who cannot get over the death of her German shepherd and who will probably lose her boyfriend because of it. (“‘We are all asleep and dreaming, you know,’” he tells her in a speech that might apply to characters in other stories inTaking Care. “‘If we could ever actually comprehend our true position, we would not be able to bear it, we would have to find a way out.’”) In “The Farm,” alcohol, infidelities, and the accidental killing of a hitchhiker will destroy the central couple. “Breakfast,” too, has many of the stock Williams ingredients: parents who abandon their children, a half-blind dog, and characters who are both alcoholic and lacking direction.

Possibly the only difference in Taking Care from Williams’s later fiction is that there appears to be more humor in these early stories, and more effort by Williams to perfect a wry, ironic style. (“The Yard Boy,” for example, is a surreal caricature of a kind of New Age spiritual character.) Yet the other landmarks are there as well: The style is often flat and cryptic, events and incidents seem to have more a symbolic than a representational quality, and people pass by one another without touching or talking. There is little love in these stories (even in those that are supposedly love stories), but often a violence beneath the surface that is constantly threatening to bubble up and destroy the characters or kill their animals (as in “Preparation for a Collie” or “Woods”). People rarely have names; rather, they are “the woman,” “her lover,” “the child.” Williams writes easily about children, but hers are children who are wandering in an adult world without supervision or love (as in “Train” or “The Excursion.”) Williams works here in the great American tradition of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), in which characters become what Anderson called “grotesques.” Williams writes of grotesques as well, of bizarre characters who are lost or losing or obsessive, and whom nothing, apparently, will save.

Escapes

These elements can be found throughout the title story of Williams’s second collection, Escapes. The narrator, a young girl, describes the time when her alcoholic mother (abandoned by the father) took her to see a magician. The mother, drunk, wanders onto the stage and has to be removed. Layers of escape, both literal and metaphorical, characterize this story: the father’s abandonment of his dysfunctional family; the magician’s illusions (“Houdini was more than a magician, he was an escape artist”); the mother’s addiction to alcohol; and the daughter’s dreams of escaping her lot: “I got out of this situation,” Lizzie writes in the last line of the story, “but it took me years.”

Williams’s later short fiction is unique not only for this bleak view of human nature, in which people are shown trapped and searching for some inexpressible transcendence, but also for a prose style that is both less and more than it appears: less because, like other minimalists whom Williams resembles (such as Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie), she draws only the outlines of the action and leaves the characters’ backgrounds to the reader’s imagination and more because Williams manipulates metaphors and motifs in such a way that they carry a heavy weight of meaning in her stories. In “Escapes,” for example, the old magician’s illusion of sawing a woman in half becomes the vehicle for the story’s theme: The alcoholic mother tells her daughter that she witnessed that trick performed by Houdini when she was a child. She wanted to be that lady, “sawed in half, and then made whole again!” Her subsequent intrusion into the show by walking onstage is her attempt to escape by realizing that dream, “to go and come back,” but the dream is impossible to realize and therefore self-destructive. The usher escorts mother and daughter out of the theater, assuring the drunken woman that she can “pull [herself] through.” She will not, however, succeed in reconstructing herself and her life, and in the end, the reader suspects, the daughter will escape only by abandoning the mother.

The stories in Escapes thus seem to work at cross-purposes: While the prose style is clean and uncluttered, the motifs and metaphors lead readers to meanings beneath the surface, to a depth that is full of horror and despair. In the second story, “Rot” (first reprinted in the O. Henry Prize collection of 1988), these concerns and formal characteristics continue. Dwight persuades his wife, who is twenty-five years younger than he is, to allow him to park the vintage Thunderbird he has just bought in their living room. The car is full of rot and rust—a symbol, readers may suspect, of the couple’s marriage. The reader learns little about these characters, what they do or where they are headed; instead, symbolism replaces information: The rusting car was found in a parking lot with its owner dead inside it; now Dwight sits in the car in the living room and looks dead.

The other stories in Escapes take a similar approach: “The Skater,” which was chosen to appear in the 1985 collection Best American Short Stories, presents a family, parents and a daughter, on a tour of East Coast prep schools. It slowly becomes apparent that the sickness at the heart of this family is the memory of the daughter—like the skater of the title who glides in and out of the story at several points—who died the previous year; the parents simply want Molly to be away from the sadness of their home.

The young woman in “Lulu” puts an old couple to bed after all three have gotten drunk one morning; she then attempts to drive off with their boa constrictor, apparently searching for love (she wonders, “Why has love eluded me”). In “Health,” a twelve-year-old girl is undergoing ultraviolet treatments to help her recover from tuberculosis but is surprised by a man who walks in during one of her tanning sessions, as she lies naked on the couch. The grandmother of “The Blue Men” tries, in part through use of alcohol, to assuage her grief over her dead son, who was executed for murdering a police officer. “The Last Generation,” the collection’s closing story, depicts a father, numbing his pain over his wife’s death through drink and work and neglecting his own children.

Williams’s bleak vision is mitigated only by the sureness of her prose and the symbolic poetry of her language. “Bromeliads,” in which a young mother abandons her new baby to her parents, becomes the central metaphor of the story’s meaning. As the young woman explains, bromeliads are “thick glossy plants with extraordinary flowers. They live on nothing. Just the air and the wind”—a perfect description of the mother herself.

In “White,” a couple has moved from Florida to Connecticut to escape the memory of their two babies, who have died. They cannot, however, escape their grief, even in alcohol and evasion. At a party they throw for a departing Episcopal priest, the husband describes a letter that the couple has recently received from the woman’s father; after the greeting, the letter contains nothing, “just a page, blank as the day is long.” The letter becomes a symbol for the missed communication, the things that are not said and that may in fact be inexpressible, abandonment and death among them.

In the end, readers are left with the bleakness of Williams’s stories—despite a minimalist style and a use of metaphor that almost negates that vision. Only “Honored Guest” differs in that it implies affirmation of life through a character’s likening those alive to honored guests. Nevertheless, Williams remains one of the more highly regarded short-fiction writers in modern-day America, often anthologized and the recipient of numerous awards. Along with Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, and a handful of other contemporaries, she continues to produce works that are read by university students and the general public alike, and younger writers emulate her polished style.