The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Stupefaction: Stories and a Novella by Diane Williams
Ben Marcus

Diane Williams. The Stupefaction: Stories and a Novella. Knopf, 1996. 176 pp. $21.00.

This third book of fiction by Diane Williams is an important addition to her already compelling literary career. Her first longer work, the title novella, is collected here with forty-nine of her singular and daringly brief fictions. What is refreshing about Williams is that antecedents and influences are hard to conjure, particularly if one looks to the recent history of literature. Think of Nathalie Sarraute with Tourette’s—refined and sublime, but also brash, bawdy, troubled, and self-disruptive.

These are stories in which every sentence is potentially a revelation, a devastating summation, an entire story smashed together into the confines of a line, a sentence, a paragraph. Readers of Williams’s first two collections will recognize the form she employs and will be satisfied to find that, while the short pieces confirm her ability to create more potent life in a page than many better-known writers manage to achieve in works twenty times the length, it is the title novella that indicates new ambitions and promising growth.

In her best pieces her storytelling devices—fractured grammar, head-scratching leaps, children’s book language conflated with mannered eroticism—achieve peculiarly effective navigations into consciousness. For Wil-liams a story can be a coded burst of grief, a confession, an instruction, an indictment, or all of these at once (her specialty). Devices and constructions of language serve to give form to something secretive and pressured—style exists exclusively to penetrate the density of what can be felt or known. There is rarely a fixed narrator, although in “The Stupefaction” the narration is suspiciously godlike, authorial, and love-struck. Indeed it is very nearly an adventure story and perhaps Williams’s closest flirtation with any recognizable genre.

The publication of the novella counters the suspicion that length, or the lack of it, is a limitation of Williams’s art (three books now of miniature fictions). One does infrequently sense that the brevity of a particular piece enacts unfortunate injustice to the world it has started to invoke. At these rare times the length is itself a genre that Williams adheres to over the deeper demands of the story at hand. A final line of a story will fake closure seemingly because a space requirement has been met, or because the writer loses vision after a certain point, escapes out of fear. These less successful pieces struggle for their exits as soon as they begin, an arc that is moderately satisfying in itself, but not as complicated and engaging as her better pieces and the novella.

Readers looking for fiction of fine stylistic invention that remains rooted in the necessity of emotional disclosure, indeed of human significance, will find a crucial experience in the work of Diane Williams. [Ben Marcus]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Stupefaction: Stories and a Novella by Diane Williams Ben Marcus Diane Williams. The Stupefaction: Stories and a Novella. Knopf, 1996. 176 pp. $21.00. This third book of fiction by Diane Williams is an important addition to her already compelling literary career. Her first longer work, the title novella, is collected here with forty-nine of her singular and daringly brief fictions. What is refreshing about Williams is that antecedents and influences are hard to conjure, particularly if one looks to the recent history of literature. Think of Nathalie Sarraute with Tourette’s—refined and sublime, but also brash, bawdy, troubled, and self-disruptive. These are stories in which every sentence is potentially a revelation, a devastating summation, an entire story smashed together into the confines of a line, a sentence, a paragraph. Readers of Williams’s first two collections will recognize the form she employs and will be satisfied to find that, while the short pieces confirm her ability to create more potent life in a page than many better-known writers manage to achieve in works twenty times the length, it is the title novella that indicates new ambitions and promising growth. In her best pieces her storytelling devices—fractured grammar, head-scratching leaps, children’s book language conflated with mannered eroticism—achieve peculiarly effective navigations into consciousness. For Wil-liams a story can be a coded burst of grief, a confession, an instruction, an indictment, or all of these at once (her specialty). Devices and constructions of language serve to give form to something secretive and pressured—style exists exclusively to penetrate the density of what can be felt or known. There is rarely a fixed narrator, although in “The Stupefaction” the narration is suspiciously godlike, authorial, and love-struck. Indeed it is very nearly an adventure story and perhaps Williams’s closest flirtation with any recognizable genre. The publication of the novella counters the suspicion that length, or the lack of it, is a limitation of Williams’s art (three books now of miniature fictions). One does infrequently sense that the brevity of a particular piece enacts unfortunate injustice to the world it has started to invoke. At these rare times the length is itself a genre that Williams adheres to over the deeper demands of the story at hand. A final line of a story will fake closure seemingly because a space requirement has been met, or because the writer loses vision after a certain point, escapes out of fear. These less successful pieces struggle for their exits as soon as they begin, an arc that is moderately satisfying in itself, but not as complicated and engaging as her better pieces and the novella. Readers looking for fiction of fine stylistic invention that remains rooted in the necessity of emotional disclosure, indeed of human significance, will find a crucial experience in the work of Diane Williams. [Ben Marcus]

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