The Quick and The Dead, by Joy Williams.
Williams’ writing has been compared to the work
of Flannery O’Connor. Like O’Connor, she has
dark sense of humor and a strong belief in divine
justice. Jettison O’Connor’s conservative
Catholicism for William’s ardent eco-activism,
and 1950s pre-segregation South for the 1990s
Southwest, and you can see the similarities.
Williams’ fiction resides in the same territory
as David Lynch’s work—a slightly parallel America
where the living and the dead mingle in a gothic
pop-culture strewn landscape. The grotesque
shares the stage with the mundane. This linked
collection of stories masquerading as a novel
concerns the lonely summer of Alice, an
eco-terrorist teenager and her group of
friends—the vapid and pretty Annabel, and the
depressed Corvus. Their lives intersect with the
fates of a wider group of misfits, both directly
and indirectly. These include a precocious
8-year-old misanthropic girl, a petty
criminal/prodigal son stroke victim, and
Annabel’s bisexual father haunted by the bitter,
bitchy ghost of his dead wife. The three girls
act as unknowing conduits of nature’s revenge, in
bizarre, comical and often violent ways.
Williams’ humor is relentless like Todd Solondz’s
films, her imagery weird, her message unsettling.


Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell. Mitchell is
only 33; I’ll go right ahead and say that I’m
jealous of his success. He’s already been
short-listed for a Booker Prize for his second
novel. This first book is a novel masquerading
as a linked collection of stories. Nine distinct
first-person, present-tense narratives take place
all over the world—they include a member of a
Japanese terrorist cult, a physicist heading out
in a small Irish island, a Russian gallery
attendant/art thief, a (smarter, non-bigoted)
Howard Stern-like DJ in New York and a
transmigrating ghost in Mongolia. The breadth
and range of the narratives is awesome—Mitchell
shows us the life of an illiterate Chinese
peasant girl from pre-revolutionary China to the
terror that Maoism wreaked on the land, or a life
in the day of an indie-rock drummer cum
ghostwriter in London. The details and voices
are distinct, yet in tone and sensibilities in
them is similar, if that makes any sense.
Mitchell hops from Gen X angst, international
thriller, fantasy and science fiction and social
realism in dazzling performance. Humor, horror
and gold old-fashioned Dickensian coincidence
abound, as characters from the other stories
appear in cameo roles.


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Book and Music Review Editor, Spoonfed. http://www.spoonfedamerika.com

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