Breaking and Entering

by Joy Williams

Overview

Willie and Liberty are drifters. They break into Florida vacation homes while the owners are away, stay a while, and then move on. They have been lovers since they were teenagers, yet Liberty now senses that Willie is drifting away from her—that their search, so relentless and mysterious, is becoming increasingly dangerous. An exhilarating cast of characters reflects this search, which is not just for home, but for self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780394757735
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/12/1988
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries Series
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	1,142,532
Product dimensions:	5.55(w) x 8.38(h) x 0.60(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

This compassionate and original book is about love and loneliness and courage in the new wilderness of out atomized society. It is also funny, awful and gruesomely Floridian without sacrificing its seriousness. Joy Williams is as fine a writer as you heard she was.”—Thomas McGuane
 
“An ominous and enthralling novel .... truly significant fiction, of which there is not very much around. Breaking and Entering reminds me again that life is short; it is also very wide.”—Jim Harrison
 
“To put it simply, Joy Williams is the most gifted writer of her generation. For her, the human personality is of most interest and most truth when it is under the most extreme pressure.... This notion of truth emerges in Joy Williams’s work in a complete Americanness of setting, language, and psychology that I find to be of great beauty and meaning.”—Harold Brodkey

From the Publisher

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. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly