18 S UNDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2021
FOR THOSE OF USlucky enough to sidestep
the most severe impacts of the natural and
man-made disasters currently occupying
the news, the defining challenges of our
lives are likely to unfold on the battlefields
of income and intimacy. It is our failures in
the latter arena that animate the work of
Diane Williams.
The acclaimed author of nine books of
fiction and the founding editor of the liter-
ary journal Noon, Williams is known for
minimalist vignettes that are often likened
to verse or well-cut gems. In interviews,
she has countered that they are simply
stories. Published on the heels of her 800-
page “Collected Stories,” her most recent
collection, “How High? — That High,”
lends credence to this insistence. These 34
stories, however compressed, are rooted in
the dramatic potential of extramarital af-
fairs and erotic regret. A title like “Nick
Should Be Fun to Be With” captures the
general mood, as does the story’s final line:
“Just a moment ago, they lived, pleasingly
ever after, by such a narrow margin.”
The aphoristic quality so often assigned
to Williams’s work arises here not from a
lack of “story,” but from syntax and speed.
A couple can meet, marry and cheat in the
matter of half a page. An unnamed trauma
— though one is tempted to call it het-
eronormative sex at large — has swept
through like a suburban storm and left
thoughts, scenes and spouses scrambled.
But it’s a premeditated chaos. A correctly
placed detail, say a hand-hewn chest
brought in from the rain, can provoke an
“atmospheric change in the world of our
home.”
Williams is especially fond of making the
familiar strange through inverted syntax.
Take the first line of “Grief in Moderation”:
“A necessary and great object of interest —
he had first found Valentina standing
among other members of her family.” Swap
the second phrase for the first, and it’s a de
rigueur opener, inviting, almost Che-
khovian. Williams prefers disquiet.
Explicit sex scenes are notoriously
tricky for fiction writers; many avoid them
altogether. (See: Chekhov.) It is a testa-
ment to Williams’s destabilizing style —
part parody, part bid for the profound —
that one finds it hard to say whether the
frequent sex writing in “How High?” is
successful. Female characters seem
mostly exhausted by the whole business of
intercourse, as if fending off the 50th prop-
osition of the afternoon. This attitude can
be amusing (“Even with my coat on,” ob-
serves a newlywed when her husband
pokes a finger into her rear in public, “I
was very much aware of the point of pres-
sure”) or arduously euphemistic: “And
then, at the task, he pulled himself back
and forth inside of me with many repeti-
tions.... He was cramming rather a lot
into the tiny space.”
Why are so many of these couples seem-
ingly on the road to decoupling? Influ-
enced early in her career by 1980s Ameri-
can minimalism, Williams is today revered
for composing through subtraction. I can’t
help wondering if marriage, unlike fiction,
necessarily suffers when exposed to simi-
lar techniques: Stripped of all the scenesthat first brought two people together, rela-
tionships are reduced to fragile erotics.
Narrators, too, are a little like lovers —
they can play hard to get. On the page as in
courtship selective and withholding minds
can be captivating. At her best, Williams
adopts a metafictional awareness of thescrutiny readers are likely to train on her
not especially forthcoming leads: “Be-
cause plainly there are the woman’s short-
comings to consider,” the narrator quips
about the difficult mother in “One Muggy
Spring.”
Is leaving too much unsaid among those
shortcomings? Maybe. But fiction ought to
lead us to those precipices where language
fails and silence begins. You would be well
advised, with a master like Williams, to
take the plunge. 0Close Encounters
A story collection explores the business of intimacy.
By JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENS
HOW HIGH? — THAT HIGH
Stories
By Diane Williams
117 pp. Soho Press. $25.
JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENSis the author of “The
Exhibition of Persephone Q” and the forth-
coming novel “The Visitors.”
Diane Williams“SANKOFA,”the third novel by the Nigerian
writer Chibundu Onuzo, follows Anna Gra-
ham, a 48-year-old, mixed-race Londoner
drifting toward middle-aged ennui. Her
mother has recently died; she’s separated
from her adulterous husband and sleeps in
“sexless pajamas... facing the space my
husband once occupied”; her workaholic
adult daughter may or may not be strug-
gling with bulimia. The novel opens as she
discovers, under a false bottom in her
mother’s trunk, a decades-old journal kept
by a man named Francis Aggrey, the father
she’s never known.
