"The Pelican Child" | Reviewed by William Winkler

American author Joy Williams is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Project. She is the author of five novels published over the span of a half-century. “Harrow,” her most recent novel, appeared in 2021. She is also the author of numerous short stories, twelve of which are included in her recent collection “The Pelican Child.”

Williams’s characters are often middle-class, trembling on the brink of losing their status, or often in the process of doing so. In an introductory note in 1995's edition of Best American Short Stories, Williams wrote: "All art is about nothingness: our apprehension of it, our fear of it, its approach.”

Her recent collection includes descriptions of characters confronting their future, as in The Beach House, where a dying man excludes his daughter from inheriting a home that holds fond memories for her. The Fellow describes an American expatriate living in Central America and her relationship with an ultimately doomed anthropology researcher, Chaunt details the life of a new resident of a desolate, multi-story retirement facility located near an abandoned hamlet named Chaunt. There her son and a friend had died in a cycling accident, and their voices filled her ears day and night.

Other stories are fables. Argos, the shortest (and most touching) is told in the voice of Odysseus’s dog who waited twenty years for his master’s return, only to die shortly after their reunion and Odysseus’s loving touch.

The title story, Baba Iaga & The Pelican Child, is based upon the Russian mythology of the witch Baba Iaga who lives in a magical hut deep in the woods.

This collection is not unlike a well-stocked buffet. It contains a multitude of ingredients of widely disparate flavors and preparations. Depending on the reader’s tastes there will be pieces appealing (and accessible) to a wide variety of perusers.

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