The Quick and the Dead, Joy Williams

And Seinfeld

What I’m reading

I have just finished reading The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams. Quick was published in 2000 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. This is the first book I’ve read by this author.

I am still working out how I want these reviews to look (thanks for your patience!). I have decided moving forward, I want to discuss these books more in depth, so there will be some spoilers. I will not be giving a play by play though! So here’s the only warning: there are spoilers!

This book follows a cast of quirked up characters (teenage girls, lone strange men, a man and his dead wife, etc) that converge in different ways. The plot is very loose with no real arc. The ultimate debate that I found is not as simple and mundane as “does life have meaning or not” but more “should life have meaning, does meaning ruin the moment, how do you decide what to care about and what you need to let go?”. The characters in this book have in common that they are fixated on one thing or one person or one aspect of their life and they turn into a physical manifest of their own tangle of neuroses. They are fixated on things they’ve lost, things that happened to them, things they’ve done, and things they’ve never had but feel like they need. This book is bleak, often absurd, and it will hit very close to home. 

Nihilism is a hallmark of Seinfeld and one of the elements that made it a groundbreaking show. This is a parallel universe, a Bizarro World where nothing really matters at all. Although the characters of The Quick and the Dead are often doing shocking and horrendous things, I couldn’t help but cheer for them sometimes when they were slighted. Yes Ray is robbing and stealing his way across the country but why did that guy point out his mouth droop from a stroke? That’s so rude. The scene where Ray insults the woman’s music (but why is she playing such depressing music?) and then shoves her tortilla chips in his mouth and pocket particularly smacks of Costanza. 

And of course, Alice/Elaine. Hanging out with Sherwin, the weird piano man (aka the Maestro). Incapable of having a conversation that relies on social niceties, unable to take life’s compromises. One of Elaine’s most infamous scenes in Seinfeld is when she gets annoyed with a woman at a house party, and interrupts with “maybe the dingo ate your baby”. It’s a strange (hilarious) dark moment. It’s macabre, and only a joke to the audience. No one in the room laughed, and if we were there in person would we have laughed? What the hell is she talking about? But as the audience, she’s right and we’re hoping the dingo did eat her baby. 

People’s quirks and their moments of obliviousness that we only give a passing glance at in reality are as sharp as needles, presented in Technicolor in the world of Seinfeld and The Quick and the Dead. We’re just a little too close, the contrast is up just a little too high, and everyone is a little disgusting. Moments of horror are common, and are only glanced at. I’ll end the Seinfeld comparison here. 

The prose is beautiful throughout. The scenery and characters feel vivid and real. I have included some of my favorite quotes.

“She spent a lot of time at Corvus’s house, a little adobe house with the practically required blue trim. Because the land had been grazed, there was nothing on the hardened earth but a few mesquite trees. An Old Dodge truck sat in an otherwise empty corral, and there was a shining Airstream trailer, for it had been the policy of Corvus’s parents to move every year. And there was a black-and-tan dog with a big head, for whom there was no one and nothing in this world but Corvus’s mother. Not far away lived a neighbor whose name was Crimmins, and then no one for miles. The dog’s name was Tommy.” pg 20.

“London had gotten Carter through many a long night. ‘There were no mourners save a huge wolf-dog, to whom the taste of his master’s lash was still sweet,’ he read. This was the real stuff. Blood on the snow. Sneering white silence. More blood. And no one cared. Nobody cared, and there was no law. Blazing eyes, slavered fangs, and wretchedness. Oh, it was a maggot’s life, a cosmos of death.” pg 63.

“Ray had never cared for Florida; he had been born in Washington State, but they’d moved, after his mother’s third miscarriage, from a town where everyone had miscarriages, where the fish in the river were as soft as bread, the trees warty with fungus, and half the dogs were three-legged. It was one of those rugged American places, a remote, sad-ass, but plucky downwind town whose citizens were flawed and brave.” pg 70.

“Our capacity to do evil has nothing to do with our innocence,” Nurse Daisy said. “Honestly, dear, sometimes you sound as though you just fell off the turnip truck.” pg 187.

“Poor tyke, Stumpp thought. Everything she was learning was beside the point, though everything anyone learned proved to be beside the point. How false and full of pretext is all that we accomplish. Little Pickless made him dwell on the undwellable.” pg 271.

Throughout the book, I was reminded heavily of themes in the Ethel Cain album Preacher’s Daughter. Particularly the lyrics in the song Strangers. “If it’s meant to be then it will be/and I forgive it all as it comes back to me”. What does forgiveness mean, what does letting go mean? How do we decide what to care about, what to fixate on? Is that in our control at all or is it all conditioning? Does collecting concerns and fixations feels good, or because it feels like purpose? What is purpose?

There are so many lines in this book that are just brilliant it’s unbelievable. I highly, highly recommend The Quick and the Dead.

Where I’m reading it

I have just returned from a trip to Tokyo with some friends. It was fun to see a new part of the country. We walked around the city and hit some highlights (Shibuya, Harajuku, Akihabara). Did you know there was a Sailor Moon fighting game? 

On the way back to Hokkaido, I took the shinkansen. I made the mistake of attempting to travel during Obon and got standing room only tickets. I do not recommend that. But I finally arrived in Hakodate. Hakodate is a cute port town in Hokkaido that very much reminds me of Savannah, GA (iykyk). I stayed in a hotel that has a private outdoor onsen. The onsen water is naturally heated by the volcanic vents. It is untreated and contains natural minerals that are supposed to be good for your skin. The onsen had a view of the ocean. Hokkaido weather is typically much more mild than the rest of Japan during the summer. So even though it’s the dog days of August, the ocean breeze made it cool enough to soak in the hot spring without boiling. Soaking, reading by the ocean, and taking cat naps was the highlight of the trip. The hotel also had a banging buffet.

Busy day in Harajuku

Sailor Moon

I won’t lie, this was my third plate.

The port

See you next time!