But on the island, dusk seemed to grow out of nothing at all. In the southern dusk, the dark grew out of the sky like a hoof of mud dissolving in a clear pool. Only at very rare moments will she allow herself something approaching the sparse poetry of the following: Their meanings lie neither in plot, nor in the prose, which is plain to the point of austerity. With most short stories, a two-sentence precis would give some idea, however pale, of the work Williams’ stories resist this entirely. Mystery seems to be the very soul of her stories, whether it lies in their interpretive indeterminacy, in the surreal turn some of them take, or in their frequent gestures towards, or the incursion of, the metaphysical they remain irreducible and inexhaustible. Williams makes that mysterious, ambiguous surplus not simply a matter of a concluding flourish, but allows it to leak back to colour the entire fabric of the story.
The Visiting Privilege contains most of the stories from three of her four collections – the fourth one, 99 Stories of God, is an exercise in microfiction – and throws in 13 new ones. That the general British readership is unaware of perhaps the greatest living master of the short story, the 72-year-old American writer Joy Williams, is a matter of some shame – but also cause for exultation, because an enthralling discovery awaits. This core of absence is everything in the form, its very meaning. A successful short story, after all, is greater than the sum of its parts an unsolvable equation, if you will, where there will always be at least one variable that cannot be pinned down. T heories of the novel abound, but have you heard of any for the short story? The form is slippery, defiant, uncategorisable, the best examples making something new of the surplus in which the form trades.
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