Status
Available
Publication
Tin House Books (2018), Edition: First Edition, 336 pages
Description
Forty years later, The Changeling is no less haunting and no less visionary than the day it was published, but it has only become clearer that 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. And through this lens--Pearl's fragile consciousness--readers encounter the horror and triumph of both childhood and motherhood in a new light. With language that flits between exuberance and elegy, the plainspoken and the poetic, 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. … (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member janeajones
The Fairy Tale Review Press of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, reprinted this 1978 novel in a 30th Anniversary Edition. It is a strange and wondrous breed of tale, part parable, part fairytale, part cautionary tale written in tantalizing elliptical language.
While shoplifting, Pearl, the protagonist of the
After Pearl's son, Sam, is born, she tries to escape with him to Florida -- she wanted him to be "normal" -- but they are quickly retrieved by Walker to be brought back to the island. She and Sam miraculously survive a plane crash in the Everglades, in which Walker is killed, and she is reunited with the baby in the hospital. Or is she? There is something strange about the child. Returned to island by Thomas, Pearl retreats into a haze of wine thoughout the afternoon and gin in the evening, becoming the favorite of the children. But strange things are afoot:
She knew that the children were not what they seemed. She knew that many of the things that visited her in the long wasted hours of the day were not children at all. They were phantoms, aspects only of her fatuous, remorseful and destructive self.
Once Pearl had wanted death but since she had come to the island she realized death was hopeless reolution at best. The soul separated from the body at last, yet still retaining memories and having hungers. That's the way she saw it. Yes. And what would be the use of it -- to be dead yet still to have the hungers -- the different hungers for love.
While shoplifting, Pearl, the protagonist of the
Show More
novel, is herself shoplifted by Walker, who takes her off to his family-owned island, Saddleback, inhabited solely by him, his siblings, their spouses, and a dozen children, most of them adopted. The eldest brother, Thomas, is in charge of the children's education until they reach adolescence when they are sent off to boarding school. All the children are remarkable; they read by the age of four and have quirky talents and personalities, and are allowed the run of the island.After Pearl's son, Sam, is born, she tries to escape with him to Florida -- she wanted him to be "normal" -- but they are quickly retrieved by Walker to be brought back to the island. She and Sam miraculously survive a plane crash in the Everglades, in which Walker is killed, and she is reunited with the baby in the hospital. Or is she? There is something strange about the child. Returned to island by Thomas, Pearl retreats into a haze of wine thoughout the afternoon and gin in the evening, becoming the favorite of the children. But strange things are afoot:
She knew that the children were not what they seemed. She knew that many of the things that visited her in the long wasted hours of the day were not children at all. They were phantoms, aspects only of her fatuous, remorseful and destructive self.
Once Pearl had wanted death but since she had come to the island she realized death was hopeless reolution at best. The soul separated from the body at last, yet still retaining memories and having hungers. That's the way she saw it. Yes. And what would be the use of it -- to be dead yet still to have the hungers -- the different hungers for love.
Show Less
LibraryThing member peptastic
I'm positive that I've missed something with The Changeling. It read like a different novel each day I picked it up to continue reading it.
I've read different reviews that suggested the island was a cult, which never crossed my mind. It was this possibility that made the whole situation that much
I took Pearl as a free spirit who was a victim of her parent’s suicides when she was younger. She muses to herself she doesn't do much other than having sex with her husband of five days, but then that was only five days. Who knows what would have happened to her had she stayed with the gym teacher.
It is to Pearl's great misfortune she is carried off by Walker. First he has sex with her at a motel, which she is resigned to as her fate. I suppose this was the part feminists despised the book for back in the '70s. Pearl isn't a character to act heroically for others benefit.
Whatever she notices is happening on the island is probably more than the kid’s mother Miriam has noted. Miriam is too busy making her skirts.
Was Thomas a pedophile? The man gave me the creeps.
The part where Pearl mistakes him for Walker thus comes onto him. Walker's reply that he doesn't need women, his work with the children, why he brought Pearl back to the island. The way Williams described Thomas speaking to her as if a pet on a leash spoke to me how everyone viewed Pearl. Miriam was kept busy with her skirts and would not hinder him with his work with the children.
When the book shows her back on the island after Walker dies in a plane crash, it is the children who disturbed me.
The book appeared to change on me whenever I put it down.
I never got a feel for whether Sam was real, if he was malicious or the other kids were. Was Pearl the grandmother?
Their hatred and fantasies of killing their hapless father Lincoln. I did skip the part where they spied on their dad jerking off. That felt like it would go on forever.
Pearl reminded me of previous Williams’s characters such as the story The Farm Sara that were about alcoholism. The Farm gave us the manslaughter and guilt one would normally associate with this condition. The Changeling may have really been about a demon baby and not booze.
I felt like those kids were snickering at me and I wasn't in on the joke.
I've read different reviews that suggested the island was a cult, which never crossed my mind. It was this possibility that made the whole situation that much
Show More
sadder.I took Pearl as a free spirit who was a victim of her parent’s suicides when she was younger. She muses to herself she doesn't do much other than having sex with her husband of five days, but then that was only five days. Who knows what would have happened to her had she stayed with the gym teacher.
