Review: Joy Williams on Alexis Wright

I harbor a frightened fondness for long sharky hammerhead novels—Miss Macintosh, My Darling, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Recognitions, Underworld, Novel Explosives, Almanac of the Dead … They do not suffer casual attention. They barely suffer the reader. It’s hard to imagine a more or less normal individual writing them—easier almost to imagine Kafka composing at night in his bed, his father snoring in the next room, his mother as well, possibly.

Engaging with a hammerhead piece of work requires commitment, submission, and a desire to forge new neuropathways in your brain. Hammerheads are kind of flaunty, they’re constructed oddly, their intentions are unclear, they exist for mysterious reasons. They’re not universally beloved. Plus they’re large—five, six, seven hundred pages.