‘Let Us Fall for Whatever We Want To’

“I Liked Rex”: this is the title of the title story in Diane Williams’s new collection. These three words, subject, verb, and object, form a complete sentence, one that echoes a line from the famous mid-century primer See Spot Run. Spot was a dog. Might Rex be one, too? In a sense, he is: a sly dog, a dirty dog; a big, handsome, disreputable man, prone to wandering off in search of fresh adventure, then sniffing his way back home. When the narrator of “I Liked Rex” sees him again, after one of his long absences, she observes that he has dressed the part: “He wore a heavy wool suit I’d never seen before—a glen-plaid houndstooth check—and next, in bed, I thought his very pink privates were meant to be some cheery dessert.” How easy it is for Rex to cut through her sexual defenses. Against him, she has none.What she has, instead, is a passion for detail and a savage talent for metaphor. That glen-plaid houndstooth check suit and, underneath it, those very pink privates—I imagine them as two melting scoops of strawberry ice cream—flesh out a man at once self-serious and impossible to take seriously. The effect of this finely wrought sentence is to depose Rex, to neuter this dog-man. Hi...