Joy Williams, in [The Changeling], descends from the best of recent innovators in fiction. Like Cortázar and Márquez, she has a surrealistic intensity matched by an admirable control of word and metaphor. Like Pynchon, she keeps us guessing: does Pearl suffer a nervous breakdown or is she the straight woman in a psychotic universe? Williams lapses into experimental form only in the last two, unpunctuated, chapters, certainly the weakest…. But the ferocity of Williams's imagination makes the choppiness of her sentences beside the point…. [The] witty and horrifying Changeling establishes Williams as a major contemporary novelist.

A review of "The Changeling," in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Autumn, 1978), p. 134.