Summer by Joy Williams

Joy Williams. Photo: Anne Dalton

Finished the third short story in Joy Williams's collection, The Visiting Privilege. 'Summer' (first printed in The New Yorker in 1981) is delightful; chronicling the events and personalities during five weeks of an August summer holiday on an island somewhere off the eastern coast of the USA. It is warm, affectionate and humorous with less of the underlying melancholy present in the first two stories in the book (although that seam is not entirely absent). The children leap off the page as unique, wholly believable, perfectly-drawn individuals. The women who come in succession to stay on five consecutive weekends are brilliantly presented with such economy that it takes your breath away. Steven, the author boyfriend to each of the five women, is never seen but I formed a picture of him nonetheless, laughing out loud on the one occasion we hear his voice through a resolutely closed door. Constance and Ben feel real and you think ... maybe I mean hope ... their love will endure (because of the final paragraph) despite the frailty of the human body.  

The story has the feel of memoir. Maybe it is, partly. But maybe it's entirely constructed from the writer's imagination. More likely, I suppose, it's an amalgam of both because isn't that what all fiction is, in the end? I chuckled quietly as I read, sitting under shade in our garden on a hot summer's day here in Canberra. I am beginning to feel in awe of Joy Williams and there are still forty stories to read in this collection. How could it have taken me thirty-five years to catch up to this story? And longer than that to find my way to Joy Williams in the first instance. Fool that I am.