House of Rain by Craig Childs

I turned off my light in the back of the cave. I closed my eyes. It felt as if all these centuries, these thousands of years, were contained here, their processions playing out again and again as drips strummed the pool beside me. The same routes are traveled repeatedly, the same meridians followed across horizons, over hundreds of years. Anasazi, I thought, was never a people. It was a rhythm, a form of motion stirred up from the land. People merely fell into step.

I got to return to Mesa Verde National Park last week and tour two more of the enormous cliff dwellings built nine hundred years ago directly into the rock. They are impressive places, made up of turrets and geometric stacks of rooms and huge circular underground kivas. It's hard not to think what the first white Americans, cattle ranchers, thought when they encountered them for the first time: how could somebody build something like this and then just abandon it? The "disappearance" of Ancestral Puebloans, previously known as the Anasazi, has been compelling narrative for a long time, a puzzle to be solved. Craig Childs, in House of Rain, travels through major and minor Puebloan sites throughout the southwest and Mexico, seeking an answer to just that question.

Among other things, House of Rain is a travelogue, and some of the most impressive passages involve Childs moving across the high, dry landscape of the Four Corners area on foot, sometimes with his wife and infant son in tow. He skillfully and poetically describes the beauty of this area, which is among my favorite places in the world. So in that sense it was like comfort food to me. And I appreciated hearing descriptions of some of these Puebloan sites I'll never see; tucked away in the corners of deep canyons, undisturbed in the way those first ranchers must have seen them. You can see how much more uncomfortable Childs is at, say, Aztec Ruins, a site run by the National Park Service in the backyard of a suburb of Farmington, New Mexico. Better to pass into these regions of quietude, where the intervening years can disappear and the past reappear in the form of a broken wall, a husk of corn, a potsherd.

So what happened to the Ancestral Puebloans? As Child notes, though a little begrudgingly, the mystery is not much of a mystery at all: they migrated, probably because of an intense drought in the high country of the Four Corners. Childs puts some specifics to this that I found highly interesting: his conclusion, based on the introduction of new kinds of polychromatic pottery in the lower regions of Arizona, is that the Puebloan culture migrated to the south, mingling with Hohokam and Mogollon cultures that were already there to create the culture now known by archaeologists as the Salado. It's Childs' contention, actually, that tensions between the new elements of this multicultural society resulted in the collapse of that society, leading the Pueblo peoples to splinter into the groups that now make up the two-dozen-odd Pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley, as well as the Hopi. But Childs throws his lot in with some more outre conclusions as well, like a revisionist theory that Puebloans migrated north from Chaco Canyon to Mesa Verde and then south again along the same meridian to a location in Mexico known as Paquime (or today as Casas Grandes), which other archeologists consider more closely related to the Aztec cultures of Mexico to the south. In any case, Childs favors a version of the Puebloans that emphasizes their grandeur, claiming for them a larger sphere of influence than many of his peers.

House of Rain is only twenty years old, but it wears its age. The term Anasazi, a rude exonym that comes from the Navajo, has been entirely supplanted by "Ancestral Puebloan." And while Childs undercuts the question Where did they go, my understanding is that nobody accepts this any longer as a framework from which to begin--something which perhaps Childs should be given credit for. But my biggest frustration with House of Rain is how it keeps modern Pueblo peoples at arm's length. They appear infrequently, and often in ways that stymie Childs' research, as with a council of elders that refuses to give Childs permission to conduct research. Childs paints this as a typical reservedness, but then again, he's the one who uses the word Anasazi around them, knowing it's offensive, but catching himself too late. Childs folds in some of the stories and legends of modern-day Puebloans that support the narrative of migration, but I noticed that these stories always tend to begin "a Hopi man once told me," while the researchers have names. At a dig, Childs notes the frustration of an archeologist who is forced to stop digging when human remains are found--a key stipulation of the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act--and, in way that felt telling to me, lets that frustration pass by without comment.

