‘Stuff’ by Joy Williams

Stuff by Joy Williams, 2016

The magic trick:

Punishing a character so unjustly that it’s the world – not the character – that earns the reader’s scorn

Joy Williams does this thing with her characters, often in her work from what I’ve read and especially here in “Stuff,” where she presents them as comically pathetic. I remember the quote from Charles Dickens talking about how sad he was to finish writing David Copperfield because it meant he no longer could spend time with those characters. He loved them all so much. Well, one does not get the same impression from Joy Williams here. She presents her protagonist in “Stuff” as so lacking in self-awareness that we are laughing at him.

Ah, but wait.

That’s not quite right.

We are not – I don’t think – laughing at him.

She makes the punishment (terminal cancer) so obscenely unfitting of his crime (being a self-absorbed writer of cheesy newspaper columns) that I think the butt of the joke shifts. The reader isn’t really laughing at him anymore. He gets our sympathy more than anything. It’s a world so mean and ridiculous – that it would put someone like him in situations like this – that it’s the world that becomes the target of our mocking and scorn.

Hate the game, not the player, as has been said.

And that’s quite a trick on Williams’s part.

The selection:

The doctor stared at him. “You made it to eighty-five—that should be a consolation.”

“No, no, I’m not eighty-five.”

“It says . . .” The doctor frowned. “This sheet’s been misfiled, sorry. Those girls at the desk, all they think about is getting laid.”

Bless them, Henry thought warmly.

The doctor turned to a computer and tapped savagely on the keyboard for a few moments. “You’re sixty-three,” he reported.

“That’s me!” Henry cried.

“You have lung cancer as well, a bit more advanced, actually.” The doctor stared at him again. “Sorry about the mixup.”

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