Let's Build a Canon: Breaking and Entering

"Well, I don't know man. The future is not altogether scrutable."

Jul 14, 2023

Let’s Build a Canon: All canon building is stupid. And I love to do stupid things! Let’s Build a Canon will be a place to celebrate good books for no reason other than that they deserve praise. You can go ahead and call me Howard Bloom, Harold’s less-serious cousin. Today’s inductee: Joy Williams’ 1988 novel Breaking and Entering.

Let’s start with the cover. I know, I know, you’re not supposed to but: the cover. Book’s been out for 35 years and Joy Williams’ reputation has only grown and no one’s touched it. Why mess with perfection?1 The best Vintage Contemporaries cover in a crowded field of contenders. You don’t really see figurative covers like this anymore – we are in the age of the abstract blob. Microcosm of the entire book on there: woman, dog, beach, seagull, a general air of uneasiness. (Special shoutout to cover artist Rick Lovell: you didn’t have to go this hard. The repeating diagonal lines on the left side of the shadow on the door, Liberty’s swimsuit, and Clem’s ear?) It helped me connect with my wife-to-be (“this book is somehow better than its cover”). I hope after death that I open my eyes to this exact image, first thing, and then God (the dog, naturally) beckons me into the beach house of the afterlife. And then there’s the interior design –Sandra Josephson also didn’t have to do it to ‘em like this:

I said it to the love of my life, I’ll say it to you all: this book is somehow better than its cover. Released in 1988, ten years after the vicious response to The Changeling “succeeded in shutting [her] up for a while,”2 Williams came out with Breaking and Entering, which follows a pair of lovers, Willie and Liberty, who break into empty vacation homes in Florida and reap the material rewards of the American dream while still being excluded from it. “Willie walked through life a welcome guest”, writes Williams early on in the novel, and it is the couple’s implacability that allows them to ease into the toniest and most exclusive of space.

Everywhere there were houses. There was certainly no dearth of houses. They had their own that they were renting, but it didn’t seem to suit them. Anyplace they saw that appealed to them, and even some places they didn’t, they just went inside. They seemed to have a certain freedom in this regard, but Liberty thought they were bound to get caught someday.

The plot, hazy as it is, could basically be reduced to ‘getting caught’ in all its various manifestations – on the literal level, caught in a house, on the figurative level, caught between adolescence and adulthood, between guilt and innocence, and between this world and the next. The novel is a return to a more conventional novelistic form for Williams – anything would be more conventional than The Changeling – yet it retains all the beguiling strangeness of that previous book, with all its attention on the howling unrealities that make up our day to day lives: a man named “Turnupseed,” a hotline that dispenses gnomic counsel, a “cool, dim and loud” bar with walls covered with “framed stills of incredible stunts,” a diner with pie pans embossed with Christian messages on the bottom. “Wise men shall seek Him” under a pineapple cream, “Be zealous and repent” under lemon meringue. It is one of the very finest novels of the 20th century, American or otherwise, and represents Williams at her absolute peak: Williams’ second and finest story collection, Escapes, came out two years later, and the writing contained in Escapes and Breaking and Entering rivals most other authors’ entire oeuvres.

In Patricia Lockwood’s recent LRB essay on David Foster Wallace – an excellent essay that generated a lot of groan-worthy discourse about the amount of ‘reverence’ that critics owe their subjects – she had an aside that flew under the radar among all the other funny lines and paragraphs that were shared: “(Do NOT read Joy Williams at the same time as DFW. It will give you a very bad opinion of him.)” This advice could just as well be expanded to any of Williams’ other contemporaries, and in fact most writers of past and future generations. On a sentence to sentence level, no one produces more bouts of amazement: where did that come from? Who else is doing it like this?

Little Dot did not hold onto the fifty-dollar bill. She gave it to Rosie who donated it to a large charitable organization. The large charitable organization funneled it into a drug rehabilitation clinic. It was taken from the clinic’s account to purchase a toaster oven for the office staff. The owner of the appliance store where the toaster oven was purchased blew it at the track one muggy matinee on a dog named Bat Mister. The bill then commenced a round of payment for lingerie, biopsy results and bra linings. It suffered a life that the most lurid of imaginations could not conjure. It penetrated deep into the repulsive nature of banality. It traveled and was suckered more than once. It knew bright lights and dark pockets. It knew admissions to pornographic films. It bought ten pairs of Mexican boxing shoes, a cheap cashmere sweater and a down payment for a trip never realized. It went off like an orphan, wailing. The flashly coincidences it disclosed were made routine by repetition. It never looked life straight in the eye. Not once. And it never returned.

George Plimpton told Williams that she was “showing off” with this paragraph. And she was! But why wouldn’t you if you had that up your sleeve? There goes that fifty-dollar bill through all the various sundry launderings of American capitalism, from charity to rehabilitation to a dog named Bat Mister to, finally, a trip never realized. Another novel in itself comes just out of payments for “lingerie, biopsy results and bra linings.” And “flashly”! Substack is red underlining that even though it is, in fact, a word, one of those arcane words that Williams neatly fits into her sentences with nonchalance. (Another favorite of these, from one of her stories in Taking Care: “She is propelled by sidereal energies.”)

