THE DOLORIAD
By Missouri Williams
In the devastated near future of Missouri Williams’s distinctive, stylish and maddening debut novel, “The Doloriad,” outside a city whose name no one recalls (it’s Prague), a large coterie of siblings dwells in futility and decrepitude, subjecting one another 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 progeny of an incestuous union between brother and sister, these bored degenerates may be the only people left on earth.
It’s not clear how humanity arrived at this state — war, disease and environmental collapse are hinted at but never made explicit — but these particular people seem unlikely to restore civilization to its bountifully corrupt former glory. Led by their distracted, emotionless mother, known only as the Matriatch, they idle away their days, torturing and mocking one another. There’s a garden and some scavenged canned goods; a generator provides electricity. But mostly the denizens of this encampment stand around cogitating, in long heavy sentences with metaphors and dependent clauses, and have few articulated motivations or desires.
Indeed, “The Doloriad” is nearly devoid of plot, and even seems hostile to it; Williams listlessly moves her characters about like game pieces on a board. Something has transpired, though: The Matriarch banished the titular Dolores, one of her daughters, to the wilderness, for reasons never made clear, and somehow Dolores has crawled back. (Some of the tribe have been “born without hands, feet, legs or the upper portions of their lips,” and Dolores is among them.) This homecoming is ominous, though we never learn why. Further gestures toward plot include a mysterious group of “others” who are thought to pose some threat, but never appear; a giant radio antenna in the distance that doesn’t broadcast anything; a rape that no one reacts to; and an apparent murder about which nobody seems to care. Someone hears a stadium full of people roaring somewhere, but it turns out to be a delusion.
Williams’s prose is fantastically elaborate, presenting itself in long, bricklike blocks of text. At its best, it reads as Faulknerian, sinuous and formal. When well matched with what it describes, it is evocative, and takes on a historical, almost biblical weight. (The book’s references to Greek myth and Christian philosophy strengthen the impression.) At other times — most times, I’d argue — it’s exhausting and obfuscatory, employing intricate and occasionally tortuous strings of words to express simple ideas, as in this passage describing Dolores’s sense that she is unwanted: “Yes — if the encampment were a smooth-surfaced pond it would not register the removal of a certain unit of water nor retain the shape of its absence; the essential form would remain unchanged.” Or this sentence, in which one character is imagining another (imaginary) character imagining the prehuman world:
“Back to the relative quiet of prehistory, the fantastic plants, untroubled megafauna and the slow dream of life; the absolute silence of the denuded polar north in which the sun was lost, drowned, reduced to stray iceblink, the dim gleam of the horizon; vague, algal significance.”
It’s pretty, it parses, but we’ve been looking at the world it describes for 140 pages now, and don’t require this kind of painterly elaboration. We just want to know, for instance, how a man with no hands or legs managed to drag a corpse several miles back to his moth-infested lair — a thing that is supposed to have happened in the back half of this novel and is never explained.
The book’s prose style doesn’t ebb and flow depending on what it’s describing or whose mind it occupies; it’s a top-down narratorial mandate. This becomes a problem when it’s used to channel the characters’ vile thoughts, which are the only kind of thoughts they entertain. They regard bodily fatness, for example, as grotesque, and repeatedly equate it with stupidity and selfishness. Dolores is, variously, a cow, a larva, a moon, a lump. Are these simple the characters’ views and words? Or the narrator’s, the book’s, the author’s? The unnuanced style and roving third person make it hard to tell, the book’s moral center impossible leaving to identify. (Lost, drowned, reduced to stray iceblink, even.)
But who am I kidding? “The Doloriad” is, in all likelihood, frustrating, wicked and obscure by design, and explicitly aims to ignite rage in any advocate of body positivity. And like other gross-out, plot-averse novels with malign intent — Ottessa Moshfegh’s spring to mind — it perpetually deflects all criticism of its shortcomings, sotto vocein the voice of Pee-wee Herman: “I meant to do that.”
“The Doloriad” evokes Beckett’s plays, or, in its static depiction of misery, Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings. But “Endgame” and “The Garden of Earthly Delights” are funny and don’t take five hours to get through. Ultimately this book, for all its ambition, isn’t for me. But, who knows, it just might be what your rotten little heart deserves.