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Honored Guest
by
Joy Williams
With her singular brand of gorgeous dark humor, Joy Williams explores the various ways–comic, tragic, and unnerving—we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. A masseuse breaks her rich client's wrist bone, a friend visits at the hospital long after she is welcome, and a woman surrenders her husband to a creepily adoring student. From one of our most acclaimed writers, ...more
Paperback, 224 pages
Published
September 1st 2010
by Vintage
(first published 2004)
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Joy Williams is just genius. I want to plagiarize it all. The elliptical “plots”(or parody of plots), the savage humor, surreal dialogue, the palpable threat in nearly every line, absurd situations, her unsettling and painfully convincing vision of life, and her handling of death, anxiety, sickness, and ecology and our place in the natural world. I you are fan of Jane Bowles and the films of David Lynch you must read Williams.
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"She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny and you had to be careful in this milieu which was eleventh grade because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke. They had left the notes everywhere and they were full of misspellings and pretensions. Theirs had been a false show. Then this year a girl had taken an overdose of Tylenol which of...more
A selection of things Joy Williams' characters say/do:
"I wasn't brought up that way."
"What were you born with, an ax in your hand? You're so destructive."
She pretended she was a virus, wandering without aim through someone's body.
"I began to wonder if it was worthwhile to undertake what I was doing at the moment. Pick a moment, any moment. I began to wonder. If I only had today and not tomorrow, would it be worthwhile to undertake...more
"I wasn't brought up that way."
"What were you born with, an ax in your hand? You're so destructive."
She pretended she was a virus, wandering without aim through someone's body.
"I began to wonder if it was worthwhile to undertake what I was doing at the moment. Pick a moment, any moment. I began to wonder. If I only had today and not tomorrow, would it be worthwhile to undertake...more
I wonder why I don't give this more stars. It's absolutely gorgeous writing, with a great sense of weirdness and detail and dialogue. Cameron Pierce lent me this specifically so I could read "Congress," the story about the deer-foot lamp -- and I loved it!
I guess I hoped the rest of the book would be equally surreal and unhinged, but instead the rest of the stories have convinced me that the weirdness of "Congress" is more a depiction of the heroine's mental i...more
I guess I hoped the rest of the book would be equally surreal and unhinged, but instead the rest of the stories have convinced me that the weirdness of "Congress" is more a depiction of the heroine's mental i...more
Good, weird stories that don't feel the need to show growth, significance and epiphany in every detail. I want a deer-foot lamp that likes to read Moby-Dick.
The title story, about a teenage girl whose mother is dying, is fantastic. The "five stages of grief" turn into five hundred, the abyss yawns and waits behind every aggressively empty line that the mom utters. The atmosphere crackles with danger.
Four stars for that story alone.
The rest of the stories: meh. The loopy, dangerously-giddy, we-are-alone-in-a-universe-of-entropy-and-minor-madness tone gets old as more and more quirky characters parade before us and ...more
Four stars for that story alone.
The rest of the stories: meh. The loopy, dangerously-giddy, we-are-alone-in-a-universe-of-entropy-and-minor-madness tone gets old as more and more quirky characters parade before us and ...more
Another collection that failed to pull me all the way through. The NY Times reviewer nailed the book's fatal flaw dead on, arguing that the collection's lack of landscape led to its groundless characters. Williams has a knack for ironicizing the detail, but when it comes to putting her skewed characters in some kind of context where their pretenatural abilities seems to emanate from some unknowable natural world, she falls well short of the successes in her first collection, which had such textu...more
Human stories with structure, fleshed out delicatly, earnestly, and not too judgementally. Joy relates tragedies of varing sizes through perspectives passionate or apathetic. The stories assembled in this book fit together better than those in most short story books. The often abrupt endings complement the narratives, never feeling as though the author just got bored. Artful writing.
Amazing short stories, most are about death, and all are about loss and loneliness, and all the ways that people deal with this emotions. This book has some of the mind blowing symbolism I've ever read, they are symbols you can't really figure out. These stories are should be depressing, but they make you happy to be alive, and to be aware that you are alive.
I've always heard writing pals of mine rave over this chick's work -- they were not kidding. She is brilliant. How she makes every line of dialogue an utter surprise is sheer genius. She really writes from the gut. I will be reading all of her works.
