Current Reading: The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams

I am enjoying these stories, although they are filled with grief and loss, and, at least in my opinion, some real humor. I find it difficult to articulate what, exactly, I like about these stories, but I did find some good reviews on the Internet. So, with apologies, here are a few quotes from others:

Ben Marcus in the NYTimes:

If nihilism provides the skeleton of this book, it is often animated with a kind of gallows humor. Certainly there’s a theory about this somewhere (why the very worst thoughts can be so funny), wherever people sit around and try to explain jokes. Whatever the reason, when Williams skewers the entire human project — the reckless gathering of material goods, the destruction of the planet, the telling of lies to protect oneself — I find myself helplessly laughing, hoping I don’t spill out onto the couch.

Dwight Garner also in the NYTimes:

It hurts to read Joy Williams’s stories, if you’re a dog person...dogs fall off ferries at night. They’re run over, abandoned and shot. They have plastic baskets on their heads, or nasty warts. They’re fed Drano. They have Grecian Formula rubbed into their prematurely graying snouts...It tells you something about Ms. Williams’s stories that the people generally fare worse than the dogs. 

Deb Olin Unferth in Bookforum:

her characters’ quests—their road trips and train rides across the US—are wild failures: determinedly aimless. A woman drives off hoping to do a good deed and winds up lost, injured, and passed out. Another character lets her friend’s daughter join her on a crooked road trip and the daughter takes off, doesn’t reappear. The wise men at the end of the stories’ journeys are as tired, bored, and confused as the seekers.

Michael Schaub in NPR:

In "Hammer," a widow is forced to deal with her unbearable daughter, Darleen, a high school junior who loathes her. ("I'm hanging up, Mummy," Darleen says to her mother on a telephone call. "You can continue with your inanities if you wish." The story ends with an abrupt time shift and a shocking ending that calls into question everything that preceded it.