Excitability

Culled from earlier works like Some Sexual Success Stories and The Stupefaction, these brief stories use simple syntax to wrangle with complicated subjects--insecurity, marital instability and human irrationality--without becoming incomprehensible in the process. Events and characters arise without context to accrue hypersymbolic resonance. Valery Plum's personal monologue on child-rearing in ""I Am a Learned Person"" presents children as a way out of loneliness. Serrated poetry springs from the friction between characters' desire for visceral pleasure and the difficulty of attaining it amid the quotidian blandness of middle-class life. When a woman in ""An Opening Chat"" tells her doctor, ""I want to feel strong again,"" her sentiment echoes similar cries throughout the book. Sex is the most common outlet for the frustration of these alienated and ultimately numb characters, but Williams's objective prose blunts any eroticism. Williams wishes to expose and examine our preconceived notions of sexual pleasure: Is it the sum of its components plus a little extra oomph, or even less? Over the years her stories have become increasingly wry and laconic; the most recent works are semi-symphonic representations of the clashing impulses that keep life in motion--characters all but absent. And yet, at her best, Williams makes a reader believe that neither story nor exposition is essential, as in ""The Answer to the Question,"" a seemingly random sampling of items one could leave as mementos that manages to expound on both absence and materiality in less than one page. (Oct.)