Kind of like watching a car wreck in slow motion (if anyone remembers Art Chicago/Next 2008. Anyone?) Mostly annoying and with flashes of poignency, subtle schadenfreude, and kinda funny stuff. Not especially riveting, but for some reason I couldn't tear myself away. My sense is that this is one of those books written for Writers; maybe I would have gotten more out of it if I were still taking literature classes and wrangling 50-cent words after hours.
I guess this was one of those "everyone loves it but me" books. It came critically praised and highly recommended by smart people, but I really didn't find much resembling actual human beings in these stories.
Almost gave up on these, but then I read and loved 'Anodyne' which encouraged me to keep going. I think that was an easy stand alone favourite for me. I did like some of the others, but I found them quite unsettling and a bit too cold and odd, they left me feeling kind of uncertain. Some beautiful writing though.
Easily one of the best short story collections. Stunning, and bizarre, but never forced or wacky. Joy Williams is something strange: A completely unique voice in fiction. Comparisons to Denis Johnson or Kelly Link aren't out of order, but they don't express how perfect these stories are, standing outside of the light of others. These stories are less like literature and more like the experience of living life itself - images stay with you, the parts don't always correlate, the energy is exa...more
These short stories were a little hard to understand. As each ended, I questioned what it was all about.
I think that a story is just that....a story. A slice of life. Sometimes full of adventure and sometimes pretty boring! Williams characters are just people getting on with life. Usually, a short story is hard to get wrapped up in and in this case you probably wouldn't want to hang out with these characters for long anyhow.
I think that a story is just that....a story. A slice of life. Sometimes full of adventure and sometimes pretty boring! Williams characters are just people getting on with life. Usually, a short story is hard to get wrapped up in and in this case you probably wouldn't want to hang out with these characters for long anyhow.
I liked the title story a lot. "Charity" was good too.
I am an enormous Joy Williams fan, though I was more blown away by Escapes and Taking Care. Honored Guest is, of course, solid but doesn't quite make me squirm like her other collections.
09 'best books' chuck palahniuk-the week
endings leave a little to be desired
A collection of kooky short stories. Not entirely funny, but quirky and very interesting!
adamantly weird prose
She has a fine way of putting things.
Speaking table lamps made from the antlers of deer. Preoccupations with death and other existential crises played out through the beautifully eery speech of Joy Williams. These stories haunted me after I read them, they became a part of my dreams and nightmares. I still find, Taking Care to be my favorite of Williams' works, but Honored Guest is a brilliant collection.
I think this book needs a doctor BECAUSE THESE STORIES ARE SICK
These stories are amazing, especially the endings, but I made the mistake of reading them when I was staying alone in the house. Oof. They are tough. I had to take the book back to the library because it was due, but I plan to take it out and finish it, probably while sitting inside a protective circle of other humans. Moral: probably don't read books with black birds featured in the cover art if you are home alone.
More story-driven than I typically like, which makes it kind of a relief, i.e., an easy read? I'm enjoying it profusely on the late-morning can, not to denigrate its obviously high degree of literary and experimental quality (in this case more "quirky prose" than word-driven poetical hybrid). The author came recommended from Tao Lin's blog about a year ago.
The first story was the best one in the collection and even it wasn't very good, the depressing factor wasn't the problem, it was something else. Once again, judging a book by its cover (I really like the cover) has proven a poor way of judging if a book is worth reading. I will continue to do it though.
i can't figure out why i didn't like this. i was so excited to read it and it has such glowing reviews, but i just didn't like the stories. they were odd, and not in a good way, and sometimes so rambling that i lost the plot. i love short stories, but these just left me confused.
problem i have with short-stories, now, is that i always compare the work to alice munro- i have her on a bookshelf- and usually this other work seems kind of... lightweight. this applies to lit, not so much to sf or fantasy/horror, but yes to what little crime shorts read.
overall quite excellent, tho in a way these stories are all the same: dark, quirky, about people who are just a little off ... in general i'm not a fan of short stories, but i will go ahead and check out one of her novels ...
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“She had a dream about a tattoo. This was a pleasant dream. She was walking away and she had the most beautiful tattoo. It covered her shoulders, her back, the back of her legs. It was unspeakably fine.”
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