THE DOLORIAD
By Missouri Williams
In the ruined near future of Missouri Williams’ signature stylish and maddening debut novel, “The Doloriad,” outside a city no one remembers the name (it’s Prague), a large group of siblings live in futility and decay, subjugated to surveillance, neglect and various kinds of abuse, and watching videotapes of an old English-language sitcom called “Get Aquinas in Here”, overdubbed in Czech. The offspring of an incestuous sibling union, these bored degenerates may be the only humans left on Earth.
It’s not clear how humanity got to this state – war, disease and environmental collapse are suggested but never made explicit – but it seems unlikely that these particular people will restore civilization to its richly corrupted former glory. Guided by their absent-minded, emotionless mother, known only as the Matriatch, they laze about their days, torturing and mocking each other. There is a yard and some discarded canned goods; a generator supplies power. But mostly the inhabitants of this camp are pondering, in long sentences full of metaphors and subordinate clauses, and have few articulate motivations or desires.
Indeed, “The Doloriad” is almost devoid of plot and even seems hostile to it; Williams moves her characters listlessly around like game pieces on a board. However, something has happened: The Matriarch has banished the titular Dolores, one of her daughters, to the wilderness, for reasons that never became clear, and somehow Dolores has crawled back. (Some of the tribe were “born without hands, feet, legs, or the upper parts of their lips,” and Dolores is one of them.) This homecoming is ominous, though we never learn why. Further gestures toward a plot include a mysterious group of “others” who are thought to pose a threat but never appear; a giant radio antenna in the distance that doesn’t broadcast anything; a rape that no one responds to; and an apparent murder that no one seems to care about. Someone hears a stadium full of people roar somewhere, but it turns out to be a delusion.
Williams’ prose is fantastically executed, presenting itself in long, stony blocks of text. At best it reads Faulknerian, twisty and formal. When it fits well with what it describes, it is suggestive and takes on a historical, almost biblical weight. (The book’s references to Greek myth and Christian philosophy amplify the impression.) At other times—mostly I’d say—it’s exhausting and obscuring, using intricate and sometimes tortuous strings of words to express simple ideas, as in this passage which describes Dolores’ feeling of being unwanted: ‘Yes — if the encampment were a pond with a smooth surface, it would not register the removal of a certain unit of water and retain the shape of its absence; the essential form would remain unchanged.” Or this sentence, in which one character imagines another (imaginary) character imagining the prehuman world:
“Back to the relative tranquility of prehistory, the fantastic plants, the undisturbed megafauna and the slow dream of life; the absolute silence of the bared polar north in which the sun was lost, drowned, reduced to stray glare, the faint gleam of the horizon; vague, algal meaning.”
It’s beautiful, it dissects, but we’re already looking at 140 pages at the world it describes and don’t need this kind of painterly elaboration. For example, we want to know how a man with no hands or legs managed to drag a corpse several miles back to his moth-infested lair – something that’s believed to have happened in the back half of this novel and never explained.
The prose style of the book doesn’t ebb depending on what it describes or whose mind it occupies; it is a storytelling task from above. This becomes a problem when used to channel the characters’ despicable thoughts, which are the only kind of thoughts they harbor. For example, they view body fat as grotesque and repeatedly equate it with stupidity and selfishness. Dolores is alternately a cow, a larva, a moon, a lump. Are these just the characters’ opinions and words? Or that of the narrator, of the book, of the author? The oversimplified style and wandering third person make it hard to tell, making the book’s moral center impossible to identify. (Lost, drowned, reduced to stray ice blink, even.)
But who am I kidding? “The Doloriad” is likely to be frustrating, evil, and obscure in its intent, and is explicitly intended to inflame anger in any body positivity advocate. And like other gross, plot-averse novels with malicious intent – Ottessa Moshfegh’s spring to mind – it constantly fends off all criticism for its shortcomings, sotto vocein Pee-wee Herman’s voice: “That’s what I was going to do.”
“The Doloriad” evokes the plays of Beckett, or, in its static rendering of misery, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. But “Endgame” and “The Garden of Earthly Delights” are funny and don’t take five hours to complete. Ultimately, for all its ambition, this book is not for me. But who knows, maybe it’s what your rotten little heart deserves.