Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams

Azrael was in the vanished forest, amidst the smoldering stumps. The silence here really was as fearsome as the grave's. The sky seemed lifeless as well, a monstrously staring eye. Rain was falling hesitantly and sliding off the soil as if it were striking wax. More and more Azrael was arriving too late for the world. The logging had taken place months ago and the great trees had long since gone through--what was it called--the processing sequence. The forest had been a living being and now it was not. Azrael felt a little sick. He was still more or less on time with humans but was finding it harder and harder to keep up with everyone else. Death was the dark crude brother, he was the shining inspiriting one. His duties had always been performed gracefully and he was appreciated for his punctuality and beautiful manners. But how could the immensity of the earth and all her other children be assisted to insure their souls' generation? His methods were being disrupted by the sheer precipitous magnitude of it all.

In appearance and form, Joy Williams' new collection Concerning the Future of Souls is a sequel to 99 Stories of God. There are, after, 99 more short pieces in this collection, ranging from a couple of pages to as little as a single word. Again each is followed, rather than preceded by their title, which in 99 Stories has the effect of making each piece feel like a joke with a punchline, or a riddle with a solution. This time, Williams has added asterisked postscripts to signify, I guess, people or texts that inspired some of the pieces, or from which they are cribbed: Eliot, Calvin, the Quran, the Book of Luke, and, uh, Christopher Hitchens, for example. God has been swapped out, not for his opposite the Devil--though the Devil is a frequent appearance--but for Azrael, the angel whose task is to ferry souls upon death to their next location.

But, on the whole, Concerning the Future of Souls is very different from 99 Stories. It is far less joke-like, and more cryptic. The vignettes of 99 Stories were, while not simplistic, often self-contained and with a recognizable ironic logic. Logic and irony might be here, somewhere; you can sense them lurking, but they're much less accessible, hidden away somewhere. They begin to seem as if they are missing some crucial element that comes just before or just after, some piece that will provide the key. Compared to 99 Stories, they seem denatured somehow, deteriorated, or showing the initial signs of an all-consuming entropy. There are fewer epigraphs, more koans, and images which refuse to offer up their meaning: a blank square, a cone supposedly designed by Pascal, a piece of Chopin sheet music. And the titles, which in 99 Stories seemed like punchlines or solutions, only deepen the mystery further. I found reading 99 Stories very satisfying; but this book felt disorienting, even troubling. It reminded me perhaps even more of Harrow, Williams' most recent work before this one, which seemed to jettison kinds of narrative logic and cohesion that might serve to comfort the reader.

So what's the deal with Azrael? Azrael is not death; in one scene he chides the Devil for making exactly this error (though the Devil, who we are told "likes games and mazes," is doubtless making the error on purpose). In his capacity as the ferryman for souls, he sometimes meets Death, but describes their interactions as awkward in the extreme. He seems like he ought to be part of God's entourage, but God, like in 99 Stories, is aloof and not prone to dialogue, unlike the Devil, with whom Azrael spends much of the book in uneasy conversation. To the Devil, Azrael makes it clear that something has changed in the condition of the souls he is meant to gather. Souls, we learn, are "non-particular"; that they return to a kind of unity or repository from which they are regenerated into new forms of life. But more and more, the souls are not returning, they are simply evaporating; Azrael comes too late to retrieve them, or they suffer a type of mass death that destroys them totally and disturbs the ancient equilibrium.

Here is the core idea: the death of the environment is the death of the soul. Here is the disappearing forest, here the saltless ocean, here the manatees killed by leached phosphates. This destruction, Williams says, is not merely physical but metaphysical. That is, we kill not just individual manatees and trees but something much older and more fundamental that cannot be returned to us. To call this essence a soul might be to invite cliche, but in the image of Azrael Williams reinvigorates the word with its ancient properties. Williams' project for the last decade or two has been to find a new language that will sufficiently express the brave new world we find ourselves in, but part of that is returning to the religious language of mystery and reverence that have been shorn from everyday talk. 

In the end, I didn't think Concerning the Future of Souls worked as well as 99 Stories of God. But I also think Williams, at this stage in her life, is interested in things like "working," or satisfaction, or readerly pleasure. To the extent that it is frightening, disorienting, and strange, Concerning the Future of Souls may be the right book for our moment, and for moments yet to come.