The Quick and the Dead
by Joy Williams

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Book Reviews of The Quick and the Dead

Book Review: A comedic tour de force of language and character
Summary: 5 Stars

Thus 8-year-old Emily Bliss Pickless, who likes to pour dirt on her head and to pretend she doesn't know how to read to see if adults will try to mislead her, observes, "You had to act dumb around adults, otherwise there was no point in being around them at all." Assessing her mother's new boyfriend, she concludes, "...mother lacked all discrimination when it came to men." (p. 167) When she has finished re-educating the proprietor of the stuffed animal/trophy museum, we find it shut down with her sign out front, accurately announcing, "CLOSED FOR RECONSIDERATION."

Thus Nurse Daisy, as she washes Freddie Fallow, an elderly 350-pound mountain of an old man (who had to be hoisted into the tub with the aid of block and tackle), muses, "Isn't water a remarkable element? It's exempt from getting wet. It's as exempt from getting wet as God is exempt from the passion of love." (p. 169) Or, "Birth is the cause of death," and "The set trap never tires of waiting." (p. 170) Or even, "Our capacity to do evil has nothing to do with our innocence." (p. 171) Or--most especially--her description of Freddie's impending death as, "the evaporation of your little droplet above the sea..." (p. 172)

This last is an echo of Buddhism that Williams wants to satirize, as she does through the person of the undead Ginger, whose husband Carter has taken a fancy to his gardener, Donald, who espouses trendy Eastern philosophies. She begins, "What's he doing tonight, out hand-pollinating something?" She goes on to say, "Slow white dudes studying Buddhism make me sick," and finishes up with, "I can just hear him. It's only death, Ginger. Everything is fine...Does he say, Thank you, Illusion, every time he manages to overcome some piddling obstacle in his silly life?"

Thus Joy Williams's characters are vehicles for the author's expressions and her starkly original slant on the living and the dead. But what Joy Williams does so well is that she plays fair. The words of quirky wisdom come not necessarily from characters who represent her own views, such as Alice and Emily (although sometimes they do) but they can even come from the most minor of her human creatures. Thus Ottolie "who resembled an iguana" tells Alice from her bed, "I never sleep, you know...Never. Someone sleeps for me. She lives in Nebraska." Ottolie adds, "Aksarben. That's where I get a lot of my people. You have to learn how to delegate tasks." (p. 117)

Some have criticized this novel as "structurally a mess." Not so. Williams has her own organizing mechanisms. Characters flow from one to another; incidents are connected by invisible synchronicities; people appear to further the plot, and then disappear, but they are melded into the psychological and atmospheric structure of the novel. One sees this in the rednecks who seem to appear just to finish off poor Ray of the slanted mouth, but actually they are essential fixtures of the landscape as they smoke dope and shotgun saguaros, observing that "Shooting felt good..." consisting in "the increase of one's power," or that "Paranoia is having all the facts." (p. 152)

Sometimes what is best about Joy Williams is the sheer dazzle of language. Thus the unrelenting Arizona sun is made manifest through metaphor: "The sun shone like oil upon the limousine's hood, which had been waxed to the shine of water." Or the boy Alice sees whose hair was "as white as glare." (pp. 303-304) And sometimes the best thing is her revelation of character with just a phrase or two. Thus we know what Annabel is like because she worries about things like running out of avocado butter or whether she can actually wear beige or not. On page 163 a waiter, who wore "white clinging plastic gloves" comes to life with just these words:

"Have a nice remainder of the rest of your life," the waiter said. "Gotta cough." He turned away.

Or the two loud women at a nearby table who "had poured sugar on their food so they wouldn't eat anymore."

People yearn for things that cannot be, and that is life. Thus Ginger yearns for Carter to renew their vows of love and for him to join her, but he prefers to conjoin with Donald. And Alice is strangely smitten with the tuxedo-wearing piano player who is (unknown to her, but Annabel sees this clearly) irrevocably gay. But some people do indeed find love or something akin, as the stuffed animal museum owner and his adored Pickless, or Carter with Donald, or Annabel and Paris. Or the "pretty lizard" with J.C.'s missing "Little Wonder."

"The Quick and the Dead" (Second Timothy: 4:1; also The Book of Common Prayer) is a work of art that finds its own structure, that reveals itself to us in its own way. It is a fascinating reading experience, alive and vital, a tour de force of language and character, a darkly comedic romp through the sunshine of our psyches.

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