had visions of myself curled up on the sofa at my mother’s apartment, reading by the twinkling light of the Christmas tree and chuckling knowingly at Joy’s dark humor. In reality, I managed six pages over four days, each attempt to read made half-awake in bed, engorged on rich dinners and alcohol. The rituals of Christo-paganism had rendered me simple; Joy’s work now proved too devious for me. I wondered if I should spend future Christmases reading books that dealt in the comprehensible rather than the incomprehensible. Maybe clear-cut moralistic tales, or interesting explanations of how certain machines work.

There are three teenaged girls living in Arizona. Their names are Alice, Annabel, and Corvus. Alice is a misanthropic, uncompromising environmentalist, not unlike Joy Williams herself. “For more than a month now, after school,” Williams writes, “Alice had been caring for six-year-old fraternal twins, Jimmy and Jacky. They lived with their mother, who was away all day, cutting hair. Their father was off in another state, building submarines. Hair, submarines, it was disgusting, Alice thought.” The twins’ mother fires Alice for pushing her environmental agenda upon the children: she has told them that the toilet should remain un-flushed after peeing, that the wasp’s nest in their backyard should not be destroyed, that humanity is a scourge upon the earth. “It you think I’m paying you, you’re crazy,” the mother tells Alice. “Pervert. Bitch. You’d better watch out.”

This is the novel’s first plot point. After I read it, I placed the open book down on my chest and wondered what, exactly, I was not grasping. I repeated the fundamentals in my head: A young babysitter is fired and and refused payment by a disgruntled mother. A young babysitter is fired a refused payment by a disgruntled mother. A young babysitter is fired and refused payment by a disgruntled mother. Then I let out one last cookie-infused belch and fell asleep.

Once I came home from the holidays, reading the novel became much easier. The unsettling limbo of late December and early January proved a much better environment to understand the mysterious, almost sinister aura permeating Williams’ prose. She was right: life could, at any moment, lose a grounding context that one had taken for granted, and reveal instead the threatening nothingness which hides behind every gesture, every endeavor, every marking of the hour. I was enjoying this idea at a safe, intellectual distance, but the Great Symbolist above got a little too heavy-handed for my tastes when, two-thirds of my way through this novel, he burned my entire hometown to the ground.

I am trying to be concise. It does not pack quite the same punch to say, instead of “my hometown,” “one of the many neighborhoods of Los Angeles where I lived as a child,” or “my hometown from around ages ten to fifteen, I can’t exactly remember.” My parents were divorced, so I always lived in two neighborhoods at once, and each parent moved three-to-four times over the course of my childhood. Both of them have now left the city altogether. In my visits back to Los Angeles, I have searched for a sense of return, but I am never sure where exactly to start, and even in my attempts to start somewhere, I’ve struggled to recognize anything I have seen—Santa Monica emptier and quieter than I remember, Venice a tech haven, Westwood stripped of the restaurants and shops from my childhood. Eventually, I gave up, and now I haven’t been back for five years. If I think too hard about it, it is upsetting, but for the most part I try to look ahead or at least anywhere but behind me, try to ignore the dogging and insatiable nostalgia that haunts my hazy memories of that place. After all, what nostalgia isn’t dogging and insatiable? The emotion is useless, I tell myself, its tormenting similar to that of a bully’s, not worth my respect or attention.

But the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes. During the week that the fires burn, my friends and I submit anxious inquiries and updates to each other on a group chat. The red of the fire map grows closer and closer to their childhood homes—as if the graphic is a coloring book being filled in by some disembodied sadist—and we speak indirectly, but never explicitly, about the dread that comes from seeing one’s history on the brink of annihilation. I watch their fears wax and wane with the direction of the wind, and I feel a squeamish gratitude that for me, it is different, that for me, the stakes of this disaster remain so nebulous and immaterial. But what is harder to acknowledge is the fact that this difference evokes its own kind of pain, one that is as difficult to understand as my relationship to the city itself. I wrote, more than ten years ago, that when people told me that I did not seem like I was from Los Angeles, I felt as if an ache were occurring in a phantom limb—and again, I can only explain the sensation I feel in the midst of this devastation as one of damage to the nerve, a weird zap, a diffuse fray, impossible to locate, and therefore, impossible to fully attend to.