All of these are minor missteps, perhaps, but they add up to a sense that Childs is most interested in the version of the Ancestral Puebloans that live in his imagination, and keeps the modern-day Puebloans and Hopi who might shine light on them at arm's length because they might complicate that imagination. Which is all just to say that I think House of Rain would be stronger if it had found a way to engage more deeply with them. That said, in the end, I really enjoyed deepening my understanding of the people of Mesa Verde this way, and I was persuaded by Childs' invitation to see them not as a static society that suddenly "collapsed," but a living, moving culture passing through several stages of development over centuries: a rhythm, a form of motion.

Heading West by Doris Betts

In contrast with this gleaming vegetation, Mrs. Dover's Western photographs had shown no tender green, no leaf, no grass. If they drove until the Southwest turned to stone, Nancy would have her chance to see muted reds and blending golds in the layered cliffs, the color of light on implacable stone. A place like Grand Canyon, she thought, would give Sisyphus bad dreams.

Nancy Finch is traveling with her sister and her sister's husband on the Blue Ridge Parkway when they're attacked and robbed by a strange man. The attacker, who calls himself Dwight Andersen, takes Nancy as a hostage, and suddenly Nancy is barreling along the highway toward nowhere in particular. It's a mystery what animates Dwight, though he makes veiled allusions to a twin brother he may or may not have killed. He seems to have no plan, no intent, though Nancy extracts a promise that when they reach the state of Arizona and the Grand Canyon, he'll let her go. As insurance, Dwight takes another hostage, a disgraced judge named Harvey Jolley, though for a while Jolley fails to understand that he's a hostage, and not simply a hitchhiker. The three make an unlikely set, but fate has forced them together, and they are headed west, knit together by the threat of violence.

Nancy and Harvey make a few half-hearted attempts at escape, but it becomes clear over the course of the book that there is something they treasure, too, in the westward flight. For the judge, it's an escape from the death of his wife and the ignominy of his corruption. For Nancy, it's a chance to extricate herself from the selfish and provincial ties that bind her to her sister and her mother, a kind of secondary status as the unwed daughter. It's a strange dynamic: for Dwight, the kidnapper, the trip seems to mean nothing at all, nothing but constant motion; it's the other two who are thinking and feeling animals, and who begin to assign meaning to their flight. The Grand Canyon becomes a symbol of where they are headed, a vast and beautiful chasm where one might really fall into, or escape, and be lost, forever.

I always heard about Doris Betts growing up in North Carolina; her books end up in those "local" shelves you see in Raleigh and Charlotte bookstores, but I'd never read her before. The quality of the writing, the sentences themselves, is high: clever, forceful, funny. For the most part, I didn't buy the intricate backstories that Betts invents for the characters: the judge's orphaned childhood, Nancy's numerous lovers, none of these things seemed relevant or quite convincing. What I was convinced by, however, is the novel's central section, a bravura piece of writing in which Nancy, having escaped from somewhere in Arizona, travels to and descends into the Grand Canyon alone. (If you have ever seen the Grand Canyon, and the many, many signs at the Grand Canyon urging you to take seriously a hike to the bottom, you know why this is a suicidal thing to do.) Nancy never explains why she does this; it's mere compulsion, brought on perhaps by the site of the canyon--why climb down into it? Because it's there. She's halfway down, blistered and delirious from heatstroke, when she hears her name being called: Dwight has followed her into the canyon.

It beggars belief, but it's the kind bold and outrageous choice that the novel could have used more of. It seems right, and gripping, that the showdown between Nancy and Dwight happens in the canyon. Implacable, impersonable, rocky, wild--it seems like his territory. But after a scuffle [spoiler alert], Nancy pushes Dwight over a ledge; he falls and is killed. Funnily enough, this happens at more or less the halfway point in the book. The second half becomes a climb out, both literally and metaphorically: Nancy is rescued by the good samaritan who drove her to the canyon in the first place, and she just so happens to have a handsome, prickly, and available sun for the battered and sunburnt Nancy to fall in love with. This stuff is OK. I have to admit that Heading West felt to me like a tremendous novella packed between two chunks of protective styrofoam. But even Sisyphus has to roll the ball up the hill again.

Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko

I have a sister too, but this ship and you, Ocean, are taking me farther from here, Indigo whispered. She imagined Sister Salt on the depot platform in Needles, searching for her among the boarding school students returning home for the summer. Now the great ocean lay between them. Her plan for an easy way home had taken her much farther away. Tears filled her eyes and she cried softly into her pillow: Please help me, Ocean! Send your rainy wind to my sister with this message: I took the long way home, but I'm on my way. Please don't worry.

Indigo is a young girl of the (presumably) fictional Sand Lizard tribe, living in the Colorado River region where Arizona, California, and Nevada meet. When her family is swept up by soldiers during a Ghost Dance ceremony, she's separated from her mother, grandmother, and sister, and placed in a brutally repressive Indian school. She escapes, and finds a place to hide near the home of Hattie, a clever young woman expelled from graduate school for her unorthodox ideas about the early Christian church, and her husband Edward, an older naturalist living with the disgrace of a failed commercial expedition to South America. They take Indigo in to prevent her from being reabsorbed by the Indian school, and soon Indigo finds herself on a train bound to New York, and from there, a steamer to Europe.

Gardens in the Dunes is an interesting contrast to Leslie Marmon Silko's most famous novel, Ceremony, about a Laguna man suffering from PTSD after World War II. In that novel, Tayo learns that healing can be found in reconnecting with the rituals of his Laguna culture. Gardens in the Dunes is a more outward-looking novel, a global one, in which Indigo grows by being exposed to the wider cultures of the world--though like Ceremony it suggests that there is a power and safety in return. Indigo makes friends with a monkey and a parrot, and wherever she goes, there are gardens, from which she quietly takes seeds for her collection. When, at last, she returns to the "gardens in the dunes" of her Grandmother's country, she plants these new seeds, it is perhaps a symbolic expression of Indigo's going out and return. She brings the best things of the world back with her, and integrates them into her homeland. This is in contrast, maybe, with the rapacious pursuits of Edward, who sees in the natural resources of the world--orchids, citrus trees, iron meteorites--things to be purchased and sold for profit.

What I found most interesting about Gardens in the Dunes was the connections it draws between the Ghost Dance religion that developed in the 19th century and other unorthodox forms of Christianity. Wherever Hattie, Edward, and Indigo go, they are confronted by signs and symbols of repressed religion, including, in England, mysterious Druidic artifacts. Hattie has been dismissed because of her thesis, which emphasized the primary role of Jesus's female followers over the male disciples. Silko draws a direct line between beliefs and practices like these and the Ghost Dance, which was popularized by a "Messiah" figure named Wovoka in the late 19th century. Indigo has been taught to associate Wovoka explicitly with Jesus Christ, and in the great churches and chapel gardens of Europe, she insists again and again to Hattie and Edward that Jesus Christ was not crucified as the stories say, but traveling with his followers in the Americas. The Ghost Dance legend is another story of return and restoration: Wovoka, the Messiah, promised that the dance would bring back the many dead and lost who perished in American wars of conquest. It's no wonder that Indigo, torn from her family, holds tight to this belief--as meaningful in its way as any orthodox form of Christian theology.

I didn't quite expect a book like Gardens in the Dunes, having only read Ceremony. Ceremony is an inward book, a complexly layered story of memory and inward healing, but Gardens in the Dunes is a kind of adventure story. Its suggestions of erudition, its wide-ranging scope, and its 19th century setting, reminded me most of A. S. Byatt. Like Ceremony, it's more complex than it looks, introducing several minor characters--a Black cowboy cook, a thieving Mexican radical who operates a dog circus--whose presence make the book shaggy and strange. I'm not sure how I feel about the novel's final chapters, which feel somehow both anticlimactic and too pointedly dramatic--but it left me a lot to think about.

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje

Garrett's voice near me on the skin whats wrong billy whats wrong, couldnt see him but I turned to where I knew he was. I yelled so he could hear me through the skin. Ive been fucked. Ive been fucked Ive been fucked by Christ almighty god Ive been good and fucked by Christ. And I rolled off the horse's back like a soft shell-less egg wrapped in thin white silk and I splashed onto the dust blind and white but the chain held my legs to the horse and I was dragged picking up dust on my wet skin as I travelled in between his four trotting legs at last thank the fuckin christ, in the shade of his stomach.