Its contents proceed to reshuffle her life,
in the same way that an anagram, or “AnnaGraham,” reshuffles the letters of a word to
make a new meaning. The setup might feel
gimmicky were it not for the deftly execut-
ed twist: Francis Aggrey, she learns, is the
former president of a (fictional) small
West African nation, Bamana. He stepped
down a decade earlier after 30 years of in-
creasingly authoritarian rule. Anna goes to
the British Library to research her father
and learns from a man she meets in the caf-
eteria that Francis was known in Bamana
as the “crocodile,” and was alleged to have
been involved in the 1988 murder of stu-
dent activists, the Kinnakro Five.
Anna reads in Francis’ journal about his
treatment as a Black African university
student in London in the 1960s: being
called the N-word, and “old landladies
opening their doors and quivering” when
they meet him, having expected a Scots-
man based on his name. These accounts
validate Anna’s own experiences of racism
growing up in a council flat in 1970s Lon-
don, experiences her Welsh mother min-
imized in a misguided effort to protect her.
Something was lacking in Anna’s child-
hood: “A sense of rightness, a sense of self.
It was nothing when you had it. You hardly
noticed it. But once it was missing, it was
like a sliver of fruit on a long sea voyage,
the difference between bleeding gums and
survival.”
Francis’ journal goes on to recount his
growing politicization under the tutelage
of a provocateur by the name of Ras Mene-
lik, who educates him about the exploita-
tion of his countrymen in British-owned
mines. Lodging in the house of Menelik’s
secretary, Francis strikes up a love affair
with her sister — Anna’s mother — until he
is called home to his dying mother’s bed-side. Back home he becomes politically ac-
tive in the northern part of the country,
where the British diamond mines are lo-
cated, and he eventually leads the coun-
try’s liberation effort. He never learns
about Anna’s existence until she travels to
Bamana to find him, nearly 50 years later.
Onuzo, who was born in Lagos and lives
in London, brings this fictional country
and its ex-dictator to life with economy,
precision and satirical bite. In the Bamana-
ian Embassy, cooking smells are “smug-
gled in clothing and hair.” The skyscrapers
in the capital are “javelins aimed at the
sun.” On a guided tour through the coun-
try’s slave forts, a Bamanaian couple pose
inappropriately underneath “the door of
no return,” through which the enslaved
passed to board the waiting ships to take
them to the Americas. Unlike the ances-
tors of the solemn African American tour-
ists in the group, Anna notes, “our ances-
tors had not been sold.” She later rides in a
golf cart through the theme park Aggrey
has built in the middle of the forest, to se-
cure his legacy — complete with “muse-
ums, a television studio, a cinema, a zoo, a
water park and a cable car ride.”
Part of the novel’s delight lies in Onuzo’s
paralleling of stories: Francis Aggrey’s po-
litical coming-of-age, documented through
excerpts from his journal, runs alongside
Anna’s own transformation from suburban
housewife to global citizen, growing ever
more aware of the murky ethics of power
along the way. The novel, named for a
mythical bird that flies forward while fac-
ing backward, explores the possibilities
and limits of evaluating one’s life choices
retroactively. After they meet, Aggrey tells
her she sees the world like an obroni, a
white person, and that she can never un-
derstand what it’s like to be African. Anna
forces him to acknowledge how far he has
strayed from his own youthful idealism.
With her anagrammatic take on the experi-
ence of the African diaspora, Onuzo’s
sneakily breezy, highly entertaining novel
leaves the reader rethinking familiar nar-
ratives of colonization, inheritance and lib-
eration. 0My Dad, the DictatorA woman discovers her long-lost father’s authoritarian past.By BLISS BROYARDSANKOFA
By Chibundu Onuzo
296 pp. Catapult. $26.BLISS BROYARDis the author of “One Drop: My
Father’s Hidden Life — A Story of Race and
Family Secrets.” She is at work on a new
memoir, “A Gentrifier’s Notebook.”Chibundu OnuzoExplicit sex scenes are notoriously
tricky for fiction writers; many
avoid them altogether.
(See: Chekhov.)