Discussed in this essay:

The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories, by Joy Williams. Knopf. 512 pages. $30.

It would be nice to get through this review without recourse to the term “writer’s writer,” a descriptor so broadly employed, in such disparate cases (Mavis Gallant, Clarice Lispector, Henry Green), as to risk being meaningless and condescending at the same time. The thing is, in the case of Joy Williams, I have seen the cliché made flesh. More than once, at professional gatherings where Williams was present, I have observed some of America’s leading literary lights reduced to…