The Changeling By Joy Williams Doubleday, 201 pp., $7.95 What I want is a piece of Joy Williams: just 10 per cent. It’d be better old age insurance than my lumpish Keogh fund. This woman (no, this novelist, she can dress in any locker room) is Xerox at three and one-half right now. Her first novel, State of Grace, put my leg to sleep again and again: I couldn’t move while reading: the book damn near left me a cripple. Steve Cauthen’s first winner must’ve looked like State of Grace to those who understand what makes a splendid jock. Joy sat low and easy and brash; she whipped with animal rhythm; and she had the internal clock, the synergetic pace, that turns horse and man into horse/man, one lithe centaur thing.
Words are a kind of old wood. Best when stripped layer by layer down: of varnish or grime: to the natural grain. Maintenance work: language must be housekept: you can eat off a prime novelist’s page. I submit two small examples from The Changeling. Of an infant: “He seemed rudimentary but intense.” Of Florida-heavy air: “Things moved about at the top with a little
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