The Brooklyn Rail

I’m not sure I always know exactly what the function or utility of remembrance is, and I’m not sure I’d put my faith into anyone who had a ready answer for such a question, but in this instance—the instance being this essay, which is meant to commemorate in some fashion the anniversary of Joy Williams’s debut novel State of Grace, released fifty years ago this year—my aims are relatively straightforward and, I think, humble. I’m not offering up a radical (re)interpretation of the novel, nor do my interests lie in the direction of appraising its place in the literary canon. My hope here is much simpler, informed by my own understanding of myself as a hindered human trying to think through the world: I want to talk about what the book means to me. I have the selfsame ambition as the stargazer pulling into focus a specific, distant star with their telescope. What they are said to be doing when they do this is “bringing the star down,” and that’s it, exactly; that’s what I’m after here.

I first read State of Grace when I was twenty-two years old. I was heartbroken and ill and unmedicated and without much in the way of a sense of who I was or what it was I was meant to be doing. I felt all the time like the bird in that children’s book who, in pursuit of its mother, thinks it must be the offspring of a cow or a car. Something was wrong with me, was my feeling. It had something to do with experienced trauma, true, but I tend to think I was heading toward the lostness of which I speak before undergoing anything unsavory life had on offer for me. Or maybe I mean that the lostness was already heading toward me. Who’s to say. All I know is that this was my primary feeling when I first came to Joy Williams’s work, and to this novel in particular: a profound sense of being myself mislaid.

Kate, the protagonist of State of Grace, knows where she is as a body in space and time, and knows the places her body has come from, but her understanding of temporality is still unrestorably warped as she inhabits a kind of half-life, allowing in only that which she can bear and dislocating herself—or attempting to, anyhow—from that which she cannot. Here she is toward the beginning of the novel:

I'm a little bored but that's acceptable enough. It's my second season here. I'm a fugitive, you might say. A vacationer from the future. I'm taking time off and may never take it on again. I'm getting my strength back and don't want to discuss it. I'm in an awkward position, you see. The first thought I had as a child was not an enlightened one, thus all my subsequent thoughts have been untrue. I'm doing very well now though, thank you. I'm getting back my sense of reality.

I remember reading that passage for the first time, second time, third time. I remember thinking that finally someone had expressed their profound uneasiness as a body in time in a way that felt familiar to me. It’s one of the novel’s many strengths, the way it moves a reader through contorted chronology and ever-shifting narrative distance, thereby imparting affectively the disorientation that has come to permeate Kate’s sense of what is past and what is present. And as for the future, well, it doesn’t seem to interest Kate overmuch, though it isn’t because she’s a nihilist—or, not only because she is. Despite the occasional characterization of her as something entirely different—consider the Boston Globe review in which Kate is referred to by the writer as “an emotional fetus”—I tend to think of Kate as, in fact, remarkably self-aware and impossibly—if secretly, the reservoirs unknown to even herself—resilient. She is not blind to the fact that her life has been one of foreclosing opportunities since her birth. She knows that the past her father fashioned for her will always be pressing a fat thumb on the scale of the present in which she is attempting to live, in ways she cannot annihilate or alter. “I want to be rid of this terrible imposition of recall,” Kate tells us at one point in the novel, and what can I say but that I felt understood by that expressed desire in ways that saved me and continue to save me.

***

This is the life into which Kate was born: one of sundering loss—of innocence, surely, which is one of Williams’s great concerns throughout her body of work, but also, in Kate’s case, the loss of the potential for grace, that elusive and chimerical and unmerited eternal favor of God. There was a moment, surely, where Kate might have been in a position to seek that grace and to receive it, but it seems as though that moment is well behind her, and she can’t return to it no matter how time buckles for her. “As I say, I wait,” Williams writes. “What is going to happen waits with me. We have always been reluctant companions. And in the meanwhile, time, as always, passes or fails to.”

What Kate is up to in this novel is no more and no less than that inexhaustible, impossible task of trying to define a world she hadn’t known even existed. She is trying to navigate her life by the process of dead reckoning, in which you determine where you are—and, thereby, where it is you want to go—by using a previously determined location, or “fix”; the last place you know you were you. For Kate, our “vacationer from the future” living in the swamps of Florida, the last place she can be sure she was Kate—where she was known as Kate, where she knew herself as Kate—was in her father’s parsonage in Maine, a home of tremendous solace and self-vanquishing violence, both. In Maine, she lost her mother. In Maine, she lost her sister and an unborn brother. In Maine, beneath her childhood bed, lying flush against the floor, there was a door, behind which, she thought, was the rest of her life, was her.

In Maine, under her father’s spell, she approached—and was made to enter—the terrain of the unspeakable.

***

“I sometimes feel I live in a dangerous place,” Kate tells us at the beginning of the novel. “I am swinging in the dreadful hammock of a dream.” She is in Florida, after all, having taken leave of her father and the island off the coast of Maine that was the only place she ever knew. In Florida, Kate is attuned to the pernicious sense of menace lurking in the landscape, and she is right to be afraid, too, for soon an array of luckless and life-wrecking happenings will be delivered unto her. But she doesn’t know that yet. What she knows—and what she is trapped by—is “the immobility of events,” the sordid history into which she was born and from the pyre of which she is trying to establish a self in the world. She harbors a cautious and proportional hope at the outset of the novel that that self might be made alongside Grady, her lover—a handsome, taciturn man with whom she shares a trailer—but what we know that he doesn’t just yet is that the child Kate is carrying is not Grady’s but her father’s. This pregnancy is another of the immobile events garroting the possibility in Kate for something like radical reinvention. “I cannot shuffle them about or alter them,” Kate tells us. “That’s not up to me. The answers remain the same when the reasons for them being true are gone.”

The novel itself is a kind of dissociative fugue; a fever dream that Kate, despite an expressed desire to awaken herself from it, cannot find it in herself to shake. This is a kind of casting aside of the self, and though it may look like—and indeed read to some critics at the time as being—a variety of passivity or unthinking self-martyrdom, I would argue that the book’s brilliance is most evident in its dexterous illumination of how little else is available to Kate but to simply continue in exactly and only this way; to more and more give herself over to the dream’s incongruous and imposing logic. Williams captures this self-abandonment in stunning and singular prose—incantatory, lush, and decidedly different from all that she would come to write in the fifty years that have followed State of Grace’s publication. Reading the novel, one feels Williams must have granted herself a profound sense of permission unusual for a writer to have so early in her career.

***

Sometimes, when I’m on my patio smoking at night, the motion-detector light goes off and I have to wave my arm in the dark in order to trigger it again. This is maybe the portrait of the writer: an unlit figure seeking a remembered but now gone light. At least, that is how it has felt for me. Why am I telling you this? I’m not sure. Maybe in order to say that this is precisely what Joy’s work has been for me since it came to occupy a place in my life: a reliable light that returns and returns and returns every time I fear I’m disappearing. I need only move toward it, and I am located, lit.

I think this is—isn’t it?—grace.