Williams, Joy

The Quick and the Dead

Vintage:
New York: 2000
Trade paperback,
308 pp
Cover artwork by: Mark Melnick

Our buddy Bill: Thank God for him. He reads a ton of review zines and haunts our showrooms (aka chain stores) looking for items of interest for himself and for us. This is one of his discoveries. Alice is a budding eco-terrorist. Annabel aspires to be a standard middle-class American. They share a desert summer. They are both motherless. They meet some enigmatic, inspiring and spooky characters in places like the old folks home and the wildlife museum. Among their new acquaintances are a stroke survivor with a vivisected monkey for a soulmate, a big-game hunter, and a widower who is haunted by his dead wife. Looks good. Here’s what Don Delillo had to say about it: “Joy Williams has produced a hard, sharp, comic novel about the off-kilter genius of adolescence - a work of maverick insight and rash and beautiful bursts of language.”   #16169