A Book that Changes — The CHANGELING by Joy Williams

Thoughts on The Changeling by Joy Williams

What a strange book. The Changeling (1978) begins conventionally enough. The prose is clear and exciting. But the story begins to decompose as it goes on, becoming something other than a story.

This quality is praised in the introduction included in the 40th anniversary printing of the novel (Tin House 2018) and hailed as a way of providing a new narrative logic, a new way to think about creativity, about motherhood, about being a woman.

This is a book that I spent some time wondering about after I finished it. I wondered what Joy Williams really intended to do. There are moments when the driving interest in the storytelling seems to be an attempt to render an experience wherein the membrane separating sacred experience from profane experience is thinning to a vanishing point. There are hints toward a strange atavism, where truth becomes totemic and reality is flexible — not just subjective but open to magic, exposed to a brutal cosmic strain.

There are moments when these ideas are prominent, but they are muddled and confused. The muddling seems intentional. The confusion is part of the “flexibility” of the real. The narrating voice is uncertain of the reality she occupies. She is unreliable in ways that are never resolved.

There are kids who live in a semi-fantastical island location with adults who possess great erudition but who are not their parents, for the most part, and who have only the thinnest foothold within the curve of the narrative.

At one point it seems that the children are turning into animals. Maybe one of them has turned into a deer and started swimming across the channel to the mainland.

The book is weird.

Initially, it is satisfying, but the digression and decomposition of the narrative structure turns into almost literary babble in the closing pages. It becomes meaningless.

Though there is still a haunting quality to the book. It forces you to wonder if there is meaning behind the meaninglessness. If the madness of the novel is pointed at something recognizable or insightful…

The novel begins with great clarity, sprinkling in some invigorating and exciting metaphysical tidbits that have deep appeal. But it runs headlong into a non-grammatical final chapter that is essentially just a single sentence, the content of which is a running dialogue of bizarre things that children/animals are saying to a narrator who has completely lost the ability to parse or filter.

Perhaps this is the point. Parsing and filtering are ways to chop down the world, diminish it so that it begins to fit our ability to comprehend it.

But that raises a question. The novel repeats this idea several times: “Every living thing suffers transfiguration.” The notion of the “changeling” is not only applied to the children, but eventuates into an implicit label for the novel itself. Are we supposed to think that the narrator has been transfigured? If so, are we supposed to see her transformation as an epiphanic experience or instead as a descent into madness?

As the line that separates the physical from the metaphysical is gradually erased, the narrator doesn’t encounter new knowledge but instead ceases to exist in either category, physical or metaphysical. If this is a statement, it’s a confusing one.

Then again, maybe The Changeling represents way of subverting a generic belief in the necessity of making a statement. Or a sort of way to say, “your sense of cogency is a delusion.”

Meaning is as meaning does, I guess.

Honestly, I really don’t know.

But I can say with certainty that this is a book that explores the question of what fiction can be and do.