In her novels, Joy Williams has introduced readers to barbed, lonely, yet startlingly beautiful characters. In recent years, she has seemed more drawn to the genre of the short-short, or flash fiction, for its flexibility of both length and texture. For Williams, these tiny capsules—some a page and a half long, others mere lines—can function like koans, the enigmatic fragments found in Sappho’s poetry or the Gospel of Thomas. The point is not simply the dissemination of knowledge or mere entertainment, though Williams’s stories are profound as well as hilarious.
Rather, what she’s able to do with such limited real estate is create a space for reflection. In 2016’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God, in which each entry is numbered one to ninety-nine, the full text of a story comes before its title. Indeed, some of the titles act as the final lines of the stories or illuminate the internal logic of the situation—not quite a Greek chorus, but a lingering thesis.
#27 reads:
“You don’t get older during the time spent in church,” he told us.
He pushed a shopping cart with a few rags and a bottle of Windex in it.
We gave him a dollar.
The story’s title is “A GOOD REASON.” #61 reads: “We were not interested the way we thought we would be interested.” The title: “MUSEUM.”
Like much of Williams’s fiction, Ninety-Nine Stories of God captures a wide range of mundane experiences, imbued with a hint of the fantastical. The stories play out in an America that feels inhabited exclusively by souls troubled by some half-remembered truth. Characters often fixate on small details, gaps in time, or revelations just out of reach. To read one of Williams’s microfictions is to feel like one is being given a wise but slightly sarcastic piece of advice, either directly told or filtered through a parable-like microcosm.
Williams’s new collection, Concerning the Future of Souls, also features a mixture of ninety-nine micro- and short fictions, but with a very different tone. There are still stories of jaundiced wit and keen observation, where Williams’s gnomic playfulness with form and concision yield surprising, even unsettling results. In one story, a man is so upset when he calls 911 that the operator tells him to call back when he’s calmed down and hangs up. But there’s also a sense that the immediate world—polluted, exploited, ravaged—has begun to intrude. One major formal distinction is the presence of two recurrent characters, the angel Azrael and the Devil, whose appearances dovetail with a God’s-eye view of our burnt, ravaged world. In Concerning the Future of Souls, Williams melds an urgency about the depleted state of the earth with a mystic’s detached, prophetic view of history.
Williams’s turn toward apocalyptic imagery is less surprising than it might seem. In certain respects, the twenty-first century has become the age of the ecologically and theologically motivated writer. Every type of writer, from novelists to poets, has taken up the climate crisis in their work. In an essay in The Point on the latter-day political poetry of Jorie Graham, Brandon Kreitler writes that the impulse to narrate, or at least dramatize, the apocalypse is part of a longer tradition going back centuries. In some perverse way, he writes, the prophetic mode itself offers the ideal conditions from which to speak urgently and importantly: “We should take the hint and consider the way the climate story folds into an older end-times imaginary and its enduring attractions, one of which is the desire to inhabit—and, for the poet, to speak at—history’s crescendo.”
It has always been true that apocalypse and disaster drive people both toward and away from faith. Disaster draws people to faith through their fervent longing for something beyond the terrestrial and their hope for grace amid suffering. But disaster can extinguish the desire to transcend; it can make one angry and callous, cynical about man-made catastrophes and human history itself. Williams has toyed with both disaster and theological allegory before. Indeed, her books often begin with a biblical or Christian epigraph, whether from Thomas à Kempis or Revelation. Her story collection The Visiting Privilege quotes Corinthians 15:51–52, the text itself a kind of thesis statement of Williams’s career: “Behold, I tell you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.”
These mysteries take a pleasing, melancholy shape over the course of Concerning the Future of Souls, in which the primary characters (though it would perhaps be a mistake to call them the collection’s main characters) are self-conscious, neurotic, sometimes petty immortals whose unlikely friendship develops as the terrestrial world burns. Azrael, an angel of four thousand wings and a thousand eyes who “looked nothing like Jesus as was so tirelessly depicted,” flies the skies of earth, birds shrieking in terror before him. He tries to whisper soothing words to them, but his unearthly language renders his speech even more frightening. Meanwhile, the Devil, who frequently converses with Azrael and forms a begrudging admiration for him, broods over his own divine origins and the fact that people don’t seem to think about him much anymore. “But this was just the inner voice talking,” he reassures himself, “the still small voice, that little piece of God caught inside him like a fish bone, trying to make him feel bad. This was just God, who hadn’t gotten over him and never would.”
Between the appearances of these characters, Williams interjects other stories—some of which might seem unimportant, even miniscule, compared to the gravity of Azrael’s and the Devil’s existences. The reader encounters, for example, a story about the mass slaughter of dolphins in the Faroe Islands or a quietly heartbreaking sentence like #45: “Washoe, chimp who learned sign language, dies at 42 without signing goodbye.” But these stories, which vary greatly in theme, subject matter, and time, all deal with the one thing that Azrael and the Devil cannot experience but can only spectate: death.
It’s the passing away of things—memories, ambitions, dreams, objects, regrets, habits, fixations—that Williams is interested in. It’s through Azrael and the Devil that she filters this interest, sometimes with aloofness and good humor, other times with a simple, almost withering plainness. #11 distills one of the primary undercurrents in Concerning the Future of Souls, its two-word sentence followed by its call-and-response title quickly snapping open and shut:
Why not?
MAY THE JUDGMENT NOT BE TOO HEAVY UPON US
As the collection goes on—as the meetings between Azrael and the Devil accumulate, as the world above them turns, and as we humans die and ponder what it means to live and die—Williams seems to turn inward, to circle back around to tenderness. Rather than grand pronouncements about how we live and what we should do, she instead returns to our most essential, long-lived preoccupation: each other. We are our undoing and our salvation. We worry over and for one another. It’s that very concern that has the capacity to redeem and restore us:
The Devil feared for him. Hadn’t he been gone rather longer than usual? Azrael and his duties, his heroic commitment, could drop from God’s attention like a stone down a well.
But then he appeared returned once more. Improbable glorious weary sorrowful. Still rejoicing, though the tiniest bit less.
Concerning the Future of Souls
99 Stories of Azrael
Joy Williams
Tin House
$22.95 | 176 pp.
