Evading the constraints of typical short fiction, How High?--That High, the 10th collection by Diane Williams (Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine), includes 34 vignettes that challenge convention with fervor. Williams's willful brevity and tantalizing obscurity make How High? a subversive puzzle box that dismantles standard notions of characterization and storytelling with deft precision.
Williams luxuriates in the possibilities of each cryptic sentence, flirting with the separation between fiction and poetry. Each story in How High? is brief--some, like "Finished Being," are only a single sentence. Others, like "Garden Magic," condense life-altering disappointments into a few laconic paragraphs, or allow a single moment of private reflection to bloom into a web of darkly illuminating associative episodes. "I am in a room where decisions are unlikely to be thought out," one of her narrators broods, "where I lack strong enough character and vital drive to take my dark thoughts and plant them at the right time like spring bulbs." Though a conventional narrative is sometimes (not always) discernable, Williams seems most interested in discovering the weight of personal narrative that animates or stymies her characters. Her claustrophobic portraits often revolve around a private moment of abjection that haunts the protagonist, holding them perpetually in its grip.
The lacerating quality of Williams's prose supplies a ruthless and powerful vehicle for these painfully intimate studies of human inadequacy and disappointment. Her preoccupation with form is a testament to her abiding love of the craft, as well as a reminder that craft's greatest enemy is always staidness. --Devon Ashby, sales & marketing assistant, Shelf Awareness