Piercing the veil
Zach Williams’s stories of everyday life are propelled by strange turns of events, like a dad discovering his son’s sixth toe in the bath.
Beautiful Days
Stories
Literary fiction often revolves around rich, nuanced characters. Plots can be important, too, but literary fiction typically avoids plots that push characters around the page. The plots tend to stem from the specific circumstances of three-dimensional characters grappling with pressing dilemmas. So, if most great fiction revolves around rich characters, what happens if we take our protagonists and hollow them out a bit?
The answer may be that we get something different. Not necessarily better, but not necessarily worse either. We might get a kind of fiction that hits us in ways that stories with fully fleshed-out characters do not. Something, possibly, like the stories in Beautiful Days, the debut collection of short stories by Zach Williams.
It’s not that Beautiful Days lacks characterization. However, the work that Williams does to shape his characters seems to function differently. The character details we get in Beautiful Days serve less to let us get to know the characters and more to get to know their situations.
