Last month, at the Vatican, Pope Francis told a group of visiting comedians that it was OK to laugh at God, so long as the joke didn’t hurt the feelings of believers or the poor. I grew up Roman Catholic; half of me was staggered by this news. The other half of me wondered if the pope had been dipping into the fiction of Joy Williams.
Williams is the daughter of a Congregational minister. Her work is shot through with flinty and anarchic varieties of religious experience. In her last book of short fiction, “Ninety-Nine Stories of God” (2016), the Lord wandered the planet as if he were Jeff Bridges in a floppy bathrobe in “The Big Lebowski.”
He drove a pink Jeep Wagoneer. He stood in line to get a shingles shot. He was a naturalist who thought Home Depot was for wimps. He attended a hot-dog eating contest and called it “the stupidest thing I’ve ever witnessed.” He longed to be in a demolition derby. He probably has $10 on the Mets this weekend.
Blasphemous? In Williams’s fiction, nearly everything she values is a) too important to take entirely seriously and b) fair game for sharp but mostly playful abuse. The abuse is proof of her love. Don DeLillo said it in “Underworld,” and I feel it keenly in my own life: The highest currency that can pass between certain friends is “the stand-up scorn that carries their affections.”
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.
What sticks with you about “Concerning the Future of Souls” is Azrael’s tragicomic relationship with his best old frenemy, the Devil. Together they’re like Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains in “Casablanca,” or Tom Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf in “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” Which one has more mojo? They tiptoe around each other, casting shadows.
How is the Devil doing? He’s depressed. He can’t stand most of his admirers because they’re bums. He’s disconsolate, too, because evil is doing so well — like a hoop rolling down a hill — that he no longer needs to tend to it. Even the snakes, who thrill him because they’re “dethroned kings,” no longer want much to do with him. The Devil is a lonely guy, in the Bruce Jay Friedman sense. He’s grown vain about his eyes. He hopes to stand Azrael to drinks down at a bar called Barb’s Wire.
And Azrael? We learn that when he was an infant, God sang “Ghost Riders in the Sky” to him. He never did figure out what “yippie I oh, yippie I yay” meant, and the Devil is not about to help him out. Sometimes, like all of us, he just needs a milkshake. He is a fiend for poetry, especially that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the verse-maker who became a Jesuit priest, stopped writing and came into his fame posthumously.
The Devil and Azrael yak. The Devil poses questions like “What is the very worst thing that has happened to you?” Azrael is not quick on his feet. He lacks cleverness; he has no repartee. The Devil does not take him seriously.
You don’t even know how to converse, the Devil says. And it’s true. Azrael is mostly silent whereas the Devil likes to engage in long conversations, usually gay and inconsequential but not always. The Devil talks to everyone except himself. God, despite the rumors, never enters into dialogue with anyone.
Running almost silently below the loneliness and the silky comedy in these stories is the sense, down on earth, of acidifying oceans, species loss and space junk crashing Muskily down from the cosmos. Why write a book of meditations on Azrael? Perhaps because, as Williams notes, so many souls are suddenly trying to leave their bodies before their time, because the portents have grown dire. Suicide: It’s a sin. Yet the “M*A*S*H” theme song, at certain moments, seems to drift from this book’s spine.
“Ninety-Nine Stories of God” and “Concerning the Future of Souls” are very good books. (Because they are so determinedly symmetrical, I wish the second book was absent page numbers, as is, ascetically, the first.) Do not let that dissuade you from reading them.
The place to start with Williams, however, remains “The Visiting Privilege,” which collects the best of her full-length stories. It is among the crucial collections of the past 50 years. No writer allows ardor and misanthropy to blend more drolly, or more ecstatically.
Do a person’s last words, perhaps in the face of Azrael, matter? When I think of last words, my mind can’t help returning to a character in one of Williams’s earlier short stories, the one whose final utterance turns out to be: “That doctor is so stuck on himself.”
I wonder what Pope Francis would think.
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