I picked this book up years ago at a shop in Tucson, and I didn't think of it again until I was in Mesilla, New Mexico, the town where Billy the Kid was tried, sentenced to death and later escaped. Tucson, too, is a place that Billy fled, and in that part of the world you can follow Billy's footsteps across the desert: the Billy the Kid Scenic Byway, the Billy the Kid Gift Shop, the Billy the Kid Casino. Fleeing is part of Billy's legend, the thief and murderer, barely more than a child, who eluded the officials of the Old West until a single man, an obsessive sheriff and former friend of Billy's name Pat Garrett, finally brought him down. As is sometimes but not always the case with the figures of the old west, it's the outlaw who ends up myth, and the lawman ends up fairly suspect. That's certainly the case with Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, a pastiche of prose and poetry that captures Billy's flight and his last days.

Ondaatje's Billy is a charmer, well-dressed and well-liked, in opposition to the famous photograph of Billy looking rather ragged and buck-toothed. You can't say he's a reluctant criminal, but he's certainly an uncertain one; in one of my favorite prose passages Ondaatje imagines Billy hiding in an abandoned barn at peace with the animals there: "There were animals who did not move out and accepted me as a larger breed. I ate the old grain with them, drank from a constant puddle about twenty yards away from the barn. I saw no human and heard no human voice, learned to squat the best way when shitting, never ate flesh or touched another animal's flesh, never entered his boundary." But Billy's peaceable kingdom collapses when a group of flesh-hungry rats gets drunk on fermented grain and he's forced to take his shotgun to them. Billy's life is like that; he is compelled to the violence he commits. It is inevitable.

Pat Garrett, on the other hand, is depicted as a strange and untrustworthy figure who can "kill someone on the street and walk back and finish a joke." He keeps exotic birds but he is "frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly he couldnt tell what they planned to do." He is "[o]ne who had decided what was right and forgot all morals." His pursuit of Billy is not only a betrayal of an easy companionship they once shared at the home of a cattle rancher, but something strange and monomaniacal. Ondaatje's no McCarthy, but Garrett shares a little bit of DNA with the Judge from Blood Meridian, only this time under the self-righteous patina of law.

The poetry is... fine. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. None of it, I'd say, rises to the level of the prose pieces, which are richly evocative and sometimes even a little grotesque. They are as poetic, perhaps, as the poetry, not least because they're not interesting in giving any real historical account of Billy the Kid's life as much as a series of impressions from it. The book works best if you know a little about Billy already, I think, or if you, as I did, pause in the middle of it and go read through the guy's Wikipedia page. There you might learn that Billy's life, like Ondaatje's book, was fairly short and full of troubles, but it produced a legend that lives on.

Field Notes by Barry Lopez

That winter I dreamed four times about wolverine. I decided I was going to go up there when spring came, regardless. I've never been able to learn what I want to know about animals from books or looking at television. I have to walk around near them, be in places where they are. This was the heart of the trouble that I had in school. Many of the stories that should have been about animals, about how they live, their different ways, were never told. I don't know what the stories were, but when I walked in the woods or out on the prairie or in the mountains, I could feel the boundaries of those stories. I knew they were there, the way you know fish are in a river. This knowledge was what I wanted, and the only way I had gotten it was to go out and look for it. To be near animals until they showed you something you didn't imagine or you hadn't seen or heard.

The characters in Barry Lopez's story collection are often academics or researchers: the Arctic voyager of "Pearyland," the fossil expert working at the American Museum of Natural History in "The Open Lot," the anthropologist in "The Entreaty of the Wiideema." They are collectors of knowledge, in a way, but their methods have a way of foundering against unknowns, mysteries which require different methods of seeing and knowing. That anthropologist seeks out the Wiideema, an unstudied (and totally invented) indigenous group in Australia because he's seeking that kind of knowledge, and finds more than he bargained for: when a Wiideema woman speaks to him for the first time, he quickly understands that it's not English she's speaking but a kind of universal language that emerges from sheer being. He can communicate with her, and them, as long as he doesn't try too hard to understand, anthropologist-like, to figure out just how it is they are communicating in the first place. In this way, the Wiideema represent something like the wolverines of "Lessons from the Wolverine," who also have their own language for speaking. The lesson they teach is that real knowledge emerges from existence, from being among the immediacy of the earth, its places, its animals; it cannot be found in systems, schemata, or books.

