Taking Care
People on the edge of sanity, of love, of the natural world. Williams writes with the compression of poetry and the menace of a rattlesnake.
Even a critic who calls the prose “wonderful crisp writing, consistently percipient and witty” notes the cost: a number of stories land on abrupt, quasi-mystical endings that feel unearned, ordinary caretaking tipping into something cosmic without warning. One reader is blunt about it: “a lot of these stories are ruined by silly spiritual endings.” Because the prose runs so spare and ambiguity-driven, individual entries can blur together if the book is read straight through rather than spaced out, and a minority of reviewers call specific back-half stories underwhelming without saying which. ‘Building,’ with its illegally kept pet toucan, reads dated in its period specifics, and ‘Preparation for a Collie’ draws notice as colder and more clinical than the collection's warmer entries.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
