GOD, DEATH, AND THE
FLORIDA KEYS JOY WILLIAMS’S LITERATURE OF THE GUIDEBOOK Random House was doing this series—Virginia, the Hamptons, the Keys. The Keys were still kind of strange and unspoiled in the eighties. I went around the state and wrote things down, but nobody talked to me. Nobody! I’d limp into these bed-and-breakfasts and people would snarl at me and not want to talk. I mean, honestly, it was terrible and I had no idea what I was doing. And it wasn’t edited, nobody edited it. Have you seen the afterword, the final edition, when I didn’t want to update it anymore? Here I am, worn out and saying how shitty everything in the Keys has become, and Random House just went ahead and put the afterword in there. Isn’t that amazing? That’s the only book I’ve ever made money from. Joy Williams in an interview from The Paris Review Issue 209, Summer 2014 +++ In 2003, the tenth and final edition of The Florida Keys: A History & Guide was published almost without comment to a modest and largely casual readership of the kind that receives most guidebooks. That this moment went unremarked by the critical establishment can be attributed to the lack of recognition afforded to the guidebook genre, an unsurprising blindspot given the derisive attitude taken by many writers of fiction and poetry toward the suggestion that they write something “useful.” The fact that the author of The Florida Keys is acclaimed novelist Joy Williams seems to have had close to no bearing on the book’s reception, and so a valuable addition to the canon of contemporary American literature snuck by critics and readers essentially unnoticed. It makes sense that of all contemporary novelists, it was Williams who saw fit to remedy the lack of literarily serious writing in the guidebook industry. Williams is occupied throughout her fiction with evoking precisely the kind of placeness that is central to the project of a travel guide. She is interested in place as it serves as a receptacle for time, and those places that are most charged with time’s passing crop up repeatedly in her fiction. Resorts and vacation towns share her attention as spaces where people live for a while and then stop living, leaving their things behind. Senior centers offer a more morbid example of the same. Desert communities in former frontiers like the American West, depleted of culture and people by violence or the strip mall variety of mass consumerism, serve as surfaces against which characters are cast in harsh, almost ahistorical light. The Florida Keys also make frequent and often freaky appearances, their diminished glamour darkly dealt with. Williams covets the kinds of places that were once enthusiastically invested with a body of meaning that either exceeded the place itself or emptied out of it over time. +++ The impossible project of the guidebook is to exhaustively describe a place. But to do so even somewhat successfully makes the guidebook central to the processes of saturation and depletion of meaning that Williams takes up in her fiction. Guidebooks can inflict the great levelling power of mass tourism on the places they attempt to pay tribute to. Williams is not unaware of this irony, which she obliquely touches on in the introduction to The Florida Keys: “Time Passes, of course. The snake lady is run over
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one night as she is crossing the road. Someone builds his dream house in front of the pretty view, cutting down the jaracanda trees in the process. But the Keys, though no longer the empty, silent stretches they once were, still markedly lack (you might as well be told) historical and cultural monuments.” Williams locates the Keys in a decisive historical moment, a pre-monument but post-emptiness stretch of time that cannot last. It is after their literary fame (most acutely felt as a nostalgia for depressed modernists) but before they will disappear under the sea. “Time passes… the bill is coming,” Williams writes, “the bill for all our environmental mistakes of the past. The big bill.” Her guidebook, like her fiction, fixes on the uncertain moment where a place crosses a threshold from one kind of existence into another. It is difficult to express just how important these threshold points are for Williams. They are the germ of her creative work. She does not dwell on what happens on one side or another of a given boundary; it is instead the points of crossing that animate her writing. These points push up through every available surface of her books, expanding and opening into characters, plot, style. In its conceptual framing, this focus on the liminal can sound tired, and it is true that the exploitation of thresholds, border-crossing, and the contradictions that flow from society’s delineations is not a new theme for modern fiction. But Williams’ love for boundary spaces is pure. She takes the raw material of these crossings and distills them to almost hallucinatory purity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her second novel, The Changeling. Williams’s description of The Changeling as a book “about a drunk” does not quite do justice to the drunken tone of the book itself, the haze of language that distorts and makes uncertain