Over and over again Lopez contrasts this kind of knowledge with the bookish kind: the fossil expert "sees" the fossil within the rock better than any of her peers, but she never advances because she refuses to systematize or generalize. The narrator of "The Negro in the Kitchen" is a fitness-obsessed retiree who finds--as the title suggests--a strange black man in his kitchen one day, having set a place at the table for them both. The man, it turns out, is walking across the United States from the East Coast to the Pacific, searching for an intimacy with his own country. In a telling moment, the narrator gets up to examine a bird at the window and check it off his life list--a solitary vireo. His guest, who has learned birdsong by the hundreds, corrects him: it was a ruby-crowned kinglet. The man is disappointed--he's already spotted a kinglet--and when his guest leaves, he goes not to the window but to his bird book to read. Despite his air of smug (white) paternalism, he's failed to learn the lesson the "Negro in the Kitchen" has borne to him.

Field Notes is best when Lopez zeroes in on the details of place; he has a Willa Cather-like skill at describing the simple features of a landscape in way that allows us to see it with freshness, ranging from the Arctic to the American desert to rocky creeks of Colorado. He's better at places than people, which is why the story "Conversation"--in which a conservationist begs her brother, the Secretary of the Interior or something, to place the ferruginous hawk on the endangered species list--such a wooden mistake. The introductory piece, "Within Birds' Hearing," towers over the rest of the collection: a strange and hallucinatory account of a man who leaves his home in the Mojave without a map or supplies, or a clear reason, walking toward a distant creek. The man's journey is so reckless I thought for several pages Lopez was describing the migration of a bird. But maybe that's the point; we have grown incapable of following a birdlike instinct, if we ever were--in the end it is a group of mourning doves who save him by siphoning water into his mouth when he is close to death.

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

Whenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them "the lost children." I suppose the word "refugee" is more difficult to remember. And even if the term "lost" is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as "the lost children." And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood.

A family of four begins a cross-country road trip from New York City to Arizona. Mama is a documentarian who wants to record the stories of those affected by the separation of children at the U.S.-Mexico border; she has recently been working to help a friend locate her missing daughters, who have disappeared somewhere in those borderlands. Papa is a documentarist--as different, they say, as librarian from chemist--who wants to record natural soundscapes in the areas once occupied by Geronimo's Apaches, the last "free" people in revolt against the United States. In the backseat are his son, "the boy," and her daughter, "the girl," and together they are a somewhat makeshift, though precarious family: Mama, who narrates the first half of the book, isn't sure that what she and her husband are looking for on the trip is the same, and foresees that the end of the trip might also bring the dissolution of their marriage. But somewhere in the vicinity of the Chiricahua Mountains, the former stronghold of Geromino's Apaches, the boy, caught up in the stories his father and mother have told him about these many absent figures, takes his sister and runs away into the desert.

Who tells the story of the missing? How does one tell the story of the missing? For Papa, it's about recording emptiness: the natural sounds where people are not. It's also about imagination: the stories he tells the children about the Apache are obviously half-made up, a way of constructing a presence where non exists. (Papa, and the novel, perhaps pointedly and perhaps not, never seems to recognize that there are lots of living Apaches one might also record.) For Mama, the question is a fraught one over which she constantly agonizes. After hearing about it on the radio, they make their way for a rural New Mexico airport where a transport of children back to Mexico is taking place, and though they witness a small line of kids trooping from the hangar to the plane, most of what there is to see and document is stillness: a building, a plane. Even the boy becomes a documentarian/ist, with a Polaroid camera he's given for his tenth birthday. In this context, the fact that the children are undocumented takes on a special valence: Who will pay attention to them and how?