Two prevailing themes alight over the text, amidst the unfurling of yet another perfect sentence: reality, its representation, and that representation’s discontents, as well as the sheer overflow of prominent yet inscrutable messages that one receives as they go about their life, whether foreboding or suggestive of a kind of grace. Liberty, recalling a birthday party at a restaurant many years ago, is transfixed by “a five-foot, twenty-room, elaborately decorated dollhouse with over two thousand pieces of tiny furniture” that sits at the center of the restaurant, designed by the town’s garden club:

Whenever Liberty came to the restaurant, she would kneel on the padded platform encircling the dollhouse and raptly study its cluttered contents – its satin pillows, its variety of windows and cupboards, its closet hung with tiny clothes. The grand staircase in the hallway was papered with an optical deceit of gardens and flowers stretching into the distance [...] The ceiling of the nursery was painted with stars. In the kitchen a black stove that flickered with paper flames and on the table was a plate of donuts [...] there was water in the sinks and books on the shelves. There were a man and a woman sitting on leather chairs in the library, sprawled rigidly as though dead.

All throughout this depiction of life are feints at movement, at how life blurs – the flickering of flames in a stove, water gathering in a sink – and also, crucially, of depth, of a wide world beyond this house, gardens and flowers. However, the people here are dead; there is no way to realistically depict the whims, the strangeness, or the diverse acts of humans. Fittingly, Liberty’s foster father has put a mini plaque on the dollhouse:

On This Site
in 1865
Nothing Happened

A character soon appears to give Liberty a piece of unnerving advice; a sign, if you will, a postcard from an unknown provenance. A French waitress comes up behind her:

You are a romantic, I know... Lots of things can go wrong with girls ... Girls lose sight of themselves more quickly. Your little boyfriend, he is just a little boy, but he has many men inside himself. Perhaps you will not love them all.

When Liberty tells her it’s her birthday, she responds, “Yes, yes. Everything is just beginning now.” This speech not only portends a great deal of Liberty’s life – her breaking into houses, her relationship with Willie, and Liberty’s seeming dissolution by the novel’s end - but also comments on the desire to look into the dollhouse as romantic yet naïve. The messages won’t come from the real world, or from our necessarily limited view of it; instead they come from the other world, fast and thick.

"There are too many messages in Liberty’s life already,” says Willie at one point. “Liberty is on some terrible mailing lists.” The novel is a series of micro-encounters with various messages, some never sorted out, only half fathomed.

As a child, Liberty had learned how to write with ascending accuracy between increasingly diminishing lines. That’s a child’s life. A child starts with intense admiration for the world. It’s him and the world. But there are too many messages. Most are worthless, but they still must be received. One must select and clarify. One must dismiss and forget. One is in a lighted room, then it turns dim. Inexplicably. One’s intense attachment turns to fear, then hate, then guilt. Finally, sorrow.

These can range, on the same page, from a child’s drawing suffused with “such earnest innocence and grubby grace that Liberty knew it would pluck [its recipient] from the plain of depressing twilight from which she was struggling to arise and shove her right back into the valley of bleakest night” to a “man’s voice […] old and nervous, even on the edge of tears” calling the wrong number in search of enlightenment. The paths are manifold; the room is light, then dim, and to keep seeing the light get harder and harder. “Rosy fingered dawn bloomed elsewhere, in higher, purer altitudes perhaps, where the heart beats more slowly.” It is in Williams’ layering of these messages that brings her in spiritual line with Kafka, a writer with whom she is in constant conversation.3 “There is an infinite amount of hope – but not for us,” Kafka once reportedly said, and Williams is able to at once remain attentive to all the sorrow in the world while also giving glimpses of hope and grace, glimpses that are at once paradoxically infinite and inaccessible, always seemingly within reach but just out of it, glimpses from here or someplace else, and perhaps graspable to someone or something else besides “us.” “Yes, she felt herself reduced, small, growing smaller. With only a little more effort on the part of others and a bit of inattention on her own, she would be the size to climb upon her white dog’s back and ride away, ride away madly, in full career through the rest of life without stopping.”

I could go on, without stopping, on this book. On the perfectly rendered dialogue, on Clem, literature’s best-ever dog, on Williams’ sine qua non sense of humor, on her frankly harrowing use of flashback and memory within the book, on how it is at once an exemplar of its time (the minimalist 80s) and all time (the mountains and mountains of books that make up Literature.) But this is a simply a book I love, and somehow also one that helped me find love, and, as Barthes once wrote, “to try to write love is to confront the muck of language,” so words just can’t and won’t do it enough justice. Maybe only the cover can.

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Previously on Let’s Build a Canon: