The Changeling

Almost half a century later, The Changeling remains as haunting and as visionary as on the day it was first published. Joy Williams is a virtuosic stylist and a singular thinker-a genius in every sense of the word.

When we first meet Pearl-young in years but advanced in her drinking-she's on the lam, sitting at a hotel bar in Florida, throwing back gin and tonics with her infant son cradled in the crook of her arm. But her escape is brief, and the relief she feels at having fled her abusive husband, and the Northeastern island his family calls home, doesn't last for long. Soon she's being shepherded back. The island, for Pearl, is a place of madness and pain, and her round-the-clock drinking spurs on the former even if it dulls the latter.

With The Changeling, Joy Williams has blended, as Rick Moody writes, "the arresting improbabilities of magic realism, with the surrealism of the folkloric revival . . . and with the modernist foreboding of Under the Volcano," and created something entirely original and entirely consuming.