Book Review: ‘Concerning the Future of Souls,’ by Joy Williams

Williams, who turned 80 this year, resembles Mark Twain in the wildcat nature of her literary scorn. One of the best things about Twain’s nonfiction is that he will stop everything and criticize the hell out of a bird or a plant, deliver an absolute drubbing, simply because it happens to be in front of him. Thus, in “A Tramp Abroad,” “the average ant is a sham,” cats have lousy grammar, the Edelweiss flower is beastly ugly and so on. His original rants are longer and vastly more fun. On audio, these will make you stop in the street and bend over, laughing like a fool.

Williams writes with more feeling about nature than any writer I know — or, at least, with more feeling than any writer whose preciousness doesn’t make me want to refund my lunch into my shirt pocket — but like Twain she knows there are more weirdos in the natural world than Audubon can count. When a fern appears in her fiction, for example, it will sit there looking “crazier than hell.” It won’t “have much of an emotional life because it is insane.” Kids? They’re “fickle little nihilists.”Williams and Twain: They’re name-calling peas in a very small American pod.

Williams’s new book, a sequel of sorts to “Ninety-Nine Stories of God,” is titled “Concerning the Future of Souls.” Here again she delivers 99 very short and often fablelike stories. This is practically a book of poetry. This time the subject is Azrael, God’s angel of death, who extracts souls from their bodies. Azrael is fearsome yet also beautiful and pensive, like the young Jackson Browne, and like certain undertakers, he is troubled by his work.

He is spectacular. Here is our first glimpse:

He had four thousand wings. This was simply a fact. The feathers of each wing — innumerable. As they should be. The wings sheltered the souls so they could not be viewed in transit. This too was correct. He also has a thousand eyes but not, as has been rumored, four heads.

The pupils of Azrael’s multicolored eyes are “heart-shaped, crescents, slits. Cones pulsed behind them. All of them could rest while open and watch while shut and they saw everything that moved or was about to move or had ceased to move.” He can lap at these eyes with his sleek and muscular tongue.

Williams distills a lot of learning — about philosophy, aesthetics, metaphysics and morality — into her vignettes. There are gleanings from, and allusions to, personages ranging from Carl Jung, Blaise Pascal and DeLillo to John Edgar Wideman, Christopher Hitchens and the bluesman the Rev. Gary Davis. Williams recalls how Thomas Merton died, wet from his shower, with a short-circuited electric fan on his chest. Stupid deaths: Williams chimes with these.