The Pelican Child brings together the short fiction highlights since 2013 from Joy Williams, one of the form’s living masters. The lone new effort here is After the Haiku Period, which follows twins Candida and Camilla plotting revenge against their father’s ecological destruction: “he had been instrumental in the ruination of Kansas on his way to Wyoming, enthusiastically participating in The Slaughter when all animal life was being extinguished by guns and strychnine.”
Also included are 2013’s Argos, Williams’s own spin on Odysseus’s abandoned hound, and George and Susan, in which the ghost of New Age giant Gurdjieff floats around Susan Sontag’s former home in Tucson, Arizona, so as to bring himself closer to her formative years: “G is in love with Susan Sontag. Dead now, sadly, but all the more reason.”
The Pelican Child gives the impression of unevenness at times. Williams flirts with ancient mythology and, while other stories have a mystical bent, they are distinctly small-town American.
‘I believe we’ve come to the end of our options here,’ warns a child in one story
There is a connecting thread that pulls these tales together, though. Their collective world is one of diminishing returns. The elderly surrender to degenerative diseases in care homes that replace family photos with stock images, while the natural world is also being pulled up by its roots. The Great Barrier Reef is dying, lakes are drying up, and Williams refuses to turn a blind eye; “we are in a permanent state of destroying the world.”
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Characters, whether ostensible wraiths or not, have a tendency to vanish; “she didn’t even see herself leaving, having just, at last, gone ... then there was a god-awful crash, and silence, as though nothing had happened.” Williams’s pessimistic environmentalism is at the forefront here, and rather than simply bemoaning nature’s crumbling, the waning of the Anthropocene is also palpable. Once cherished values have also disappeared, and ambition has been sapped from the world.
“I believe we’ve come to the end of our options here,” warns a child in one story, who may well be a mirage. Most of The Pelican Child’s characters are “still there but [aren’t] alive”.
A vast, ecologically motivated collection, Williams’s newest effort is far reaching, and while these stories are full of everyday happenings, The Pelican Child always keeps one eye on what the future has in store.
