The Brooklyn Rail

My wife wants to ask Joy Williams what happens when we die. Having read her body of work, she’s convinced Joy will have a satisfying, anxiety-alleviating answer, and she may be right. Reading Williams’s new collection of short-short stories, Concerning the Future of Souls—something of a follow-up to 2016’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God—one comes away from the experience with the belief that Williams has something like a preternatural insight into our predicaments: life, death, and the discomposing interim between the two. Again and again in her novels and stories, she illustrates that these three states have far more in common with one another than we might think, and in fact can be extremely difficult to distinguish between if not impossible to tell apart. When are we alive? When are we dead? These are questions at the heart of Williams’s project, though whether these inquiries be a source of comfort or unease is somewhat beyond her interest in her reader, mercifully.

Many of the ninety-nine stories included in this collection feature the psychopomp Azrael, that liminal angel, escorting perished souls on his four thousand wings from Earth to whatever comes after it:

The number of souls is fixed. Each birth is not the creation of a soul but the completion of the transmigration from one body to another. There is no such thing as a new soul. The souls made no sound as Azrael transported them. Never had one attempted to engage him in thought. The journey was made in perfect silence. They seemed wonderstruck.

A perilous and distressing journey to fathom, though it must be said that for the nonhuman animals—“the souls of octopi and sharks, great fishes and rays and turtles, even the glittering lowly ones, the little ones”—the element of awaiting judgment has been removed from such metempsychosis. The animals will not be judged in “the hidden retreat,” which is of course correct. If you consult these stories for Williams’s take on our fate, however, for our forthcoming appraisal in the afterlife after all of our greed and meanness and despoilment, you need turn no further than the eleventh story, which, citing T.S. Eliot’s line “may the judgment not be too heavy upon us,” asks only, “Why not?” (A more concise distillation of another of Williams’s animating questions you aren’t likely to find.)

For is not our arrangement like that depicted in a parabolic story titled “Big Fish Little Fish,” in which a woman who has hired a former student as a house sitter arrives back home to find the titular big fish dead, her beloved (though “not particularly loyal”—“What did that mean, even?”) Bernese Mountain Dog imprisoned at the pound, and many of her formerly intact possessions now broken? Forgive, momentarily, a literal reading, but are we not, in a profound sense, the stewards of this place, and have we not wrecked it, and don’t we jeopardize its possibilities ever further with our failures to act, to remedy? These questions agitate like vexed fire ants at the edges of the stories in this collection, most of which are suffused with similar concerns, and yet it’s a terribly funny book, too, which serves as further irrefutable proof of Williams’s nonpareil genius.