Review of Eley Williams' “Attrib. And Other Stories”: On Language, Our Difficult Lifeline
Review of Eley Williams’ “Attrib. And Other Stories”: On Language, Our Difficult Lifeline
by Sarah M. Zhou
“The plot of this is not and will not be obvious.” So begins Eley Williams’ debut short story collection Attrib. and Other Stories, out today (Anchor Books, 2021), a declaration that grows increasingly self-referential as the collection unfurls, each of its sixteen stories a successive petal in the work’s burgeoning eccentricity, sensitivity, and wit. As a collection, Attrib. and Other Stories is much less concerned with capital P-plot than it is with the quietly turbulent, joyful, lonely, daunting, amusing, etc. moments that pockmark even the plotless stretches of our lives, as well as with the mode through which we try to understand and communicate these moments, which is to say, language.
For Williams, these preoccupations manifest in startlingly singular characters and delightfully peculiar settings; a deployment of punctuation and white space more reminiscent of experimental poetry than straight-backed prose; and a generous helping of puns, wordplay, and double entendres.
Attrib. and Other Stories opens with “The Alphabet,” a story imbued with both a colorful charm as well as a taut sense of loss, lack, and absence. Spotlighting a narrator suffering from aphasia, a language disorder that gradually deteriorates a person’s ability to express and understand written and spoken language, “The Alphabet” reminisces on the narrator’s relationship with their partner, who has, over four years after the narrator’s diagnosis and two weeks before the story’s opening, left the narrator. In the flashing wake of lost love and against the more opaque backdrop of lost language, the narrator reflects on these two intertwining storylines.
As a collection, Attrib. and Other Stories is much less concerned with capital-P plot than it is with the quietly turbulent, joyful, lonely, daunting, amusing, etc. moments that pockmark even the plotless stretches of our lives.
Here, their first date, their partner’s question What’s your favorite letter? tumbling through the rest of their night’s conversations. There, the day of the narrator’s diagnosis, their partner’s joke “‘You can’t spell aphrodisiac without aphasia’” a waggish moment of comfort. And here, the day the narrator forgets the word hairbrush, the first time their partner looks concerned, the moment from which everything becomes “like easier but the opposite.”
The double-edged loss, then, is devastating and apparent, but the story itself rings far from hollow. Sparkling with wandering series of word association, distorted idioms (is the world yours for the taking or “yours for the mistaking”?), and a healthy dose of double entendres from the narrator’s innuendo-inclined partner, “The Alphabet” is not so much empty of language as it is full of a reconsidered version of it.
As language drifts further and further out of reach, the narrator begins to view the twenty-six letters as self-contained entities rather than the building blocks to communication. H, no longer recognized as the starting letter in house or the silent letter in hour, is understood instead as the image of a rugby goal post, while L transforms into a candle-holder with the flame snuffed out and R into a thrown magnifying glass half-lodged in a wall.
Through the narrator’s understanding of the alphabet as standalone pictographs rather than dependent graphemes, as destination rather than vehicle, language is suddenly crystallized into something solid and substantive—something whole in and of and unto itself.
Through the narrator’s understanding of the alphabet as standalone pictographs rather than dependent graphemes, as destination rather than vehicle, language is suddenly crystallized into something solid and substantive—something whole in and of and unto itself. Even as the narrator increasingly loses language, their “speech-bubbles [growing] thinner and more gauzy above [their] head,” they are the one to remind us of language’s true form and gravity.
This pattern of strikingly offbeat characters and settings tempered by a delicate perceptiveness and emotionality continues as we venture through the rest of the collection. In “Bulk,” a ragtag group of spectators—among them a rumpled, tipsy couple in evening wear, a pair of mourners with an urn and a dog, a mellow-voiced visiting artist, and a mousy natural history museum employee—behold a dead whale beached along the morning coastline.
…increasingly torn between their professional impulse to haul up, cut open, and prepare the whale for exhibition and their sudden, surging wonder at the whale’s magnificence, the unexpected sadness and sanctity in its death, and the strange intimacy in their knowledge of its inner systems and underbellies…
As the group considers the whale’s great bulk, its possible cause of death, and what to do next, the museum employee feels increasingly torn between their professional impulse to haul up, cut open, and prepare the whale for exhibition and their sudden, surging wonder at the whale’s magnificence, the unexpected sadness and sanctity in its death, and the strange intimacy in their knowledge of its inner systems and underbellies.
