Macabre, provocative, depraved, and unforgettable, The Doloriad marks the debut of Missouri Williams, a terrifyingly original new voice
In the wake of a mysterious environmental cataclysm that has wiped out the rest of humankind, the Matriarch, her brother, and the family descended from their incest cling to existence on the edges of a ruined city. The Matriarch, ruling with fear and force, dreams of starting humanity over. Her children and the children they have with one another aren’t so sure. Surrounded by the silent forest and the dead suburbs, they feel closer to the ruined world than to their parents. Nevertheless, they scavenge supplies, collect fuel, plant seeds, and attempt to cultivate the poisoned earth, brutalizing and caring for one another in equal measure. For entertainment, they watch old VHS tapes of a TV show called Get Aquinas in Here, in which a problem-solving medieval saint faces down a sequence of logical and ethical dilemmas. But one day the Matriarch dreams of another group of survivors, and sends away one of her daughters, the legless Dolores, as a marriage offering. When Dolores returns a few days later, her reappearance triggers the breakdown of Matriarch’s fragile order and the control she wields over their sprawling family begins to weaken. As the children seize their chance to escape, the world of the television saint Aquinas and that of the family begin to melt together with terrible consequences.
Told in extraordinary, intricate prose that moves with a life of its own, at times striking with the power of physical force, Missouri Williams’s debut novel is a blazingly original document of depravity and salvation. Gothic and strange, moving and disquieting, and often hilarious, The Doloriad stares down, with narrowed eyes, humanity’s unbreakable commitment to life.
Release date:
March 1, 2022
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Print pages:
240
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When Dolores inclined her head to acknowledge the presence of her uncle the movement dragged her down toward the earth; her breasts dipped and swung in a low arc and the rest of her droopy, fat body scarcely managed to resist. The wheelbarrow in which the others had placed her wobbled dangerously until their uncle grasped its handles with his trembling hands and began to push Dolores away from the encampment and into the forest. The rest of the children watched them go with little feeling, deadened by light and heat. As she rolled down the slope that led to the green border of trees a great tremor went through her, but Dolores was not able to distinguish between fear and desire and so she made herself still again and awaited her destiny with the wooden resignation of a sinking merchant ship. Her affinity to the earth was so pronounced that she couldn’t wait to be in it, though she would never be able to articulate that in words, the trick of which eluded her, and so Dolores had faced up to the marriage and what the schoolmaster called “the dribbling monotony that was promised to her” just as stoically as she’d faced up to being born. She bounced along in her melancholy way, as patient as a stone, and Agathe watched her from the ridge above the path, having followed the two of them at a distance since their departure from the camp. She moved forward, still hidden by the dense net of leaves, and squinted down at the pair in the gully below her. Their uncle shuffled along with his unwieldy burden and the cracked lenses of his glasses repelled the sun; the light bounced away from him, splintering into new delusions, and those bright disks, fixed to the head and the long, dry stick of his body, gave him the appearance of a watchtower on the move. It was no surprise to Agathe that their mother had entrusted their uncle with the transporting of Dolores, the success of which was already a source of much speculation among her children, because his loyalty to the Matriarch was ancient and unquestionable; at all times he bowed to her stronger will. And then there was Dolores herself and whatever soul remained to her after nineteen years of stony submission, although Agathe couldn’t find it with her narrowed eyes. The sun slipped through the green canopy above them and moved over her sister’s white body. She was a blinding point, all the more blinding given her placement within the bright forest, sodden with light, and suddenly it was painful to look at her. But this was the last sight that Agathe would have of her sister before she was gone with no guarantee that she would ever come back, and so she blinked the tears from her eyes and committed the image to the vault of her memory, scrabbling in the earth with her dirty, restless fingers as if anchoring herself to the damp mulch of the forest floor. The creaking of the wheelbarrow—the whoosh of air as it moved from one side to another, tilting with the weight of her sister’s body—her uncle’s dry cough. Up on the ledge watching the pair through the screen of vegetation, Agathe felt as though she were really down there, next to her uncle and the wheezing sound he made as he pushed the wheelbarrow along the rough dirt path, and she could smell the sweat pooling in the deep folds beneath Dolores’s armpits without having to imagine it. But this sense of herself dispersing, of occupying multiple spaces at once, was something Agathe knew how to dismiss, and so she pushed herself back through the green forest and through the arrow loops of her own dark eyes all the way into her own dark head, and concentrated on the stupid smile she thought she saw on her sister’s lips. Even if she had had legs, Dolores wouldn’t have known how to use them to get away. There was a poison in her and the theft of her legs had not been enough for it: those melted stumps were simply the sign of that greater corrosion, much as the trappings of a church are only there to point to the presence of the god, and it was this hidden thing, not their uncle, that was leading her into the forest. It was the blunt promise of her anatomy: the slack mouth and the round pig eyes; the antiquated languor of her fat white hands—these small acquiescences all pointed to the answer of a question never asked: a great pale feminine yes. Agathe knew all this and knew not to feel sorry for her.
