With 40 discrete pieces occupying a mere 115 pages, the works showcased in Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine are not so much stories, in any traditional sense, as small, self-contained fabulatory puzzles. Diane Williams's narration is so oblique as to appear almost incoherent – a welter of nameless protagonists, perplexing nonsequiturs and contextless allusions. Her stories demand hyper-attentive reading: they are to be pored over and their meaning teased out, like some recherché formalist painting.
The book is set amid the wood-panelled domesticity of respectable Americana – a deceptively cosy world of faux fireplaces, blue-and-white china and hand-cut carafes. Themes range from hopelessly estranged couples (“She had once intended to evaluate their options for the improvement of their understanding”) and the poignancy of removals (“how many times do you catch sudden sight of something heartfelt?”) to idle speculations on the cognition of animals (“I have been deeply moved by what I take to be the dog’s deep concerns”; “Does a fly reminisce about a good time?”).
In A Mere Flask Poured Out, a mother harshly scolds her daughter for spilling some wine, and then promptly dies, all in the space of half a page; the flask is passed down as an heirloom – "which we now use on special occasions" – symbolising the memory of their fraught relationship. The melancholic psychodrama in these vignettes is invariably shrouded beneath a thick layer of world-weary irony and cynical detachment.
Blue plum dumplings
In the collection's opening story, Beauty, Love, and Vanity Itself, the narrator wonders, à propos de rien: "Isn't looking into the near distance sometimes so quaint?" In Lamb Chops, Cod, Williams relates, with blithe officiousness, the death of a gastronome between courses: "the fish with dill – a great favorite – outstanding with butter – and the boiled blue plum dumplings".
Elsewhere, a man comes into some money: “He will buy a new V-neck cardigan!” The mock exuberance of that exclamation mark, set against an otherwise monotone narrative voice, is of a piece with the general register.
Williams lives in New York, and her work has been lauded in the US for its avant-garde boldness. No doubt her minimalism is refreshing in a literary scene in which explicatory verbosity is wearisomely de rigueur. Her writing is laced with a cool, sardonic wit, and there are occasional winking in-jokes: in one story a cup of tea is described as having “the tang of the dirty lake of her childhood that she remembered swallowing large amounts of while swimming”.
The simile is playfully inverted in a later tale, in which a woman swimming (or possibly drowning) in the ocean swallows some seawater and observes that it tastes “like a cold, salted variety of her favorite payang congou tea”.
Spluttering cadences
Still, for those of us who enjoy language as a thing that fizzes, there is something a little trying in the book’s spluttering cadences and unremitting opacity. Take, for example, the peculiar syntax in the latter half of this sentence: “She feels the onset of arousal, of genital swelling that is triggered by no one in particular and she has the inability to think normally.”
Why “has the inability to” and not “is unable to”? One must assume this is not a matter of linguistic failure but an aesthetic choice, intended to connote a kind of morose, scientistic anti-lyricism. There is a point on the spectrum of cultivated affectlessness beyond which the flatness itself begins to feel overworked and obtuse: does it breathe life into the prose, or weigh it down?
Perhaps there is something to be said for artlessness after all.
Houman Barekat is a literary critic.