every object of her description. The major elements of the book’s plot rarely exist as anything more than intimations. We gather, barely, that the drunk in question, Pearl, may be raising a son who is not her own, a baby switched in the chaos of a plane crash, a changeling. Her paranoia on this subject is only one manifestation of a much broader suspicion that the whole world is a changeling world that has come into being not unlike her unloved son. Pearl suspects that God doesn’t love humans, suspects that He created the world only to take it away again, using it to feed “what He loved most… Nothingness.” She struggles to be free in the world, but drinking obviates the need for that struggle. When she isn’t drunk, she has a talent for constructing provocative declaratives: “God wasn’t dead, He was just sick. Very very sick . . .” The threat of an encroaching Nothingness is also present in her guide to the Keys. In both The Changeling and The Florida Keys, the consciousness-altering force of alcohol plays a decisive role in the preservation of the world against the increasing emptiness. For both Pearl and the Keys, the consumption of alcohol is a form of resistance against the work of time. Although developers and the “consumptive edge” of Floridian society threaten the Keys, Williams assures us that at the very least, “the disreputable bar remains.” Such bars are important to Williams (they feature prominently in her fiction) if only because they change more slowly than the rest of a place, burdened by the inertia arising from their commitments to an institutional existence that is at once social and commercial. This, along with the habit-forming power of alcohol, makes them a good place to find the grittier presence that remains within
mainstream society. Several sufficiently disreputable bars are featured in The Florida Keys, described in passages which contain violence worthy of her fiction. Williams explains the origin of the “absolutely no dogs” rule at The Caribbean Club Bar by recounting a story that culminates with a drunken customer angrily kicking a puppy to death; she concludes that after the incident, “the management decided that the dogs hanging out in the bar were a potential problem.” The guidebook is populated by anecdotes like this one, depicting gruesome acts that are idiosyncratic enough to seduce the reader, but which are ultimately swept out of the realm of future possibility. It is probably for the best that no one will ever have reason to kick to death a puppy at The Caribbean Club Bar thanks to its “no dogs” policy, but one can’t help but feel that Williams mourns as she regards these changes. The stories in The Florida Keys are a history of possibility being standardized and reduced, and the newest bars are summarized with only the address and price range that typify most of the guidebook’s entries. But Williams is never truly nostalgic, and the ethos present in the guidebook can be found more explicitly in The Changeling, where she uses Pearl’s alcoholic consciousness to show us the work of the sick, liminal God and His world, most full only as it leaves existence. The novel is dominated by a paradoxically constant motion toward death, a dying that never realizes itself. Dying appears fractalized in the novel, covering every level of the language with an irreconcilable strangeness that suggests the ever-present possibility of death, always left barely unsaid. Dialogue between characters is often so odd that we cannot really be sure it is not the invention of Pearl’s drugged consciousness. Another member of the cult-like island community that Pearl is coerced into living in asks her the rhetorical question: “Had not insects visited Plato in his infancy, settling on his lips, ensuring him powerful speech?” How can anyone respond to this question, which is made bizarre by a language offered in such disconcerting abundance that it takes away any possible response? “Pearl sweated. Pearl hadn’t known what to say.” The reader is often emptied of words at the same time Pearl is an effect of Williams’ disarming textual stylings. Not every line is comprehensible, and the vague plot is only mobile by virtue of its own uncomfortably ambiguous language. The reading experience at times verges closer to the physiological than the intellectual. We too can only sweat, left powerless and wordless when confronted by Williams’ language. +++ For Williams, these questions of language, death, and power are inextricable from the matter of sex, which is pervasive in her work, although rarely more than subtext in the systematic descriptions of The Florida Keys. In The Changeling, it is Williams’ erotic imagery that revels in and exploits the threshold spaces, the moment of the not-quite-there. But its place in Williams’ writing is difficult to understand. What can be done with a passage like this one, for instance: “‘I’m not responsible for anything as far as I can tell,’ Pearl said. She watched him eat, the soft sea flesh entering his mouth. ‘Everything is sex,’ Pearl sighed. ‘To dream of someone or to want to go somewhere. Eating is sex and music is sex . . . What is childhood a preparation for . . . I
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