* * *
“In primo enim statu sic erat subjectum corpus animae ut nihil in corpore contingere posset quod contra bonum animae foret vel quantum ad esse vel quantum ad operationem,” the first voice said, and the second voice translated: “In the first age of mankind the body was subject to the soul and nothing could happen in the body that would be contrary to the good of the soul, neither in its being nor in its operations.”
There is an ancient agreement between the glass and the light that allows one to pass through the body of the other without hesitation. Today she was the glass and the glass was in her; her head was a great flat plane and the sun slithered through her brain and received no alteration; she was an infinite disk and she could not see where she ended and the whiteness of the void began.
The second voice continued, reading from the page, “Nor does it matter that even then there was a diverse dignity of souls according to the diversity of bodies…” and the surface that was Agathe spasmed—something gave in, and she became aware of the world in stages. Before she knew it she was surrounded by the long, light bodies of her siblings and the walls of the sunny schoolroom. She straightened in her seat and looked at her brothers and sisters, who sat in rows with their faces angled toward the light as if they were waiting to receive orders. Propped up in his high chair, the schoolmaster was a black mass silhouetted against the window behind him, gutted of detail, and understood this angling as a mark of his significance, although he was not blind to the glare of absence in their faces. Agathe placed her chin on the hump of her folded wrists and tried to look at him too, but it was impossible to concentrate on anything in this room that had given in so stunningly to the slyness of the forest and the brightness of the sky, and she was not afraid of the schoolmaster and the dark arrow of his attention because it would be equally impossible for him to address any one of them by name, to single them out, and so the schoolmaster never tried, not wanting, perhaps, to shatter either the illusion of his importance or the pretense of the lesson.
He rumbled again, “Diversa fuisset dignitas animarum, cum oporteat animae ad corpus proportionem esse, ut formae ad materiam, et motoris ad motum,” and Marta translated laughingly, “A diverse dignity of souls. It is necessary for the soul to be proportioned to the body. As form to matter, as mover to moved…” but all Agathe heard was “a diverse dignity of souls.” She let her eyes slip out of focus and the line of children in front of her melted into a column, a smooth marble whole. Next she placed her head in her hands and imagined her way into the dead city, gliding through the thinning trees toward the crumbling apartment block where the schoolmaster lived in what used to be known as Vinohrady. It was from this lonely building, half swallowed by the green undergrowth, that the legless old schoolmaster was carried to the school every morning, wrapped up in his habitual cloud of resentment and despair and full of curses and mumbled threats. After wrenching the schoolmaster from his sheets and placing him in the metal wheelbarrow, her brothers would push their portly trophy along corridors where the early-morning light tumbled through defeated ceilings and dark green moss made secret insinuations across the ancient wallpaper, and then down the gentle incline that led from the schoolmaster’s apartment to the encampment some three miles distant, Jakub at the handles and Adam guiding the front wheel, while Marek would run ahead and tell the others that they should assemble in what the schoolmaster liked to describe as “that run-down hellhole of a building” because no matter how parodic they believed the process or however meaningless the schoolmaster’s lessons, they were preferable, after all, to the other options. Agathe had never seen the city with her eyes, but Jakub had told her about it, and now she followed the thread of his images and saw the weeds pooling in the gaps between the broken tiles, the windows with their shattered panes of glass, and the rotting wooden doors of the apartment blocks, listening all the while to the whispering of the abandoned buildings, which was sometimes mutinous and at other times a lament, and the quiet desolation that shoved and jostled around the bright halo of her brother’s hair. When they reached the rotting room where they had their lessons, the schoolmaster droned on about things nobody cared about for as long as he could bear it, and then his pouchy eyes began to droop, fat mouth slackening, and he’d snore and snore until the boys took him home and this was the end of words—there was only the creaking of the wheelbarrow, the rustling of the leaves, and the quiet drip of the dying light through the canopy above them, a great mottling; and so the journey back to the schoolmaster’s lair had the cadence of an older dream, a slow, incomprehensible merging. Soon night hailed down upon the old city. The schoolmaster emitted his high snore and fifty feet above him a flock of roosting birds drowsed in the wet wooden rafters of the apartment block, their white droppings mingling with the trickling water from yesterday’s rains to form a pale liquid that dripped through the ruined floors and landed on his swaddled form, speckling the blankets and sieving through the wiry mass of his beard …
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