The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams

Carter had started thinking of the girls as the Three Fates.  He didn't know why this image should have lingered in his mind, except that he was a classical sort of fellow.  Contrary to the popular visualization, he had never seen those ladies as decrepit, tottering old crones but as irrational, merciless, impatient maidens.  How did they all get along?  They seemed so different.  One measured, one spun, one cut.  The only name of three he could remember was Atropos, the Inflexible, which was definitely Alice.  He thought of his dear Annabel as the spinner--good-hearted, a little unaware of what she was doing--and quiet Corvus as the measuring one.  Corvus was tragic but allowed no gesture of condolence.  She was utterly uncommunicative with him, though she did smile pleasantly if cornered.  She lived in the protectorate of suffering.

Joy Williams' The Quick and the Dead opens on teenage Alice, babysitting a pair of twins.  Alice, a misanthrope and an environmentalist, has told these twins all about the ravaging of the Everglades and the dangers of single-use plastic.  But she hasn't yet been paid, so in the car on the way to the bank, the twins' mother abandons her, but not before giving her the old what-for:

"My boys say you say the world would be better off without them.  They say you killed a pony and a farmer and that you make them eat lettuce-and-rabbit pellet sandwiches.  They say you hate nuns and say not to flush the toilet when it's only yellow water.  But it was the wasp nest that did it.  I'm excessively susceptible to the stings of bees and wasps and could go into anaphylactic reaction and die.  It was as big as a beer keg.  They cursed me for destroying a thing that could have killed their own mother." 

"Fatal anyphalactic reaction is actually rare," Alice said.

I tell you what, from this scene, I was utterly engrossed in this novel.  It's like nothing else.  Williams is one of those writers who makes you pause in the middle of a paragraph just to marvel at the quality of the writing, which is spiky, ribald, uproarious, epigrammatic.  This is an author who describes the booming sounds of a fire as being "like the sounds of shotguns striking down owls at dusk."  I love the way the mother's harangue here mixes the obviously true (Alice told them not to flush just urine) with the obviously untrue (she killed a pony and a farmer).  And why is it so much funnier to say "you killed a pony and a farmer" than "you killed a farmer and a pony?"  And how did Williams know?

But all that would be nothing if Alice herself weren't such a terrific character, equally repulsive and attractive.  Watch how calmly she walks back down the desert highway, planning her revenge with clarity and coldness; her moral sense is constantly outraged but she's never angry.  She's joined by two other girls: Corvus, an old friend whose parents' sudden death makes her increasingly aloof and catatonic, and Annabel, a materialist whose mother has also recently died.  (It's a testament to Williams' abilities that both Alice and Annabel are equally sympathetic and detailed; Annabel's materialism is silly but never shallow or ordinary--she's as likely to say something as strange or interesting as Alice is.)  Death and loss unite the three girls; Alice has only recently learned that the man she thought was her brother is really her father and her mother, too, is gone.

The Quick and the Dead is mostly a novel about death, and partially a novel about grief, though the relationship between the two is always a little less than clear.  It has much to say about death, so much that sometimes you wish it would say a little bit less, so that you could catch your breath a little.  But it never seems anything less than fresh, and even when it's cryptic ("There is a next world, but no one we know will be in it") it seems to sparkle at the edge of some immense mystery.  Long sections take place at a nursing home where the girls volunteer, a kind of purgatorial predeath that is scarier than any of the book's more violent moments--and this is a novel where (spoiler alert) a man's penis is blown off by a package bomb.

The writing is so terrific, the images so haunting, the moments so breathlessly strange, you almost want to call The Quick and the Dead a masterpiece.  But it's hard, when you take a step back from the glittering sentences, to think that you've read a cohesive book at all.  For one thing, we're always off on tangents with side characters--why, you might wonder, is there a whole extended plotline about the millonaire big game hunter who runs the wildlife museum, and the eight-year old who forces him to see the error of his ways?  (Is it because Williams, as you'll know if you read 99 Stories of God, is jut fascinated by museums?)  Though Alice, Annabel, and Corvus each have their own internal conflicts, none of them seems to move forward in a recognizably narrative way.  99 Stories of God seems much more inherently suited toward Williams' style, which leans heavily on anecdote and vignette.  But all that seems right for a novel about death, which has been flouting humankind's expectations of narrative closure for millennia now.

There's one exception to this: the storyline that has a recognizable progression, that keeps The Quick and the Dead from feeling like a bunch of odds-and-ends cobbled together, is that of Annabel's father Carter, whose dead wife visits him every night to remind him what a schmuck he is.  Carter wants desperately to exorcise his wife, Ginger, from his life, so that he can enjoy an affair with the hired gardener, and so that the dead and the living will return to their properly ordained places.  The Three Fates, working in unison, measuring and cutting with precision and accuracy.  But death, like life, is messy, and the marginal cases are not always easy.

As is sometimes the case with good books, I've talked myself into liking it even more by writing this review.  Maybe it really is a masterpiece, once you sit down and try to put the pieces together.  I don't think Joy Williams really cares if you do.  You can put it all together, or not, it doesn't matter.  "What is the difference," she asks on the first page, "between being not yet born and having lived, being now dead?"