FICTION
Beautiful Days
By Zach Williams
Doubleday Books
Published June 11, 2024
Zach Williams’ “Beautiful Days” Is Just Scary Enough
It is often said that truth is stranger than fiction. But Zach Williams, whose debut short story collection, Beautiful Days, is out this summer, makes the case for a new adage: strange fiction can help us tell the truth.
For Williams, the short story form is long enough to bring readers from places they know (an office; a country home; a first date; a hardware store) to surreal, suffocating places that feel, in equal measure, like the realms of nightmares and fables. In reading Beautiful Days, one will learn to stop trying to guess the “rules” of each story, as they are prone to vanish—but they do so with a clarity and confidence that is rare for a debut. It seems that Williams, a former high school English teacher and father of two, is a writer who has been playing the long game. Before he published his first story in the New Yorker in 2022, he’d already graduated from the MFA at NYU (he worked closely with Zadie Smith) and been selected for the prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Now, his patience is paying off. The entire collection is varied, yet focused; serious, yet throw-your-head-back funny; virtuosic in the way of a writer who will be around for a long time.
In “Trial Run,” a man finds himself alone at his social media company’s office with a disgraced husband and an antisemitic conspiracy-theorist security guard named Manny Mintauro. Soon, suspicion and anxiety send him further into a social labyrinth—one guarded by a man whose surname is an anagram of Minotaur. These evocations of myth and horror are Williams’ specialty, used to cage in his characters and make them squirm (the succinct “Mousetraps” makes a similar move with its titular allegory). But at no point do these twists feel like gimmicks. Instead, they cast the everyday actions of American life in freshly sinister light, portraying paranoia as a chaos agent, one that skews our understanding of what is right and wrong.
Ethics get even more skewed in “Wood Sorrell House.” The story begins peacefully—two parents, Ronna and Jacob, are living in a rustic country cottage with their infant son, Max—but readers quickly understand that the family’s predicament is far from idyllic. The house is quaint, yes, but Ronna and Jacob don’t remember how they got there or how much time has passed since they arrived. Their attempts to make sense of their environment fall short:
For instance, his plan to track the moon’s progress in his journal. It was, of course, a good idea. If the moon did behave oddly here, that might suggest further lines of inquiry, a chain of discoveries. But think of all the nights when he’d realized with a start that the moon was already up, that he’d forgotten the project altogether for who knew how long …
“And,” she added, “a handful of nights—what if that’s not right? What if it’s dozens? Hundreds?”
“Don’t exaggerate,” Jacob muttered, lying on the rug, eyes hidden in the crook of his arm. “It isn’t hundreds.”
While Ronna and Jacob are lost visitors, Max seems to belong to the cyclic limbo. His catchphrase—“too scary”—clangs with ominous irony; to him, nothing is as scary as it is for his parents, who are driven to the brink of sanity. Today’s readers will recognize the questions eating at these characters. How can we prepare our children for the world they will inherit? How can we teach them how to live, when the fundamental rules that govern life have changed forever?
Parenthood is a central theme in this collection (“The New Toe” follows a father’s pathological spiral when he discovers his son has grown an extra digit), as is finding meaning in a disturbing, contradictory world. “Golf Cart” follows an anxiety-riddled digital illustrator living on his family’s private estate, which they call the Farm. Here, inherited privilege is another sort of cage. Though artmaking does not rescue the narrator and his brother from complicity (there is an allusion to the du Pont family), it heightens their awareness, pushes them to confront the truth of their predicament. “My practice was changing how I saw,” the narrator says.
If Williams’ own practice has changed how he sees, the last story in the collection, “Return to Crashaw,” is evidence of a fully formed artistic vision. The Crashaw Site, an array of excavated geologic megaliths in the desert, is Williams’ invention, but the language used to describe it—focalized through a disheartened Crashaw tour guide—is so specific, so scenic, and so reminiscent of our own tourist sites that readers might still look it up on Google. Such attention to the story’s corporeal world calls to mind Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon” or George Saunders’ CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and it is certainly the best tourists-in-a-Jeep story since Jennifer Egan’s “Safari.” Like these writers, Williams uses his strange and scary premises to reveal the persistent humanity of his characters. They are terrified, conflicted, guilty, grieving—but still yearning, too. Perhaps the collection’s title represents the one thing we are all crawling toward, even if we know it’s a mirage.
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