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A review by doulicia
Honored Guest by Joy Williams
3.0
While I was impressed with her short story skills, her capturing a moment with an economy of words, not all of the stories had staying power. Just 3 weeks after finishing it, I look at the beginning of some of the stories and think, "What happened in this one?"
Many of them involved dying or recently dead characters, and mother-child relationships. In the title story, a girl's mother is dying of cancer. In "Marabou," a mother hosts an unplanned funeral afterparty for the friends of her addict son. In "Anodyne," a daughter and her mother take gun lessons. In "Hammer," a daughter just loathes her mother.
There were bits of good, dry humor like this opening sentence of the title story:
"She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny and you had to be careful in this milieu which was eleventh grade because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke."
Then there is the community of twenty-somethings in "Fortune," living the trust fund life in Central America, whose parents visit, invariably in second marriages with new families.
But the mood throughout was pretty dismal. Ordinary and dismal.
Many of them involved dying or recently dead characters, and mother-child relationships. In the title story, a girl's mother is dying of cancer. In "Marabou," a mother hosts an unplanned funeral afterparty for the friends of her addict son. In "Anodyne," a daughter and her mother take gun lessons. In "Hammer," a daughter just loathes her mother.
There were bits of good, dry humor like this opening sentence of the title story:
"She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny and you had to be careful in this milieu which was eleventh grade because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke."
Then there is the community of twenty-somethings in "Fortune," living the trust fund life in Central America, whose parents visit, invariably in second marriages with new families.
But the mood throughout was pretty dismal. Ordinary and dismal.