Meanwhile, the northeast is so frigid that I must cover up almost every part of my body while I am outside. These are the times when I cry the most, my face fully obscured by my gaiter mask and sunglasses. I walk my dog in polar privacy, in intimate communion with the silent desolation of winter, and I let rip. My dog, meanwhile, is in ecstasy; the cold activates her. She sprints in bursts and snatches up sticks the length of her body, ripping off thin sheets of bark with frantic joy. It is a good arrangement; emotionally, we cover all the bases.

One of the last times I visited Los Angeles was in February of 2020. I drove the five hours down from Oakland with Isaac, and we stayed with my mom in a new apartment she was renting. It was in a part of Beverly Hills I had never seen before, a quiet grid of tudors in the flats. We had come down, in part, because my dad was visiting from England to deal with some pension paperwork through the Writer’s Guild. When he arrived at my mom’s apartment, he washed his hands immediately, citing his concern about this new virus that was beginning to pepper the news. He spoke about his vigilance with self-deprecation, dismissing himself, humorously, as paranoid.

Meanwhile, I wanted to show Isaac landmarks from my childhood, but we did not have access to our car—some issue with the apartment’s narrow garage—and I struggled to think of a place within walking distance that was of any significance. My former orthodontist’s office? The fountain in Clueless where Cher realizes she loves Josh? Then I remembered the town’s library, a gorgeous Art Deco building connected to an equally gorgeous city hall, and one of the first public libraries I visited regularly. I would go there after school to check out modernist novels whose plots I didn’t understand, but whose language I enjoyed. I had read them as if listening to music. On one of my excursions, I’d run into a girl from my high school whose mother had plopped her there for a couple of hours, hoping that the confinement would force her to finish her homework. I’d watched her expression take on an unpleasant pall as I explained, reluctantly, that I was there because I wanted to be. “That’s so weird,” she muttered, avoiding eye contact. I was not so surprised by her disdain: I recalled that in her Facebook bio, she had entered, under Favorite Books, i don’t read. (Under Political Views: who cares honestly!!!)

Isaac and I walked a mile down Rodeo Drive in order to reach the building. On the way there, I grew increasingly overstimulated by our direct exposure to the noontime sun and the chainsaw roars of the sports cars peacocking their way up and down the street. I was wearing a thrift store dress made of cheap polyester; the fabric felt too tight on my body, and the bright colors did not match the luxury creams and khakis which surrounded us. My hair was dry and frizzy, and I kept trying to smooth it down, anxiously glancing sideways into the dim reflections of designer stores. We ended up walking behind a group of high school girls all dressed in monochrome spandex workout sets; I felt as if at any moment they would turn and look at me, a twenty-seven year old woman, and with one glowering stare, reduce me to the rubble of my pubescence. Eventually I grew faint, and we had to take a break from walking so I could sit at a small metal table outside of an espresso cafe. I drank ice water out of a translucent plastic cup and stared silently into space. It had been so hard, to have to become a woman here. I don’t remember much from the visit to the library itself, but Isaac has some photos of me looking happy enough.

Now I live in a city whose nickname is not Tinseltown but America’s Filing Cabinet, a city whose official slogan insists, perhaps too forcefully, that “Hartford Has It,” and whose local non-profit arts space offers an alternative slogan: “Hartford: You Could Do Worse.” I am happy in the filing cabinet, where I do not feel the constant need to prove I deserve the privilege of existence, where my relevance and attractiveness are no longer currencies I must have on hand in case of a sudden social audit, where I have more time, space, and stability for creative work than I ever have in my entire life. There are times when I can almost believe that everyone is right—that I am not the kind of person who would be from Los Angeles at all, that such a place does not have that much do to with me. It was just a place where my mother—a Virginian—and my father—an Englishman—happened to raise me, an event which, through our collective exodus, we seem to agree should be dismissed as a strange dream, which occurred in a place where many dreams do.

