New Yorker Fiction Review #259: "Nettle" by Joy Williams
American fiction writer Joy Williams is an author whose writing has wormed its way into my favor slowly, over the course of the past seven years, much like one of her often-inscrutable stories bores its way from the realm of the apparent and literal, into the realm of the unconscious, and then back (if you're lucky).
Her short story "Chaunt" from the Dec. 10, 2018 issue was eerie and unsettling on a much more surface way than this current effort, "Nettle," but still there is that underlying vibration of the super-natural, of a narrative being pieced together on some level beyond the normal, waking, 3-D world. "Nettle" feels a bit like the film Inception, and makes the reader ask the same kinds of questions: "What is real? Is this a dream? Is this a dream within a dream?" It plays with reality in way that, frankly, is not even apparent at the end.
The story, if we are to call it that, is a sort of patchwork of memories shot-through with a few recurring characters...a young boy, his mother, an older classmate whom he has a crush on, the boy's father, who dies young, by suicide. The young boy is haunted by his father's early demise, into his own young-manhood, as he pursues a romance with the girl he had a crush on as a boy.
If there are clues or some sort of codex embedded in this story, then it would take a much more sophisticated reader than I am to find them. I read the story 1.5 times through, and still did not "unlock" the actual process or formula that is at work. Maybe there is none. And that's certainly okay.
In fact, it's kind of refreshing in a deeply twisted, literary self-torture kind of way. When we read fiction, or prose, we sort of intuitively expect a "story." Just like, when we read poetry, we don't expect a story at all. It is frustrating to spend 30-40 minutes with a story and not find within it a beginning, middle, end, or some conflict or resolution, but in another regard it requires much more attention and can be, if written properly and approached properly, a much more deeply rewarding experience that plays out over a longer time frame. I don't know if Joy Williams exactly gets us there with "Nettle," but it's a noble effort.
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