A fascination with words and symbols provides a unifying theme in this richly ambiguous collection of short stories
courtroom artist sees the features of her date in the face of a defendant. A woman stranded on the pavement when her office’s automatic doors refuse to open finds her attention drawn to a doppelganger sitting in a restaurant reflected in their glass. A sound editor “oversee … the levels of canned laughter” that are added to audio tracks, and begins to visualise the laughs themselves as physical objects: “meteoric arcs of delicate frost”; butterflies with ragged wings.
These are stories that work from the inside out. Williams has a clear preference for the point-of-view shot: she begins each of her brief, odd tales – none more than a handful of pages long – inside a new character’s head, and allows us to see only what they themselves see, in precisely the way they see it. There is no sense here, as so often in short-story collections, of universe-building.
Take Clarity, a tale towards the middle of the collection, which starts from the perspective not of the central character, but of her eye. “Tash’s eye opened,” it begins. “After a minute, it experimented with winking.” As Tash takes in her surroundings, it becomes clear that she knows little more about them than we do.
Words and symbols are, in fact, the theme that ties this otherwise freewheeling collection together. Williams’s characters are, collectively, fascinated by semiotics; by the chancy, unstable relationships between signifiers and signifieds. Esoteric words are a source of delight. Foreign words : the characters attend to them all meticulously, in a bid to bring definition to bear on an alarmingly undisciplined world.
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