THE PELICAN CHILD

Enigmatic, elegant stories by a writer at the pinnacle of her art.

Williams has long worked magic with stories that, on the surface, seem quite quotidian, save that something unspoken—and occasionally sinister—lies beneath. The interactions of a woman and her driver in the opening story, “Flour,” are a case in point: She is well-off, but she invents an excuse to get rid of an expected weekend guest so that she can escape her daily life. The driver “spends the nights searching for the missing word in some Coptic riddle,” the woman tells us. That missing word figures in a folktale—Williams being a devotee of the genre—that echoes in the odd events that follow, ending at a destination that, the woman says, “struck me then as being utterly foreign.” In another story, a man is told he has cancer, then that he’s been confused for another patient but still has cancer. He tells his mother, “According to the doctor, I’m dying,” to which she replies, “Oh, well.” A talking dog tells an assistant at a writers’ retreat, “The river of indifference flows through the country of forgetfulness.” The mystical charlatan George Gurdjieff drifts down to Tucson, Arizona, to visit the childhood home of Susan Sontag, whom he adores; never mind that the chronology doesn’t line up. An ethereal child, perhaps a ghost, tells a woman, “Imagination only fails us in the end, when the stories we tell ourselves have to stop.” All the stories here are lovely, and so skillfully written that disbelief is suspended forthwith. But the pièce de résistance is “Baba Iaga & The Pelican Child,” where the Slavic folkloric figure meets the murderous naturalist John James Audubon, much to the detriment of her pelican daughter, a searing fable of the destruction of nature and the ease with which humans do harm.

Superb, and yet more evidence that Williams should be next in line for the Nobel Prize in Literature.