New Yorker Fiction Review #225: "Chaunt" by Joy Williams

Review of a short story from the Dec. 10, 2018 issue of The New Yorker...

It's been long enough since I've read a Joy Williams story that I've long-since forgotten how boring I found her writing. And then "Chaunt" comes along and totally disorients me and makes me look at her writing differently.

"Chaunt" is a spectral, anxious, and eerie piece of fiction, so laden with submerged context that it could just as well be part of a 300 page novel. In this story, Joy Williams inhabits the fragile, wounded mind of a woman living in an old-folks home in the desert long before she should be living in an old-folks home, in an effort to escape from a tragedy that took her young son's life.

The story is set in the desert, but even so the environment in "Chaunt" is one of a dying, poisoned and barren dessert.

"Night was best, for, as everyone knows but does not tell, the sobbing of the earth is most audible at night. You can hear it clearly then, but the sobbing still harbors a little bit of hope, a little bit of promise that the day does not afford."

Combined with the eerie setting, a sort of forgotten group home on the edge of this landscape, it makes for a spine-tingling, unsettling backdrop to the already grief-laden and other-worldly atmosphere in this work.

The most bizarre and vivid description in the story is of the abandoned chapel the main character visits in her mind. It is a place her son used to visit, in the ghost town of Chaunt, which he and his friend used to visit. The main character imagines it but refuses to go there, even out of simple curiosity. She prefers to let the chapel continue to exist only in her mind, because there it can exist forever.

"She doesn't think of the place in terms of distance. If absence becomes great enough, it grows into a genuine apparition, an immediate presence."

This story feels like the fever dream, in many ways. The fever-dream of a grief-stricken woman trapped in a loveless life and a barren landscape, a woman who is trying to give up but whose emotions won't let her give up yet. It's as though grief keeps her alive. You can almost see and feel the hot, dusty room in which she tries to sleep in order to forget her pain, but to no avail.