Book Review: ‘Beautiful Days’

Zach Williams’s startling new collection of stories, Beautiful Days, convinces us Williams isn’t all that interested in the conventions of traditional storytelling.  He’s a truth seeker unafraid to expose the ugliness that lay behind the trappings of modern life. Williams writes in a somewhat concealed first-person voice that doesn’t attempt to win over your sympathy, but rather exposes you to his vision of the bleakness of our times and the endless absurdities we must endure. His characters often seem like weary travelers who have been trampled on by their generation’s endless exposure to all forms of political madness and the technological addictions that have accompanied them since childhood. His central characters aren’t looking for anything specific, which perhaps is their primary problem. They are a dreamless and dreary generation.

In his opening story, “Trial Run,” a man shows up at his office building on the weekend hoping to catch up only to be pounced upon by the security guard, Manny, who served in the Marines during the Gulf War. Manny always wants to chat and takes no notice whether the person he is talking to wants to engage with him as well. Hebabbles on and on about all sorts of disturbing things one might read about on the Dark Web. Manny begs him to take the time to investigate the Rothchild family and follow the money, reminding him that the world changed in every way that counts when the Balfour Declaration was issued. He moves away from Manny cautiously only to see Shel Bunting, a colleague who makes him queasy.

Williams writes: “But something had always been the matter with Shel. In meetings, he hardly ever looked up; he just focused on the table.  His face was pale in some spots, blotchy red in others—on his forehead, or under one eye, or across his throat.” The office chumminess of years ago didn’t exist anymore and people were wary of one another. No one shared their feelings about anything consequential, but rather felt each other out, thinking perhaps about how they could best them. He decides to leave the office abruptly, rushing past Manny, who is still talking about the Jews. He feels uncertain some might find out about his own dark secrets. Like the disturbing fights he had with his wife before they divorced. Or the incredibly nasty things he did with his wife’s sister on Facebook.

In “Wood Sorrel House,” first printed to great acclaim in The New Yorker, the narrator Jacob and his wife and their baby son seem to have been transported to an imaginary idyllic dwelling, yet everything is amiss.  The refrigerator magically restocks itself, and both he and his wife Ronna have lost all sense of time and place, and their memories are fading.  They speak quietly at night after Max falls asleep, trying to ascertain what has happened to them.

At first, they find the sensation of endless time enthralling. But now they long to return to the life they have left if only they could recall what and where that was. It is always summer where they are now, and that initially enchanted them, but they miss the dependable changing of the seasons. Jacob’s final memory was a pale-white morning with the sun shining bright and a downtown bus approaching them. Ronna can only recall scrubbing baby Max’s back in their old blue tub. There is an epiphany of sorts when Jacob thinks perhaps the place where they now reside has been “automatically generated somehow. Maybe it’s creating itself as I go. Like, I could walk for the rest of my life and it’d just be different configurations of the same trees, the same hills.”

We sense that this is an ordinary family, or at least was one before their dislocation We aren’t sure precisely what is happening, and either are they.  Williams’s characters are often adrift in a modern world with no genuine aspirations that are clear to anyone else including themselves. They simply are, and in their lack of definiteness or purposefulness, they’re somehow able to become disassembled and reassembled elsewhere. Because nothing really matters.No one wants anything. Everyone is hopeless burrowed inside of themselves unable to lend a hand to anyone else. Even distraught, Jacob does not know what it is he is longing for; nor do we hear him express compassion for his wife and son who are also experiencing distress.

In “Lucca Castle,” a father and his fourteen-year-old daughter are reeling from the accidental death of his wife and her mother. The policeman who called to explain the accident had trouble finding the words to explain how she could have died in such a strange and unusual way.  The father now can’t get out of bed most days and is unable to work at his father in’ law’s private equity firm where he has spent over a decade. He made an attempt at trying to pull himself together but shut his phone off and his laptop too, and explains how “I got rid of every platitude anyone had ever offered, everything I’ve been fed in therapy, any notion that Bea and I would be alright again…I was only lying in bed, but I felt as if I was way out on some kind of ledge.”

He found that the longer he remained in complete solitude the more he noticed that perhaps he had “new directions to wander.  New constellations overhead.” We sense the narrator is flirting with leaving this life, but Williams shies away from such overt declarations. He believes his daughter will keep him tethered, but Williams lets us see that he thinks mostly of himself,  and a waitress named Aggie at a coffee shop he frequents who intrigues him. Aggie takes him one night to a party where all sorts of maniacal characters roam about muttering inanities about corporate life, like the leader of the group, Lucca, who asks him outright “Have you ever stopped and asked yourself who, or what, it is that you really work for? If your shareholders want constant, unchecked growth, and that growth is lethal to humans-I mean you see what I’m getting at, don’t you?  Economic and technological development are a form of mass suicide, we know that, so how do we understand the impulse towards it?  Who’s driving the train?  See, to me, that’s the mystery.”

We find ourselves mystified by the rantings of Lucca, which seem disconnected from life in a way that screams to us that he himself is just a hustler of sorts. In Williams’s world of characters, there is a shortage of people you can trust. Most of his narrators have trouble keeping faith with themselves. Williams describes a lost generation of broken-down techies, drifters and grifters who unlike the hippies of decades ago, seem to have no dreams at all for a better and more beautiful world, or a more equitable one. Instead, life seems to them like a long stretch of time in which they bounce between different realities and geographies, entranced by none of them. They have lost the ability to become infatuated with anything outside of themselves. There is always a stinging bitterness present.

In “Golf Cart,” a surprisingly heartbreaking tale of two almost middle-aged brothers who seem to be mourning their past lives before either of them has really lived in one. One brother seems more distraught than the other, almost violent.  The other brother, who narrates the tale, seems to only be able to get excited about his acuity at pixel art, in which he excels. The two brothers are riding around haphazardly in a golf cart in front of their elderly father’s home noticing how “all the night’s beauty was so garish I could have mistaken it for digital.”  The Grateful Dead is blaring from the vehicle’s speakers. Their father is dying and neither of them had ever taken the time to get to know him, and it seems now they have few regrets about the distance between them.  They laugh about how much their father loved to watch birds and how in crowds he seemed to be exceedingly nervous.

We realize how in all of William’s stories, there is almost no love and passion or any sunshine and hope about future “Beautiful Days.”   Instead, there is grievance, resentment, and a sense of impotence about their ability to get anywhere or accomplish anything meaningful.  There is little to no self-awareness, only rage and sullenness. The brother speaking to us thinks briefly that he escaped once and worked for Spotify, but his anxiety and insomnia returned, but was there a chance he might be able to summon the courage to strike out on his own again?  He says something to his brother about this but hears no response.  His brother isn’t listening.

Williams has said in interviews that he has felt almost capsized, having experienced living through Covid with a toddler in tow. He concedes his stories often reflect a certain new and entrenched lostness that has grabbed hold of his peers. He and his friends live in a world that is post-loneliness where the once sacred belief that words said to a loved one, or heard from one, could save them from themselves. Many struggle to figure out who they are or what they want to do or why any of it matters. Their activities on the computer grow darker and instead of opening them up to new vistas, it seems to sew them into clusters of like-mindedness that eventually eat their own. There is a shortage of compassion everywhere.

We feel Zach Williams’s frustrations and fears in this spellbinding first collection of stories that should bring him great acclaim. He captures the distractedness of our times and the agonies of a lost generation. There is something somber about so many of them that is unusual for youth. In Zach Williams’s world of misfits, nothing is sacred, and little endures. Even the family is no longer thought of as a sanctuary, and no one speaks much anymore about God, or anything else that could be thought of as holy or consequential.