In Mama's section, this anxiety plays out through intertextuality, criss-crossed with a number of literary and journalistic sources that might help one make sense of the removal and disappearance of these children. Some are real books, fastidiously quoted and then indexed in interstitial lists of what's contained in the family's many moving boxes. I found this to be the least successful part of the novel, an attempt to write around a fundamental absence that left the narrative feeling overstuffed with ideas. Mama fixates especially on a fake book that tells a fable-like story of a group of children on a weeks-long train journey; it's pieces from this book--and others--that the boy adopts and reinterprets when the novel switches, halfway through, to his perspective. This section doesn't always work voice-wise, I thought, and even at ten his impulse to venture into the desert without his parents seems almost too thick-skulled to be believed. But it allows Lost Children Archive to escape some of the writerliness that makes the novel's first half seem sluggish.

In one cutesy detail, the kids each want to take their own empty moving box, to be filled with what they find on the trip. The girl ultimately fills hers with echoes: the sounds of people responding across a great distance, that turns out to be--for better or worse--the sound of us talking to ourselves. And yet, when the kids find themselves alone and lost in the Arizona desert, there is the chance that the echoes will turn out to be a real voice, searching for us as we are searching for it.

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?"

Angels by Denis Johnson

She looked up out of her voice and saw the angel.

He will have ears like a cartoon of organic growth.  He is yellow with light but covered with mobile shadows, animated tattoos.  His face kept changing.  His voice will come from far off, like a train's.  His body is steady and beautiful and hairless, the wings white, incinerating, and pure, but the head changes rapidly--the head of an eagle, a goat, an insect, a mouse, a sheep with spiraling horns that turn and lengthen almost imperceptibly--and the entire message had no words.  The entire message will be only the beat and direction of time.  Yes is Now.

The angel who says, "It's time."

"Is it time?" she asked.  "Does it hurt?"  He will have the most beautiful face she has ever seen.

"Oh, babe."  The angel starts to cry.  "You can't imagine," he says.

Angels begins on a cross-country Greyhound bus.  There, Jamie Mays is traveling with her two young children, away from her husband.  She is desperate, confused, and alone; she has thoughts like this one: "She wished she could smother the baby.  Nobody would know.  They were four days out of Oakland."  On the bus she meets Bill Houston, who has beer enough to share, and over the course of several days they are drawn together.  It's not exactly sweet--it's their willingness to ply their pain with chemicals that brings them together, at least in part--but the connection is genuine.  They part ways, but she goes seeking him in Chicago, only to be raped by a would-be Good Samaritan.  It's his reading about the paper that puts them back together, and cements their relationship to one another.  The rape itself is ghoulish and macabre, facilitated with drugs and written accordingly, but Johnson writes about its role in their relationship with cold-blooded clarity:

They started calling it The Rape, and it came to stand for everything: for coming together while falling apart; for loving each other and hating everybody else; for moving at a breakneck speed while getting nowhere; for freezing in the streets and melting in the rooms of love.  The Rape was major and useless, like a knife stuck in the middle of things.  They could hate it and arrange their picture of themselves around it.

Bill pulls Jamie back across the country, to Phoenix, where he grew up.  They connect with his brothers, James and Burris, each of them tied up with petty criminality and chemical abuse to different degrees, like Bill.  These characters are familiar from Tree of Smoke, where Bill and James are terrorized by their army service and Burris is just a kid developing the drug habit that will be his albatross in Angels.  Tree of Smoke is the later book, a prequel to this one in a way, it reads like a natural sequel.  Those who read the two novels in the other order probably read Tree of Smoke with additional foreboding, knowing where Bill Houston's tragic life is headed.  Back in Phoenix, the three brothers get involved in a scheme to rob a bank at gunpoint.

Things go wrong.  I'm going to mention exactly how they go wrong, so consider yourself appropriately warned.  A bank guard, shooting at James, is himself shot to death by Bill.  All three brothers are arrested, and Bill is tried and sentenced to execution.  At the same time, Jamie, perhaps pushed over the edge by Bill's predicament, is admitted to a mental hospital.  The pair, who were seemingly driven together by fate, are ripped apart for the book's final third by two very different forms of incarceration.  Johnson's account of Bill's trial and his time on Death Row is one of the most desperate and heartbreaking pieces of writing I can think of, rendered in a kind of hallucinatory realism that reliably describes how strange and unbelievable it must be:

He watched his trial from behind a wall of magic, considering with amazement how pulling the trigger had been hardly different--only a jot of strength, a quarter second's exertion--from not pulling the trigger.  And yet it had unharnessed all of this, these men in their beautiful suits, their gold watches smoldering on their tanned wrists, speaking with great seriousness sometimes, joking with one another sometimes, gently cradling their sheafs of paper covered with all the reasons for what was going on here.  And it had made a great space of nothing where Roger Crowell the bank guard had been expecting to have a life--a silence that took up most of Bill Houston's hearing.  It was a word that couldn't be spoken, because nobody knew what it might have said.

