![Diane Williams, author of I Hear You're Rich](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/07/28/TELEMMGLPICT000344156348_16905574370430_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq-IWLY18X4-CzgyIcjLEAj0k9u7HhRJvuo-ZLenGRumA.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Is this America’s smartest – and strangest – short-story writer?
As proved by I Hear You’re Rich, Diane Williams’s fiction, long beloved by those in the know, is joyful, unnerving and linguistically spry
![Diane Williams, author of I Hear You're Rich](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/07/28/TELEMMGLPICT000344156348_16905574370430_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq-IWLY18X4-CzgyIcjLEAj0k9u7HhRJvuo-ZLenGRumA.jpeg?imwidth=680)
“Doesn’t everybody want to learn, to explore,” one narrator asks in Diane Williams’s 12th collection of often very short stories. The list of universal desires continues: “interpret the actions of people”, “add in what romance I can”, “play with what little I have learned for all that it is worth”. It would be too glib to say that speaks for her creator. But on finishing I Hear You’re Rich, which is by turns joyful and unnerving, you would be inclined to answer: yes.
Over the space of 110 pages, Williams unfolds 33 scenarios-in-snapshot, most of them domestic and familial, and dealing, as far as one can tell, with Americans in America. When her characters aren’t faced with a conundrum (“What to name our baby?”), they’re trying to get a firmer handle on a dynamic – often fraught – or a state – shame, yearning, mortification, bemusement – and how they should act in response.
To What Beautiful End?, quoted above, takes the form of 14 largely single-sentence paragraphs, concerning the distance, rooted in poor or eccentric communication, between a married couple: “He was gone for about a month – but then he returned – to what purpose? – and what do I want?” The male character in We Had a Lot of Fun Dancing, looking back over a long-term relationship with an older woman, asks himself seven questions, none of which he appears able to answer.
Sometimes Williams spreads her wings a little. The delicious title story, in which a woman hangs out with her best friend’s parents, and The Assignment of Fate, about a visit to a mansion-turned-museum, show the writer working on a larger canvas. But even the most ambitious stories are bare-bones, and the attendant dangers are obvious: bathos, jaggedness, whimsy. They are not always averted. Chuck begins: “But this story is not about Chuck.” And then: “Chuck Chuck, so to say.” The brevity can exacerbate a recognised short-story vice, whereby a payoff is closer to a punchline.
But the more common effect is of slyness and hidden or hinted-at depths: it’s Hemingway’s “iceberg” principle of explanation taken to a dizzying extreme. I found myself returning to the stories that seemed the richest, to probe for missed meanings and untapped significance, to scrutinise an image or adjective, to work out how Williams does it – and then, having failed, to marvel at her precision and fecundity.
I Hear You’re Rich is published by Scribe at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books