Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams review – intriguing short stories without neat endings

A fascination with words and symbols provides a unifying theme in this richly ambiguous collection of short stories

A courtroom artist sees the features of her date in the face of a defendant. A woman stranded on the pavement when her office’s automatic doors refuse to open finds her attention drawn to a doppelganger sitting in a restaurant reflected in their glass. A sound editor “oversee[s] … the levels of canned laughter” that are added to audio tracks, and begins to visualise the laughs themselves as physical objects: “meteoric arcs of delicate frost”; butterflies with ragged wings. In Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good, the latest collection of short stories from Eley Williams, the characters stand athwart the world, leaving only the lightest of impressions (“thoroughly overlookable”, as the woman in Words of Affirmation, who communicates obliquely with her husband via search-engine keywords, puts it), but noticing intently.

These are stories that work from the inside out. Williams has a clear preference for the point-of-view shot: she begins each of her brief, odd tales – none more than a handful of pages long – inside a new character’s head, and allows us to see only what they themselves see, in precisely the way they see it. There is no sense here, as so often in short-story collections, of universe-building. Instead, each of Williams’s stories is intensely subjective: plunging us into a new environment; offering little in the way of orientation. The experience of reading them one after the other is discombobulating, and you get the feeling that this is just the way Williams likes it.