In title story “Attrib.” a Foley artist, tasked with auditorily recreating Michaelangelo’s The Creation of Eve for a Sistine Chapel audio guide, grows increasingly indignant at Eve’s upstaging by The Creation of Adam, while “Platform” features the concurrent dramas of a friend’s tearful departure and the theatrics of a flyaway toupée. “Mischief,” one of the collection’s concluding stories, sees a soldier skittishly working at defusing a landmine, voice nervously pushed right up to the surface of the page, while their companion, a rat specially trained to sniff out TNT, coolly looks on. Ultimately, what Williams offers here is not the flashpoints of plot but literature stripped-down: the emotions that outline us and the words we conjure up, fumble through, shoot off and mull over, in an attempt to darken that outline.
…a Foley artist, tasked with auditorily recreating Michaelangelo’s The Creation of Eve for a Sistine Chapel audio guide, grows increasingly indignant at Eve’s upstaging by The Creation of Adam…
This through line—our persistent desire to crystallize experience through language—rises to a crest in the collection’s closing story “Spins.” Caught in a moment of l’esprit d’escalier after an argument with their partner, the narrator sits on their bed ruminating over the perfect riposte before noticing, first, a spider up on their ceiling and, second, their partner’s silk pajamas, which they had forgotten to pack.
Resolute, now, to rid themselves of the pajamas (and equally—perhaps even more so—resolute not to discard them in any trash can they’ll have to live around), the narrator heads out into the London evening to locate a suitable garbage bin while their wandering inner monologue, prompted by their memory of the spider, suffers more than a few arachnoid jokes, facts, and references.
Ultimately, what Williams offers here is not the flashpoints of plot but literature stripped-down: the emotions that outline us and the words we conjure up, fumble through, shoot off and mull over, in an attempt to darken that outline.
At first glance, “Spins” is nothing more than another example of the quintessential Williams story—quirky characters, bizarre narratives, and linguistic gymnastics to boot. But what Williams is really doing here is drawing not just a through line but a circle, and one that clarifies her understanding of language and our relationship to it at large. “Spins” is, upon closer examination, a sort of response to “The Alphabet,” if not a sort of inverted reflection. Sure, on paper the two narrators are markedly different: while the narrator of “The Alphabet” feels language run through their hands like water, leaving them empty and grasping, the narrator of “Spins,” cognizant of words such as aphaeresis and poultice and easily able to recite apocalypse’s Greek roots and hell’s Old Frisian cognates, is intimately familiar with not only words but also their etymologies, usages, and near cousins.
But both narrators undergo one of life’s most turbulent experiences—love’s fraying and fracturing—and both, no matter how closely language clings to them, blindly stumble through the right thing to say and the right way to say it. Language is imperfect, and language has its limits, Williams seems to say—but not towards a hopeless end. “The Alphabet,” in its narrator’s grasping for language’s basic building blocks, regrounds us in language’s shape and weight, while “Spins,” in its narrator’s grasping for the perfect phrase, the perfect retort, the perfect one-off comeback, reflects our own moments of l’esprit d’escalier, our own difficult dance in transmuting the internal into the external. Language, even in its limits, is reflective and connective, both a linkage and a lifeline.
“Spins,” in its narrator’s grasping for the perfect phrase, the perfect retort, the perfect one-off comeback, reflects our own moments of l’esprit d’escalier, our own difficult dance in transmuting the internal into the external. Language, even in its limits, is reflective and connective, both a linkage and a lifeline.
Attrib. and Other Stories is not a book of five-act narrative structures or easy, familiar settings; the vast majority of its characters, including its narrators, are unnamed, ungendered, and unmarked by any other social identifiers. And yet something intensely familiar plays out across its pages. Williams’ constant testing of language—her insistent poking and prodding, her patchworked idioms and tessellated metaphors—unveils the intricacies of communication, which are, in turn, seen to result from the intricacies of experience. Language, in this book, is stretched and laid bare, and, in this process, so are we.
Williams’ constant testing of language—her insistent poking and prodding, her patchworked idioms and tessellated metaphors—unveils the intricacies of communication, which are, in turn, seen to result from the intricacies of experience. Language, in this book, is stretched and laid bare, and, in this process, so are we.
Sarah M. Zhou is a writer from the Midwest. Her work appears in Blue Marble Review, COUNTERCLOCK Journal, Bombus Press, and Vagabond City and has been recognized by the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom and the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. A Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop alumna, she is also a former COUNTERCLOCK PATCHWORK poetry fellow. She studies East Asian Studies and Economics at Columbia University.