I just finished…

…Joy Williams’s “The Quick & The Dead” (2000). I had read “Breaking and Entering” shortly after it hit paperback and liked it. A couple years ago, I read Q&D was Williams’s best. So when I saw an ex-library copy at Half-Price Books…

Williams writes about out-liers’ lives. Her sentences are rich. Her ideas swarm through her text. Her life view is not mine, but her world is engaging. Her characters are odd and, often, crazed; but her “plot” here is virtually non-existent. Sometimes it seemed like she began with one, then two, then three interesting characters and ran with them until they met up with some other odd someone, who intrigues Williams more, so she ran with him or her until they met another even more interesting oddball. From time to time, she would resume with characters where she’d dropped them but, except one fellow who was cut to pieces by a shattered mirror and another who was, as I recall, shot, no one seemed to get anywhere.