Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine
Diane Williams
[McSweeney’s]
The fourth story of Diane Williams’ new collection describes a collision of birds in which one injured gull plummets to the ground while the other hovers awkwardly, inertly suspended mid-air. The woman who watches them is disturbed: she “didn’t think she was supposed to see that”. The reader of Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine has much in common with this bystander. We intrude on Williams’ characters in media res, catching them off guard. They are busy, looking away, and obliquely engaged in tiny banal acts that hiss with guarded intimacy.
Barging in like this, it can be hard to find a foothold in these stories. They seem intent on maintaining their seclusion. Williams’ discontented, vulnerable, often witheringly apathetic characters are slippery creatures, and emerge only through fleeting details. Story fragments stubbornly refuse to form a coherent plot, and clauses doggedly resist forming sentences in conventional ways. In Williams’ tiny, strange stories, words are art objects, meticulously curated and placed just so. Roman Jakobson famously described literature as “organised violence committed on ordinary speech,” and Williams’ attack here is strategic, precise and devastating. For all their opacity, these stories succeed in worrying the surfaces of everyday lives; in making the familiar dangerous and new. They are a minimalist caution against reduction and routine, and lay bare the conventions of a life with shocking clarity, artistry and glee.
Words: Gill Moore
