Szplug's Reviews > State of Grace

I paused some dozen or so pages into this book to reflect upon a couple of matters that had arisen and become wedged against the rhythmic current of the narrative—firstly, that I was struggling to grasp what exactly what taking place within the lilting snapshot vignettes of a wounded girl's life that had passed before me; and, immediate upon this, that the whole was comprised of sentences, of a peculiar cadence and texture, whose stricken beauty and enigmatic allure held me utterly enthralled. It dawned upon me that, provided Williams could maintain such a high level of fictional word-crafting, I didn't particularly need to fully understand the events uncovered through their artful allusion and linguistic liaison—I could be content merely to imbibe and admire the form they displayed in so doing. This is a writer who can deliver one haymaker of a sentence, both in isolation—ofttimes after setting it up with a diaphanous abstraction that unbalances the reader—or in continuous feed; and it wasn't long after I had stopped to contemplate this state of affairs that the story Williams intended, perhaps needed to tell began to coalesce with an urgency and raw precision that matched the prose in which it was set down.

I would still hesitate to recommend this book across the board—indeed, I could readily accept that others would find the entirety too dark and depressing, too esoteric and elliptical, too circular and sere to be worth the required investment of the reader's time and emotion. This is not a happy tale—there are no characters undamaged and undamaging, and even the halest of human attachments and connexions, in the hands of the talented Williams, are shorn of their glimmer and shine, strength and soundness; scrubbed down until the pallid bone and sickly flesh are all that remain, a flayed thing rendered dull and disquieting. Yet it spoke to me, powerfully and evocatively, if not always clearly. As a man who regularly chews upon the gristle of the past, worries purposelessly at the grim detritus of memory's tidal bore, I found that I could relate to the travails and follow the dilated gazes of Kate Jackson with a disturbing inherence—or, rather, as I understood the protagonist naïf through the author's presentation. Perhaps in fiction we are always finding some midpoint between the author's intent and our own adaptations at which to stake out our individual understanding.

In the alienating anticipation of heaven, life on earth is degraded to a hellishness; and in State of Grace it stands as a frozen Hell in Maine, a burning Hell in Florida. Everyone in the story is on a kinked path, lined with pathologies and secrets; and the worst is the secret of birth, wherein the fetus growing in the womb misshapes the mother's body in its kicking and demoniacal spasms, and misshapes her very life by the way that its entombed, unconscious dreams infiltrate and distort the awareness of the mother in real life. That most joyous of occasions, the birth of a child, is limned herein as a terrible burden, the demand to bear a wizened puppet attached, like a leech, at the breast, and allow it to drain whatever vestiges of willful purpose remain in one's mental reservoir after the daily allotment to a life straining against the circumferential pressures of nullity's deadening mass. The dichotomy between the sapping and imposing of wills, between parent and child, work in initiatory meme through Kate's mother and her madness, and her father in his cold and haughty piety. In the presence of rage one is discombobulated, but, ultimately, adaptable; it is the sense of being in the presence of one who possesses a secret, especially with an assured quality to the latter—whether infelicitous or benignant—that drives a restless resentment, a compulsion to inflict suffering. It is those who don't react in such a manner to her devastating secrets that Kate finds herself falling in love with, and thus, as she portends, sentencing to death. It seems Kate's innocence is intermingled with her guilt, her passivity with her continual movement in the service of subdued drives—in the world and in her mind. But both have the power to doom those whom she encounters that proffer her some form of love that is not God's Felon Fist.

Is the incest between Reverend and Kate Jackson actual or intimated? What comprised her tiptoed-around confession to Grady—he of the ear-pricked self-assurance and the uncomfortable love—that primed fate's gun to be triggered by her caressing fingers? How tenebrous is the connexion between the younger Kate, bound to the manse and her aphoristic explorations, and her elder self in perpetual flight? Who inflicted upon her such a vampiric pregnancy? Questions but peek from the darkened slats of the windows Kate brings into our vision, only to be shuttered within, unanswered, as an alternate one appears under her (mis)direction. You think that this vile confession that I have made is what I meant to say? To Williams, the innocent and the guilty differ not in the damage they cause, but merely in the degree or tenor of their culpability: for, whether one's action in or knowledge of the world, and the individual beings who inhabit its material environs, be sprung from haloed innocence or assuaging guilt, we cannot determine beforehand how they will affect or be received by those around us; and even the purest of motives can unleash the evilest of results. God cannot promise a world absent of evil because evil is determined by how we react to stimuli, internal and external, and these reactions are tainted by the weave of unknowing upon the loom of our dread unravelling into everything and nothing. We can work great harm in attempting great good, we can drive to the brink of madness those upon whom we desire naught but to provide succor and benefit: thus, innocence is harm without malice.

This is a story drenched in the inescapable complicity of Original Sin, where one's conscious life must, perforce, be beset with fears and flights, betrayals and impositions, where everything fragile shall, at last, be broken and the very act of love itself, its union between souls conjoining flesh and spirit, stand revealed in the mirror of the self as either a cold and mechanical exchange or the beastly satiation of an offshoot of murderous rage. This essence of sin has painted Kate into corners ever tighter and more constricting, until despair so overwhelms that it plateaus and she can actually make plans in the face of hopelessness. She wants nothing more than to reach that dearly longed for and promised State of Grace, and can only sense that there exists nothing more ineffably distant, further from her reach—for we cannot will ourselves into its presence, nor breach it through passivity; and though we strive to impose the speed and location wherein our stone punctures through the water's surface, we cannot control or direct the ripples it forms.

I thought State of Grace was near perfectly constructed, especially in the insertion into the middle portion of the novel of a third person authorial voice to counter the faltering recollections of the bookended sections as narrated by Kate; this removed narrator reveals the actions and thoughts of its target and her immediate family in a stronger light, one that makes fewer elisions and less allowance for the peregrinations of a young woman whose self-portrait of the past would be unbearable in more than quick peeks and glimpses. And the final stretch, broken once more into a string of island narratives, delivers the terrible blows of converging misfortune with a hermetic energy drained of all violence or vehemence. Kate's weariness has, by that point, affected the reader; I sat stone-faced while the lights were extinguished one-by-one, until, by the final page, I had returned with her to stand anew before the wind-scoured gates of an austere and parched temple, scrubbed of all but stern renunciation and rote litany, to anticipate the void.