It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature: A Novella and Stories
One doesn't expect the author of Some Sexual Success Stories Plus Other Stories in Which God Might Choose to Appear and of This Is About The Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate to be completely serious, or slight. This short book is neither, and it harnesses Williams's essentially comic sensibility to highly sophisticated, highly satisfying ends. The book opens with "On Sexual Strength (A Novella)," which consists of 36 titled prose pieces of half a page or less, all fuguing around a Mr. Bird; his wife, Blanche; and a first-person narrator, Enrique Woytus: "I am the neighbor." Its opening lines-"Mr. Bird was sexually strong. That sounds good"-set the tone: its parody of genre fiction and of Beckett-like writerly self-reference continues throughout. As Woytus and Mrs. Bird get into compromising situations, Woytus's narration takes on a self-help-like quality ("Both physical and emotional elements almost forced me to have moderate satisfaction") and his own marriage is affected. The remaining 40-odd pieces continue in the same vein (veins are a favorite here), with surprising and explicit juxtapositions throughout. Williams's irony never feels forced or distancing; instead, it allows her to get into some very messy facets of human desire as it gets rammed through American life.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.