It is to Pearl's great misfortune she is carried off by Walker. First he has sex with her at a motel, which she is resigned to as her fate. I suppose this was the part feminists despised the book for back in the '70s. Pearl isn't a character to act heroically for others benefit.
Whatever she notices is happening on the island is probably more than the kid’s mother Miriam has noted. Miriam is too busy making her skirts.
Was Thomas a pedophile? The man gave me the creeps.
The part where Pearl mistakes him for Walker thus comes onto him. Walker's reply that he doesn't need women, his work with the children, why he brought Pearl back to the island. The way Williams described Thomas speaking to her as if a pet on a leash spoke to me how everyone viewed Pearl. Miriam was kept busy with her skirts and would not hinder him with his work with the children.
When the book shows her back on the island after Walker dies in a plane crash, it is the children who disturbed me.
The book appeared to change on me whenever I put it down.
I never got a feel for whether Sam was real, if he was malicious or the other kids were. Was Pearl the grandmother?
Their hatred and fantasies of killing their hapless father Lincoln. I did skip the part where they spied on their dad jerking off. That felt like it would go on forever.
Pearl reminded me of previous Williams’s characters such as the story The Farm Sara that were about alcoholism. The Farm gave us the manslaughter and guilt one would normally associate with this condition. The Changeling may have really been about a demon baby and not booze.
I felt like those kids were snickering at me and I wasn't in on the joke.
Show Less
LibraryThing member ouroborosangel
This is a re-release of a book written in the 70s (and severely panned by the critics). I finished the book two days ago and am still thinking about it. Did I read a book about a cult? An alcoholic woman's crazy thoughts? A dream? The truth or a bunch of lies? If you enjoy books with creepy
Show More
children, a gothic horror sensibility and no true resolution of what you've invested hours in reading, then this is your book. Show Less
LibraryThing member albertgoldfain
A tough but unique and ultimately worthwhile read. The sustained confusion of a disoriented narrator might turn off some, but there is enough here for a close reading of Pearl's perspective.
LibraryThing member macha
it's challenging to spend a whole book in Pearl's mind, Pearl who herself seems to be hardly there at all. yet the book, swimming in gin and thereby skimming over so much of the real world outside herself until she achieves the condition, by refusing to engage, of transcending, transforming the
Show More
real, creates its own reality in the drift, in the wild children who may or may not exist, who tell her everything and protect her, willingly caught inside her/their stories. it begins as a plane wreck, Pearl floating, rescued/not rescued, resurfacing on an island she cannot bear to inhabit or to leave. it's a force of life, caught perhaps in a moment of death or self-destruction, connected and tragically unconnected to the world around it, even to the inner life it still feels. first published in 1978, it resides in a profoundly female consciousness, set in another time we hardly can (manage to)(bear to) inhabit, where the mother splits, dissolves, after childbirth, and the child left behind is perceived as loved, as other, and as gone. Show Less
LibraryThing member hbowie
It's a dazzling book. Not at all a conventional narrative. Elements of magical realism and deep mythology. The protagonist and primary narrator is an admitted drunk, but I think it a mistake to think about this in terms of a personality characteristic... it is more a device that lets us, as
Show More
readers, experience the world of the novel while dodging the limitations of conventional, rational explanation and unambiguous description. A tough read at times, but ultimately well worth it. Show Less
LibraryThing member sophroniaborgia
What to say about this book? For starters, it's certainly like nothing else I have ever read. We begin with Pearl, drinking in a bar while clutching her newborn son, having run away from her husband and their home on an island inhabited solely by his family. Then a plane crash upends everything.
This is definitely not a book for everyone. Answers are not provided. Potential plots drift in and out, never really pursued to their conclusions. The story is much more concerned with emotional states than with telling any sort of rational story. But for readers who are not bothered by ambiguity and strangeness, it is fascinating. Pearl is both an appealing and offputting character; her observations are both pricelessly acute and ridiculous, and the reader can never be certain whether what she thinks is happening is actually real. Joy Williams wants to ask questions that don't have clear answers -- about connections between parents and children, what it means for that connection when children grow up, how we process trauma, how we lose touch with reality. She turns the world upside down and gives you a glimpse of how alien it can be. It's not an easy read, but it's an intriguing one.
Show More
Pearl returns to the island, spends all her time drinking, and begins to have odd feelings about her son that may be alcoholic delusions or may be revelations of something very strange going on.This is definitely not a book for everyone. Answers are not provided. Potential plots drift in and out, never really pursued to their conclusions. The story is much more concerned with emotional states than with telling any sort of rational story. But for readers who are not bothered by ambiguity and strangeness, it is fascinating. Pearl is both an appealing and offputting character; her observations are both pricelessly acute and ridiculous, and the reader can never be certain whether what she thinks is happening is actually real. Joy Williams wants to ask questions that don't have clear answers -- about connections between parents and children, what it means for that connection when children grow up, how we process trauma, how we lose touch with reality. She turns the world upside down and gives you a glimpse of how alien it can be. It's not an easy read, but it's an intriguing one.
Show Less
Original language
English
Physical description
336 p.; 5.3 inches
ISBN
1941040896 / 9781941040898
Local notes
fiction