Attrib. and Other Stories

February 15, 2021
A jewel box of 16 stories. "The Alphabet" sets the tone for Williams' verbally dazzling collection: The narrator, suffering from aphasia, struggles to describe what's happening to her. She is losing her ability to retrieve the words for things. More tragically, she may have lost her lover: "Forgetting hairbrush became forgetting our address became forgetting dates became figmenting became fragmenting, became I remembered your beautiful, beautiful face but could not quite place it." With her verbal mastery loosening, the narrator improvises. Though her condition is rare, she's not alone since the following stories suggest that language's riches and its imprecision are another source of slipperiness as well as creative potential. These pieces often take the form of one-sided conversations, allowing Williams' first-person narrators to riff on finding the perfect backdrop for a kiss in a gallery ("Smote") or choosing the right words to shout at a lover storming away after a tiff ("Spins"). Time stands still, it expands luxuriously as is possible only in fiction, giving characters all the time in the world to muse. This is certainly true in "Alight at the Next," which alights on this image and that idea while the narrator constructs and deconstructs the significance of her physical proximity to her date and what she should do to the man who has stepped onto the Tube and threatens this magical moment of intimacy: "I am certainly braver than before, when the pre-you afternoon got jumbled with you-evening at rush hour, where throats squirmed with the old smoke and stream of tunnels: a world pinstriped by eyelashes, uproarious with the need for a Friday, downroarius with lost cards." These stories are not for those who relish plot, but they will please daydreamers and lovers of verbal wizardry and wit. A work of linguistic exuberance and lyrical meandering.

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April 15, 2021
A boy who collects color names. A Foley artist (someone who re-creates sounds for film). The trainer of a rat searching for land mines. In this artfully crafted short story collection, Williams has created a memorable set of characters obsessed with or defined by language. There are those with conditions that affect their experience of language, such as the person with aphasia who loses the ability to understand words, and another suffering from synesthesia who goes on a date with someone who brings relief from constant sense overload until an explosive end to the day is so overwhelming that a second date seems impossible. The poignant beauty of these stories is how language, in its imprecision and history, its specificity and memories, can build or break relationships. From small moments in time, considering a kiss in a gallery, letting a bee out of the window, or confronting a beached whale, Williams pulls readers into a universe of personal meaning for each narrator. Put under a microscope, even the smallest moments loom large.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 17, 2021
British writer Williams’s diverting collection (after The Liar’s Dictionary) combines wordplay and narrative to chart her characters’ attempts to find meaning. In “The Alphabet,” flirtation, romance, and memory are explored through each letter’s attendant associations as the narrator, addressing her partner, loses her ability to express herself because of worsening aphasia (“ ‘You can’t spell aphrodisiac without aphasia,’ you said later, trying to make a filthy joke out of it and holding me”). In “Concision,” the narrator, while on a silent phone call with an erstwhile lover, meditates on words in other languages that have no analogue in English, such as the Finnish word löyly for a sauna’s steam. “Spins,” set during a London gloaming, demonstrates the author’s acute powers of observation: “clouds make a candy-colour of the evening, the passers-by have conversations that marble together like endpapers.” Williams is strongest, however, when she diverts from rhetorical games. In “Spines,” a vacationing family notices a distressed hedgehog treading water in a pool. The question of whether to save it reveals the lesson-focused cruelty of the family patriarch: “If it thinks we’ll scoop it out each time, it won’t learn.” Williams explores pathos and the dictionary with aplomb and a fresh voice. Anglophiles and linguistic schemers will savor this. Agent: Lucy Luck, C&W Agency.