The Books: “State of Grace” (Joy Williams)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

State of Grace, by Joy Williams

A fantastic writer – very hard to pin down (especially when you look at the style and content of Breaking and Entering – my favorite of her books). Williams seems (to me) to channel completely different energies and voices, depending on the structure of what she is writing, and I’m mesmerized by it. She hasn’t written all that much, and there were YEARS in between books. She just came out with another book – maybe 2 or 3 years ago, but for many years I only had State of Grace and Breaking and Entering on my shelves. State of Grace was published in 1973, but when the whole Vintage Contemporary “movement” started happening in the late 80s, early 90s, it was re-released in a snappy new paperback, and that’s how I came across it. I’m not sure why it appealed to me. I write the date of purchase on the title page of every book I buy and State of Grace was bought in January of 91. That tells me quite a bit. A bleak time for me. Awful. Living in Philadelphia, feeling completely lost – and worse than that: voiceless. I had lost my power of self-expression. I was frozen. There are no journals for about a year of that time in my life, I had nothing to say – even to myself. Something in State of Grace – with its poetic description of a paralyzed (emotionally) young woman, on the run from her past, trying to re-invent herself desperately: sorority girl, wife … but the past is stronger than any present-day affiliations and it comes to claim her. She has not the stamina to resist.

Kate grew up in a rigid Bible-thumping family – whose mother hated her and her father … I can’t remember if her father is a preacher, or just a fanatic – but he has a hold on his daughter’s mind, his standards for her behavior are impossible … and there’s something too-much about the whole relationship. It is like Kate is expected to be her father’s sweetheart. They are connected. Two peas in a pod. Kate goes off to the South, to Florida – for college … and it’s unclear (you’ll see what I mean in the excerpt below – Williams doesn’t give anything away too literally, it’s a true “mood” book) whether or not her father is aware of where she is. What is she running from? Kate tries to slip into the hot Southern world of college and sororities – she has sex (as Kate writes about her sorority: “all the sisters fuck like bunnies”) – she doesn’t follow the teachings of her childhood, but goes off the deep end. None of this is spelled out in a chronological way in the book – we start smack-dab in the middle – with Kate pregnant, sitting in a trailer with her husband Grady – and we have to back-track to figure out how she got there.

State of Grace is almost like a stream – or a river – with many different estuaries – branching off, coming back, surging together, branching off again. Kate, our narrator, is NOT a reliable narrator. She sits in the trailer, she wonders where she is, she is haunted by her father, she loves her husband, but she seems to have no center. Nothing grounds her. And her writing reflects that. Eventually, Kate – the first-person narrator of the first half of the book – goes away – and we get a cold quiet third-person narrator later on in the book, who looks down on Kate, and her father, and their meanderings. It is as though whatever Kate is wanting to describe, whatever Kate is really thinking and feeling – is too awful and too intense for her to even attempt to tell it herself. She needs an omniscent narrator.

It’s been years since I’ve read this haunting book – but the poetry and dreamlike quality of Williams’ prose here has stayed with me. I remember some of the lines by heart; they have become quite important to me. (“Don’t become impatient. Here is the time.”) Kate looks around at the landscape and sees that it is alive. She speaks to us, in a voice which is at times strangely disconnected, hallucinatory – but then she’ll switch, with no warning, and take on an almost commanding voice – telling us what to do, what to think, what to look at. It’s like a montage, the first half of the book. We don’t know where Kate wants us to go, we have to piece together her story … and somehow Williams manages to suggest that Kate is aware of her father, at all times – whatever she does, is somehow in reaction to her father. And so even her marriage to sweet Southern boy Grady lacks substance, lacks reality … because all along it is her FATHER who will win the battle. She will never be able to escape him.

I need to read this book again. Breaking and Entering, her next book, is a book I love – and have read a couple of times – but there’s something so raw about State of Grace, and it reminds me of that raw wordless time in my life … I have stayed away from re-reading the book again. Ghosts, you know?

Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter.

Williams is something else.

EXCERPT FROM State of Grace, by Joy Williams

I do little here in the woods. I assimilate the soundlessness. We pursue the meager life with a few garish exceptions. I have my Dixie Darling products, which, I might add, have never disappointed me, and he has his Jaguar. An old faithless and irrational roadster, black, and in perfect running condition. It is so fast and inside it is a warm cave and smells delicious. It is parked beside the trailer and often, in the afternoon, I go out and sit in it and have a drink there. It calms me. The leather is a soft dusky yellow from all the saddle soap he works into it. It smells like lemons and good tack.

After that singular Fourth of July, Daddy never had a car, although there once were two. Daddy and I walked everywhere. On Sundays, we would skate across the pond to church – two sweethearts, my hand in his, in the other glove, ten pennies for the offering plate. Slivers of ice flew up beneath my skirt, my eyes wept. We skated quickly, seriously, lightly on Sunday mornings, barely leaving a mark behind us …

He loves the Jaguar – the skill and appreciation it takes to enjoy it. He is Grady. I shall make myself clear. Grady, my husband, a country boy with brown face and hands and blond matted hair low on his brow. The rest of him is long, white and skinny. He knows a great deal about hunting, fishing and engines. He loves the Jaguar and he also takes an abashed pleasure in this dank trailer which is his. It cost $10. He bought it from Sweet Tit Sue who now lives farther upriver. She wrote out a bill of sale which we keep in Rimbaud’s Illuminations. At the moment, it happens to mark the spot you know, Andthenwhenyouarehungryandthirstythereissomeonewhodrivesyouaway. It is not always there. We move it about for amusement, to tell our fortune. He used to enjoy that. All those words with their imminence and no significance. He always saw luck in these woods.

He gets angry at me often now. I’m afraid it’s the way I keep house. I don’t keep house. His face becomes rigid and he speaks so softly I can barely hear him. The place is so soiled that nothing can be found. It smells. It doesn’t bother me. What is the purpose of order?

Each morning I am ravenous. I eat with a lamp on and my feet in a pair of his socks. The mice have left their turds all over everything, in the sink and in our shoes and in the dog’s dish. It doesn’t bother me.

I am chewing on this bread … I must admit I eat this garbage because I want to insult myself. We think as we eat. Our brains take on flavor and scope. What I want is to slow down my head and eventually stop it. I strive for a brain friendly and homogenized as sweet potato pie.