Joy Williams

The Changeling

Jessie Kronke

This book made me voracious. I read it at any moment possible-on the train, before bed, during slow bouts at my job when I could sneak a couple of pages. I was reading at one point in a museum sculpture garden when a fly fell out of thin air and landed on its back next to my foot. It spun around in circles trying to get back on its feet, but before it could do so a sparrow flew down and ate it. Normally I love to watch these cute little brown birds, but as it finished its meal and approached my foot pecking, I became so startled I shooed it away. I felt like this book had come to life - heightened, uncanny animality from a creature I once knew to be sweet and innocent.

When we first meet Pearl - young in years but advanced in her drinking - she's sitting at a hotel bar in Florida, throwing back gin and tonics. Cradled in the crook of her arm is her infant son. But 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 drinking might dull the latter but it spurs on the former. Through the lens of Pearl's fragile consciousness, readers encounter the horror and triumph of both childhood and motherhood. With language that flits between exuberance and elegy, the plainspoken and the poetic, Joy Williams has created a modern fairy-tale, entirely original and entirely consuming.

Moray Lyle McIntosh

The Changeling is one of the founding texts in a genre of mythic, hallucinatory writing that has become far more common since its publication. I had never heard of it but its influence is quite clear if you enjoy this type of writing.

The Changeling is about Pearl, a young woman who has fled the isolated island home of her charismatic but domineering husband with their infant son. When Walker appears to take her home an accident leaves her alone amongst his family, including his twin and the many children he has adopted. Pearl finds her sense of self dissolving in the oppressive atmosphere of the family home and is increasingly haunted by the idea that her son is an imposter, a changeling.

It’s a deeply unsettling story and a challenging, atmospheric novel filled with charismatic but menacing characters. Pearl’s perception, and that of the reader experiencing the story through her eyes, is often uncertain and contradictory. Reality has a strange distorted, unreliable feel that increases as Pearl’s story (and her drinking) develop and she feels her ownership of her son, her body and her identity slipping away from her under the power of the family’s demanding and intrusive interactions.

There is a strikingly uncanny feeling to the characters and environment, or unheimlich to use the better German alternative, for there is no sense of home for Pearl and her surroundings and companions become increasingly alien and disquieting. The constant feeling of unease, even though it isn’t readily identifiable, is in part created by Williams’ clever use of the darker traditions of mythology and fairy tale. She is certainly well aware of the eerie effect that child-characters can create and the many children are deeply unpleasant, their cruelties enhanced by a dark, otherworldly quality that may be a delusion or a real consequence of their upbringing in this cold, hard family. Again this plays on a common trope in fables and fairy tales (and much horror writing!) and is accompanied by the strong animal theme that runs through the narrative where the characters are often given animal qualities through intense and sometimes violent imagery. Both children and animals, as well as Pearl’s slow feeling of vanishing, dwell on the idea of transformation and mutability and the effect that change has to bestow and remove agency and power.

The Changeling

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