Kate is the anesthetic woman [in State of Grace] whose life is too painful for her to face, who sees with a child's eye focused dissociatively on the foreground, who wants to be released from the burden of her selfhood. (p. 106)

"Everything I touch hurts," Kate says. But she touches only small things, for she can approach her suffering and humiliation only indirectly: through splinters in her hand or fables or half transmogrified memories. Williams' accomplishment is that of having dramatized the inertia of a mind too weary even to feel, much less resist suffering. Like a mosaic, State of Grace is full of color and intimations of movement, but without movement, and … Williams uses a miniaturist's art to achieve effects which are not small. (pp. 106-07)

As in [her previously published short story] "Tripping," Williams relies on her control of rhythm and on the judicious use of...