And if only it were that simple. In The Quick and the Dead, Corvus attempts to incinerate her past, too—quite literally. Grief-stricken by the death of both of her parents, and then by murder of her dog by her neighbor, she burns her entire house down. Another mystifying beat from Williams, the master of deviousness, but this one I understood easily. If the loss of something is inescapable, then playing the active participant, pushing that destruction to its extremes, can provide the suffering subject some mirage of agency. But the mirage is only that. It does not work, this attempt to beat grief to the punch. The power of true annihilation is reserved for sublimity alone; meanwhile, we play with toy blocks, knocking down towers of our own construction, dismayed to find, after the initial thrill of devastation, that the pieces still surround us, and that no one else is coming to clean it up. Corvus spends the rest of the novel floating between the solace of dreams and the persistent sadness of waking life; by the end of the book, she disappears into the nursing home where she has been volunteering, seemingly to spend the rest of her life listening to the confused ramblings of those who are brushing up against their final curtain, and yet, until their final silence, speak only about their pasts.

Multiple sources online post footage of my old town’s charred ruins. The message is always the same: look at this, unrecognizable. I try to recognize what I am supposed to not recognize, but I struggle to place any of it. Once again, I resign myself to the possibility that it has been too long, that I am more of a stranger to this place than I thought. Perhaps that means I can find a way to care less than I do. But late at night, images buried for decades start to surface, flashing against my lids every time I rest my eyes, like pictures in a slideshow. Winding streets and Spanish houses, tall bluffs against the sea, where my friends and I hurdled gingerly over low fences and shimmied around gates to steal for a moment the private luxury of the ocean’s view. The Chinese restaurant, its wonton soup and sweet, pickled green cabbage, and the store a few buildings down, dark, low-ceilinged, and inexplicably, tantalizingly filled with old beanie babies. The steep street I drove down on my way out of the dentist’s pink office bungalow, the tenderness of my gums mingling with flashes of desire from being touched for the first time the night before, by a boy who would never speak to me again. The grocery parking lot where the school bus would pick me up in the morning when the sky was still dark, where another boy once yelled out of the back of his mom’s car to make fun of the knee-high socks I wore with my chunky New Balances and starchy school uniform. “Nice socks,” he’d said, his voice dripping with lazy derision, and I had thought to myself, one day I will live somewhere where people do not think it’s okay to insult you for your socks. And now I do, but so does the person who wore those socks, and whenever I try to burn her down, she burns, and I can feel her burning.

It took me an embarrassing number of years to learn that the version of Los Angeles in which I grew up was a sliver of its true scale and complexity. In my last couple of years there, when I had more independence and mobility, I glanced, underneath the city’s shallow and anti-intellectual facade, a real, beautiful place, though I confused those epiphanies too often with the joy of adolescent self-discovery. When I got to college, I encountered a disproportionate stampede of people who were from the Bay Area, and I was shocked to hear my comrades in statehood spew such vitriol towards my home. One person even told me that they believed Los Angeles should not exist at all, that it should be burned to the ground. I was confused by my reluctance to agree. Hadn’t I suffered there? Hadn’t I found it terrible? It has only taken me fifteen years to articulate what I had wanted to say in response:

It does exist, and it does burn to the ground. And it is where my bones grew, and it is where I saw the first things that I ever saw in my life. And it lives inside of me as that same contradiction, as the part of myself that should not exist, but that does. It was a bad place, and it was a good place, and it was where I learned that good places can exist inside bad places. It was where I first learned about the false, the hollow, the inauthentic—and so it will also always be the place where my hunger for realness was birthed, a hunger which has enabled me to excavate from my life a deep, invaluable happiness. It is where I learned the lesson that has been one of the most important of my life: that to live in a place means to live in it actively, to wrestle with it, to take responsibility for it, to commit to understanding it, to uncover what it can give you, and forgive it for what it cannot.

