Joy Williams, great lady of magical and wild realism: "While we are distracted, the world ends"

Still living in the desert.

Somewhere at the foot of a mountain near Tucson, Arizona.

He still types on his old Smith Corona, because, he says, he wouldn't know how to write without that sound.

Joy Williams (Chelmsford, Massachusetts, 78 years old), the great lady of American magical, wild and absurd realism and a neo-Gothic desert surrealist, picks up a phone with a view of a lonely cactus to talk about her first novel in 21 years,

(Seix Barral).

In it she imagines a Lynchian end of the world starring a once-dead teenager, Khristen.

The protagonist arrives at a

become a nest of environmental activists, and, in fact, describes the kind of civilization that has left the human being alone on a dying planet.

“And what happens when he is left alone?

Which is self-pitying.

He feels sorry for himself.

Isn't that amazing?” the author asks.

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Williams laughs often.

Her laugh is nervous and amused.

It is likely that she is wearing her sunglasses.

She wears them even indoors.

This summer she attended an award ceremony in Los Angeles with them.

She met the Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez there.

For a while they were going up and down in elevators without really knowing where they were going.

She says that the translation of

It is one of the last books he has read.

And that she loved it: "It's wonderful."

Williams, who went to university with Raymond Carver — “Oh, Ray, that seems like another life to me,” he adds —, has been compared to Alice Munro —she considers herself, and is, above all, a storyteller— and at the same time to Juan Rulfo , Flannery O'Connor, William H. Gass and Franz Kafka.

“If there is one thing I have loved, it is French surrealism.

I don't know much about the American tradition, really.

Now I am reading Vladimir Sorokin,” she says.

His prose, hypnotic and cursed, "rough and beautiful", in the opinion of the writer Don DeLillo, returns, over and over again, to the figure of the one who does not fit in, the one who lives in a world that does not understand and will never understand him. .

And, of course, there is the non-barrier between the living and the dead —all their stories are, in a certain sense, ghost stories, or dead and, at the same time, living souls—, adolescence as the place where everything it begins and ends, the wise children and the adult children, and the monster mothers, or who refuse to be because they are too busy trying to figure out exactly what they are.

“I don't know where they come from, really.

But I like to write about that kind of downfall.

They are lost, and they feel like monsters.

in

there are two, and one is also an alcoholic, and her disorientation is total.

It amuses me to create those kinds of characters,” she confesses, and she laughs, nervously.

There is, of course, also, as in the rest of his stories, a nanny.

In this case, she is a boy.

Was she really so affected by reading

, by Marguerite Young, the long and bizarre classic about someone who travels across the United States in search of his nanny?

His parents gave it to him when he was 21 years old and he decided that “this was how it should be written”, although he adds: “I could never aspire to something like that”.

"Oh, wow!

Maybe it is!”, she answers to herself.

That babysitter is the only witness to the time Khristen's character spent dead, supposedly as a baby.

The rest of the bizarre characters that Khristen meets in search of her mother, in that lysergic North America in ruins—a train full of sociologists, a boy who recites laws and ends up as a judge, a lake named Lady capable of looking at you and making you exist because she is seeing you—they envy her because she has been to the Other Side, in the Future, in Death, and maybe she knows what happens there.

“The human being is incapable of change.

We should [do it], if we don't want the world to end.

But we're not doing it.

While we are distracted, the world ends.

All we do is invent more things to distract ourselves.

The bigger the problem, the more we move away from it.

I don't understand how we can remain so calm.

Consuming, and pretending that the thing is not going with us ”, he sentences.

Is

, in that sense, his most actively political novel?

“I believe that fiction is experiencing an important moment.

Or should.

Because when something becomes incomprehensible, it is the only thing we have.

But sometimes I ask myself: 'Does fiction matter?'

Anyone else think that's all we got?

I tell myself lately that words should be made sacred again for things to change,” she replies.

Williams, who made his debut in 1973 with

(Alpha Decay) —a novel with which he competed for the National Book Award with Thomas Pynchon—, laments that “imagination is being left aside in contemporary fiction”.

He doesn't like stories that talk about oneself.

“No, the adolescents in my novels are not like me, and neither are those adults who cannot grow up, or do not want to —in reality, what happens is that they do not feel the world around them—.

My intention has never been for literature to be a mirror in which to look at myself.

I am not interested in the slightest, ”he says.

in the

monster of adolescence finds the wild, "electric, strange" side of the human being that he needs when faced with a novel.

“I am surprised that I have written five novels.

I consider them too many.

My thing is stories”, he stresses.

The characters in

live in a sort of purgatory that looks suspiciously like a hyperbolic version of our world. Are we already in purgatory?

“Haven't we always been?” she wonders.

Before hanging up, he talks about the desert.

“Of course the landscape influences my work.

And also the isolation.

Here are some fascinating animals, and there is no distraction.

What you see is life, and the human being, desperate to get everywhere.

More than anywhere else, here humanity is seen as something that threatens any kind of ecosystem.

In the same desert, they do nothing but build.

There is no way to defend against it, ”he concludes.

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