State of Grace is a "difficult" novel, hard to get into and even then not easy to stay with. Williams is not [Jacqueline] Susann, after all. Time shifts are sometimes confusing, and the plotting is in parts outlandish. I once attempted a plot summary, and it sounded like Tolstoy's vicious précis of King Lear. The novel was written some years ago, and some of Williams' best stories have been written since. It may be that she is at her best as a short-story writer, or it may be that she's learned how to write a novel by writing this; time will tell. Clearly parts of it don't Joy Williams 1944– © Nancy Cramptonseem to fit, have little or no apparent relation to the whole or other parts.

But open the novel to virtually any page and you'll instantly see it—a kind of strange phosphorescent style describing disquieting...