The last fifty pages of The Quick and the Dead are no longer entertaining, only comforting. I see lines that would have made me laugh a few days ago, and now I just nod in quiet validation. “All art is about nothingness,” Joy Williams has said, “our apprehension of it, our fear of it, its approach.” Nothingness is simple; that is its redeeming quality. Its approach, however, is different. Devious. And while alive, its approach is all we experience; there, in its shadow, is where we must live, disoriented by the dappling of memory and void, stumbling on the shifting terrain of what we still have and what we have lost. We bargain, we offer complete surrender, not understanding that the lesson is harder than we wish: you cannot surrender. Loss is never complete, only partial, and it remains with you, reminding you always of what you cannot have, but also, what you can never fully relinquish.

MY FAVORITE EXCERPTS FROM THE QUICK AND THE DEAD:

“In my room I have a picture of a woman trysting with an octopus in a hotel room. Actually, it’s more like a squid. A cross between the two. It’s a great picture. The squid is sort of sitting in a chair, comforting her. Light streams through the window across the unmade bed.”

“There’s no picture like that,” Annabel said.

“I look at it and think, Women are capable of anything.”

~

Kevin had once published a book of saguaro photographs in which the cacti said funny things befitting their incongruent natures. It was something you’d read sitting on the can. Then he’d published a sequel in which they said additional funny things, but this hadn’t proved as successful. Hickey told him he was belaboring the concept.

~

He and Alice were sitting in an enclosed patio that once had offered the convenience of a drive-up window. A striped awning hugged the area, altering the hue of flesh and food alike. Each table had a card propped among the condiments (the ketchup looked quite green) stating YOU’RE NOT GOING COLOR-BLIND! OUR NEW AWNING CREATES THIS EFFECT! PEACE!

~

The wings had arrived with the sweet potato fries. Sherwin was wearing his tuxedo. His fingers were greasy. Watching him had given Alice much pleasure in the past, but now she felt nothing. Would she forever be an empty onlooker at the feast of life?

~

She was regarding a plate of cookies as though it were all a matter of selection when clearly it was not, the cookies being identical as far as Alice could tell, round and brown with colored sprinkles. They looked desperate, as if baked by someone in despair.

~

But now she was unwell and in Florida. But where was that? Florida could be anyplace, which had always been one of Florida’s problems.

~

Belief in resurrection was the butt of pagan jest. The difficulties, the logistics of it…better to see dust as both more and less than dust and be finished with it.

~

He wished he could write or paint, that he was possessed with some small talent. To race through the night with a pen! But writing makes everything clearer and worse at once, that is, when it wasn’t making everything appear worse without clarifying it. That was the problem with writing.

~

Agriculture—worst damn thing to ever happen to the human race. Hoeing and hoarding. Man lost a dimension. Lost all sympathy and sense of magic.

~

He lit another and leaned on the haunch of a red Mercedes convertible whose bumper sticker declared, “My Friend Was Killed by a Drunk Driver.” Person always had to have a certain kind of face on when driving that car. They must have another car they drove when they wanted to relax.

~

Concern is the new consumerism. A person’s worth can be measured by the number and intensity of his concerns. Candles, lighting a candle, confers the kind of fulfillment that only empty ritual can bring. Empty ritual’s important. It’s coming back as a force in people’s lives. Its role is being acknowledged. It’s the keystone for tomorrow’s dealings in an annexed and exploited world.

~

All souls lonely, but what did it matter? Couldn’t matter less that all souls were lonely. Was in a soul’s nature never to be satisfied until infusion was achieved with all. Price was obliteration, which was unacceptable. Though only on one level; on another level, perfectly okay.