Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty by Diane WilliamsMcSweeney’s Publishing, 2012

One of the quotes on the back cover of Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty is from Ben Marcus, who calls Diane Williams’s stories the “ideal delivery system” for “the uncanny”: that was the closest thing I could find as a point of entry to these fifty-one short short stories. Or maybe that’s not entirely true: I could see the appeal on the level of words or sentences or phrases, like: “I want to end this at the flabber, although I am flabbergasted” (13)—that’s from the first piece in the book, “My Defects,” which is quoted in full in Daniel Green’s review of this book over at identitytheory.com. I liked the moments of wordplay or verbal slips: in “Between Midnight and 6 AM” (which you can read in full on the McSweeney’s site) the narrator says: “To get anywhere in my life at this time!—rather, to get anywhere near my wife at this time!—that can take days” (16). And I liked this, from “Woman in Rose Dress”: “She hadn’t been married long, it was a spring day, and she was uninterested still in her own love story” (35). But I felt uncomfortably adrift in many of the pieces and in the book as a whole: this is a world made strange, a world of dream logic, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I realize this is probably part of the point: in the almost-title story (“Vicky Swanky Was a Beauty”) there’s this: “Cruelly, I’ve seen nothing in the book I am reading—about me. I need to see specifically my life with pointers in the book” (66). Touché?