Short-form master Diane Williams’s new collection, “Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty,’’ is an appropriately slim volume. Appropriate, because it’s comprised of micro-stories - from two sentences to two pages in length - pared to their essentials and populated by a near context-less narrative voice. As always with Williams, the stories are also compactly complex. Strained against formal limits, they tingle with the electricity generated by minute emotional shifts. Marriages, deaths, friendship, children, pets, and mundane domestic scenes take on symbolic importance, through their painstaking placement inside a skeletal frame. Doing as usual with minimal plot, character, and all but the most rudimentary elements of description, Williams once again manages nonetheless to capture the spark and flash of life.
‘Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty’ by Diane William
The collection’s stories present as puzzles or poems. Their omissions and elisions create a negative space that glows from behind, a “very small, bright, enlarging thing.’’ Actions and interactions follow one another like variables in an equation to which the story is the answer, as in “If You Ever Get Three Or Four Laughing You Weren’t Soon To Forget It’’:
“Marg left, perhaps for the rest of her life.
Tim kept to himself. Gertrude married again.
I am going to pick up Mr. Reed in the basement.’’
This sort of mathematical list creates shape, giving the narrative a gestural quality. Elsewhere, it’s gesture itself that becomes something like plot. “Ponytail,’’ a one-paragraph story, explores and explodes notions of “security.’’ The word migrates throughout the paragraph, its meaning changing as it moves. Movement takes place in Williams’s imagery as well, as she almost cinematically adjusts her focus over the course of a phrase: “Over across the - how can I make this wonderful? - the large turf bog! - the sky showed fewer than a hundred birds and at its near top, zero.’’
The book’s title story describes a narrator’s visit to an old friend. In it, sexual tension is generated, dismissed, and then reaffirmed by a talismanic insistence on the size of Vicky’s hands, the flatness of her breasts and hips, and the flatness of the pancakes she feeds her guest. This suggestive awkwardness is neatly encapsulated by the story’s ending: “Is it true? One would think perhaps you might. I thought so. You were right to tell me. I wouldn’t enjoy it very much.’’ The shifting “flatness’’ destabilizes; doubt has been instilled.