Breaking and Entering - Hardcover

Williams, Joy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002710552 ISBN 13: 9780002710558

Publisher: Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group), 1988

Synopsis

A story about a young couple who are drifting apart. They break into Florida vacation homes while the owners are away, stay awhile and then move on. Liberty senses that Willie is drifting away from her and that their search, so relentless and mysterious, is becoming increasingly dangerous.

About this title

About the Author

Joy Williams is the author of four novels—the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001—and four collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the Academy in 2008. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.

From Publishers Weekly

Although they are renting a house, Willie and Liberty, deeply disturbed drifters, break into Florida vacation homes of the wealthy, "living the ordered life of someone else . . . inhabiting the space others had made for themselves. For they themselves were not preparing for anything, they were not building anything." The married couple's picaresque wanderings are springboards for Williams's (Taking Care, etc.) deliberate parody of cultural foibles and mores as Willie and Liberty encounter ceramic dildos, a dial-a-sermon telephone service for the distraught, toilets with "deodorant sticks to protect the integrity of the bowls" and an old woman wearing "a low-cut evening gown which showed off her Pacemaker to good advantage." Williams, who has some arresting short stories to her credit, is best at creating mood, yet she distances the reader with descriptions that throb with isolation, doom, loss, depression and death. Her phrasing is provocative but forced and desultory ("His eyes looked like breakfast buns spread with guava jelly"), and the plot, as disconnected as the protagonists, leads nowhere. Portions of the novel were previously published in Esquire and the Paris Review.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group)
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0002710552
• ISBN 13: 9780002710558
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256