Is Joy Williams a great writer?

In the 1980s, in the shadow of Beattie and Carver, two looming giants, there emerged a forest undergrowth of short stories - the mantra was that the novel was dead, the world was too fast-paced for readers to engage in long works, we were moving toward a literature of short fiction, and of course short stories - cultivated in the writers' workshop hothouses, made for the perfect debut publications - agents were actively seeking short-story writers, incredible as that may seem today. Among those emerging then - Mason, Tallent, Phillips, Minot - many others - some still writing, some not most have of course moved on to longer fiction -one of the luminaries of the era was Joy Williams, who has been pretty much off the grid for a # of years and is now, thanks to a Knopf selected new and collected and to a glowing piece in the NYT mag has been suddenly re-discovered as one of the great American writers. To me, that's going too far - her work back then seemed to me very sulf-consciously off-beat and eccentric, very mannered, although clearly polished and professional - she appeared regularly in various anthologies, and of course she was very well connected via her high-profile marriage. I approached her story Chicken Hill n the current NYer with some trepidation and was, at first, put off by it: a 70ish woman living alone with (or w/out?) 5 dogs in a somewhat isolated area gets approached by a neighbor child who speaks like no child in "real life" has ever spoken, quirky, full of shrewd observations, off-beat connections, elliptical phrases - in other words, she talks like a smart, literate graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop striving for effect - and yet, and slowly - the story began to work on me. Of course the child is not meant to talk like a child; of course the child is meant to talk like a sassy, troubled, isolate writer, perhaps (I don't know her at all) like Williams herself. And of course the child is the writer - she is, I believe, imagining this child as a way for her to confront and recollect elements from her past - the title refers not to the present day but to a hill where the protag remembers childhood sledding and horse-back riding. The story is about loneliness and fear of dying, and is much darker and more troubled than it seems on first, surface reading. If this is an indication of Williams's new work, then perhaps the hype is justified - in late career she may emerging, or re-emerging, as a powerful and original presence.