FICTION IN REVIEW

1 7 2 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W D A V I D G A L E F American avant-garde writing comes in many di√erent sizes, from expansive to minimalist, not just in style but also in projected scope. For every David Foster Wallace, there’s a Lydia Davis: the whole world in great detail versus the universe in a grain of sand. One notable miniaturist is Diane Williams, whose longest works are the novellas The Stupefaction and Romancer Erector and whose shortest stories are just a few sentences. For over forty years, Williams ’s modus scribendi has been to make an arresting declaration (‘‘Women were not a major ingredient in my thinking at the time’’), follow it up with some narrative details, often about relationships (‘‘Sometimes I’m over a barrel – my wife and I agree’’), and end with a brief paragraph that sums up the perplex: ‘‘pettiness , a tendency to show o√, and temporary stops to take a breath.’’ These excerpts are from a piece titled ‘‘Between Midnight and 6 AM,’’ all of a page and a half, from the 2012 collection Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, but they might just as well have come from her first collection, This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the F i n e , F i n e , F i n e , F i n e , F i n e , by Diane Williams (McSweeney’s, 136 pp., $20) 1 7 3 R World, Time, and Fate, back in 1990, or her latest volume, the 2016 Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine. Often her book titles herald the tilted territory that Williams marks for her fiction: Some Sexual Success Stories: Plus Other Stories in Which God Might Choose to Appear (1992), for instance, or It Was Like My Trying to Have a TenderHearted Nature (2007). Some experimental styles, such as Virginia Woolf’s mode of associationism and multiple perspectives, eventually filter into mainstream writing, albeit in watered-down form. It’s a testament to the bizarre e√ects of Williams’s work that her stories remain in a category all their own. Williams’s Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine contains forty stories ranging from a paragraph to a few pages. She can sum up a character with a puckishness that hovers over the whole narrative: ‘‘She had been lucky in love as she understood it’’ (‘‘A Gray Pottery Head’’) or this portrait of a husband from ‘‘To Revive a Person Is No Slight Thing’’: I turned and saw my husband naked, with his clothes folded in his hands. Unbudgeable – but finally springing into massive brightness – is how I prefer to think of him. Actually, he said in these exact words: ‘‘I don’t like you very much and I don’t think you’re fascinating.’’ He put his clothes on, stepped out of the room. The story accomplishes a lot in a small space, including a biting portrait of middle age and ritual, as well as the innumerable minor irritations of long-term marriage, ending in armistice instead of romance. Yet her stories are rather funny. This one concludes : I gave him a nod, made no apologies. Where were his? I didn’t cry some. I must say that our behavior is continually under review and any one error alters our prestige, but there’ll be none of that lifting up my eyes unto the hills. Though Williams’s stories are likely to surprise at any juncture, what binds most of them together is dissatisfaction, in many instances purposefully small, even petty: an unfortunate experience at the hairdresser (‘‘At a Period of Exceptional Dullness’’) or being 1 7 4 G A L E F Y blown by the wind while walking down a street (‘‘Personal Details ’’). What turns them into something rich and strange – or fractured and disconcerting, depending on your point of view – is in part her jump-cuts bordering on surrealism: a small girl, a fountain in a conservatory, a rose of Sharon, and a ‘‘dead or disabled raccoon on the sidewalk’’ in ‘‘The Mermaid Pose’’; back pain, a rec room, a sponge cake, and a...