The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

I wrote before about the daring inertia of The Changeling by Joy Williams. The funny thing is that it falters slightly once the action picks up. How many books can only sustain their brilliance as long as nothing happens? How many characters lose their attraction once they become sympathetic? But that seems to be the case here. As Pearl starts to manifest a bit more self-awareness and initiative she becomes less compelling, and Williams seems more powerful as a poet of inaction than as a creator of events: an ambiguous, aggressive attempt at sex that occurs toward the end, for example, felt wholly slapdash, drama-as-randomness, even though it was carefully foreshadowed earlier…

It’s still a great book, don’t get me wrong. But with the unravelling of its quiet, fidgeting, multivalent anxieties into murder and mayhem (perhaps in the second-to-last eighth of the book) I found my interest flagging—just at the moment when it should have been most exciting. So perhaps the real hazard of character like Pearl, who exists as a web of tensions rather than as a series of events, is that she can only exist as tension: drama snaps the threads and she falls.

The premise is brilliant. The changeling himself, Sam, who may or may not be Pearl’s child, introduces a kind of subliminal magic to the other children on the island, and the children start to metamorphose into animals and slaughter the adults, leaving only Pearl alive. The prose is spectacular, seductive, insinuating; the transformations are alluringly layered and uncertain. Even Pearl seems a bit unclear on whether or not any of this is actually happening. We gets lines like this: ” It was a summer night. Always it was summer in the womanish, childish, animal houseshape of God.”

If plot is a manifestation of character, though, then maybe plot in a book like this—even inspired plot—can only be an imposition.

“I have to stop this, Pearl thought. I’m going mad. Everything was turning white. Her white nails were gnawed and ugly upon the smooth white mug. She had let one of the children paint them. There was the story, wasn’t there? about the English-woman, who could have been French or Dutch, or even a wealthy American, with one of those wealthy purses or belts or eyeglass cases that says upon it ’shit shit shit shit shit,’ and this woman, whoever she was, was mad but she had been cured of it and they had asked her what it had been like in there, in madness, and she’d said, the angels are white, they give off the most amazing light…”

(Damn, dear housewives, don’t you want that purse? I do.)

I tend to believe that plot is an expression of the characters who generate it. In a way there is no such thing as plot, only the different phases inherent in the character, who exists simultaneously in all of them. It’s not so much that Quentin Compson commits suicide, but instead that suicide is intrinsic to Quentin Compson. His suicide unpacks his soul.

So it’s fascinating to watch a writer determined to violate this tenet as thoroughly as possible, to write a novel whose characters are composed of nonevents: characters so inert that no narrative can inhere in them. To the extent that anything happens, it has to be imposed from without, say by a plane crash. What happens in a narrativeless narrative with characterless characters? I’m more than halfway through The Changeling by Joy Williams, and after a quick blurt of introductory drama her heroine Pearl just sits endlessly beside a swimming pool getting wasted. In so far as there are events, they are mostly passages in the wash of dialogue that surrounds her: she lives on a private island populated by a handful of adults and by her brother-in-law’s many foster children. And Pearl isn’t the only character in the book to display sludgy passivity; the whole book seems to take place in gelatinous suspense.

It’s occasionally draining, but not boring at all. The flux of random voices and broken stories that saturate Pearl have enough fascination to substitute for the absent narrative. This isn’t plot as an expression of character, but plot as a culture of airborne bacteria, stray words and flecks of anxiety.

And there’s the odd excitement provoked by the project’s daring in hanging itself on a character as weak and repellent as Pearl. I’m absorbed in the suspense of waiting for the novel to collapse, to become lousy instead of brilliant. It never happens. The trippy virtuosic prose carries a lot of the weight, certainly, and the sheer textural luxuriance of the fragments Williams collects, and then the creepy resonance that starts to gather between those fragments…

At a certain point, halfway through twilight, the housewife swallowed the house. She instantly regretted it. So much externality confused her. Objects ceased to define her, as they had in her old home, and instead became unraveling extensions of her head, her hands.

As long as she stayed home, her fate was intrinsic. It was just a matter of turning the pages and so finding out who she was. Out here she was as episodic as the streets, as dubious as a sequel.

She could hear the children bickering in her midriff. A fight over who owned the blue horse. They apparently hadn’t even noticed.

If she tried hard enough, could she stop noticing? Insinuate herself again between the covers? She shut her eyes and tried. There was too much cold wind for the effort to be convincing.

You know that someone is a person if he or she is the right size. The housewife realized that her enormity would make her status difficult to determine.

Housewife and nobody are off to the Sanatorium for Uncertain Housewives. We will return, some semblance of ourselves, when our cure is complete, or sooner should we manage to escape. We may, in fact, have a plan.

Check in for fresh dispatches around July 13th.