A Guest Post From Jack Seney, a Review of "The Doloriad"

Mr Seney reviews a first novel by an American authoress living in the UK who is an admirer of the Angelic Doctor, St Thomas Aquinas.

By Jack Seney

The novel "The Doloriad" by Missouri Williams was one of last year's best new books in my view, second only to Sayaka Murata's "Life Ceremony" collection of stories.

About a mutant-like family of incestuous survivors of the end of human civilization, "The Doloriad" requires fortitude and a willingness to accept difficult styles of writing by its readers. But those who have embraced it have found it richly rewarding in the strangest of ways.

The qualities of reading patience and ability to deal with the offensive are of course usually in short supply, so "The Doloriad" has gone with a small publisher as it breaks all the rules of the big business ones. What it likely will accomplish, and I believe already has, is to establish its young female author as a working cult writer, similar to Murata as she is now rather than as she was with her popular and easy-reading "Convenience Store Woman" (which is still quite an original must-read).

Not much is known about the apparently reclusive Williams but that she is a young American living in England whose "Doloriad" appears to be about a destroyed Czech Republic. I say better for her to remain sheltered than to let herself be influenced by the modern media and the mainstream publishing world.

Williams gives interviews via e-mail and admires Saint Thomas Aquinas as a philosopher, as indicated in "The Doloriad" of all places. In other words, she is a scholar, leaving no surprise that "The Doloriad" concludes in a way that Aquinas would say is where rational thought gives way to mystical Revelation.

Williams works as an editor for a film review journal and presumably has a steady income, so that she need not be a starving artist while writing her next book, whatever that might be about considering her bizarre first one. But one can be assured that it will not be anything commonplace, and those of us who admire her first work are looking forward to it arriving as soon as possible.