Joy Williams’ Uncanny Valley

Truth, the saying goes, is stranger than fiction. Not so the fictions of Joy Williams, which are precisely strange enough to capture the uncanniness of reality. Case in point: I had just started Williams’ latest story collection, The Pelican Child, when my husband and I went on a road trip, him in the driver’s seat. We were heading south from New York City, straight through the Shenandoah Valley and on into the buckle of the Bible Belt. The first story in the collection, “Flour,” is about a woman on a road trip. Her driver is a man engaged in translating a story from the Gnostic gospels into English.