Johnson, better than maybe any writer, seems to understand people like Bill Houston: people who can't get ahead, whose poverty is endemic, who devote themselves to alcohol and opioids, who turn to petty crime, and even not-so-petty crime.  He doesn't gild them; they're not good people just trying to make it in this crazy world.  Most of them are fairly bad people.  But lots of people are bad people; they're just not so easy to get rid of--you can't ignore them or ship them off to the gas chamber.  They are invisible in this novel, the people whom Bill calls "the outraged owners of the establishment... [t]he bankers, the people with tie-pins and jeweled letter openers and profoundly lustrous desks of mahogany, the workers of all this machinery of law and circumstance."  He calls them "[t]he people he couldn't fight--the people who were never here."  Bill Houston, toward the end of the novel, gets to make a few gestures of selflessness, but they're no more than prayers.  When are "the people who were never here" to make their own contritions?

Angels is terrific.  It's a shame to think I probably won't be able to put it on my year-end list, because I try not to include more than one author, but it's close to the masterpiece that is Tree of Smoke. It begins shamblingly, with buses crossing the country and back again with no clear destination, and ends with the knife-edged inevitability of what seems like doom.  It left me with a feeling of profound, gut-rocking sadness.

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

The man hanging out of the wrecked car was still alive as I passed, and I stopped, grown a little more used to the idea now of how really badly broken he was, and made sure there was nothing I could do.  He was snoring loudly and rudely.  His blood bubbled out of his mouth with every breath.  He wouldn't be taking many more.  I knew that, but he didn't, and therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person's life on this earth.  I don't mean that we all end up dead, that's not the great pity.  I mean that he couldn't tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn't tell him what was real.

Denis Johnson's story "The Other Man" begins: "But I never finished telling you about the two men."  And sure enough, you recall: earlier in the collection Jesus' Son, there is a story called "Two Men," but it's really just about one man: a deaf-and-dumb giant of a dude who ends up in the narrator's car, signaling that he'd like to be taken somewhere.  He's a stranger, but somehow his inability to speak fends off a fight, and compels the narrator to comply.  The man in "The Other Man" is a tourist who pretends, convincingly, to be a Polish tourist until he admits it was a prank all along.  Yet the reveal doesn't reveal all:

When I've told others about this man, they've asked me, "Did he make a pass at you?"  Yes, he did.  But why is that out come to this encounter obvious to everyone, when it wasn't at all obvious to me, the person who actually met and spoke with him?

What's the connection between the two men?  Are they both liars?  And why does it take the narrator so long to remember to finish the story?  All of Jesus' Son is like that, within and across stories: obscure connections are made and broken; time skips unpredictably and without warning.  In "Out on Bail," the narrator is at a bar commiserating with a friend about to go to prison, until he remembers that the moment was actually one of celebration, because the friend was acquitted.  In the virtuosic "Emergency," he tells us a story about getting stuck in a car in the snow, and accidentally kills a nest of newborn rabbits he'd been trying to protect.  Then he says, "Or maybe that wasn't the time it snowed."  This moment that he's thinking of, "The bunnies weren't a problem yet, or they'd already been a problem and were already forgotten, and there's nothing on my mind."  The fractured nature of the narrative reflects the drunken, drug-addled mindset of the narrator--nicknamed, unfortunately, "Fuckhead."

Does that sound frustrating?  Does it sound like the worst excesses of our most masculine hacks?  Our Bukowskis, our Palahniuks, our Bret Easton Ellises?  Certainly you can their shadows in a story like "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," which spares little in the way of violence or gore, or the black humor of the moment in "Emergency" when the strung-out orderly glibly removes the knife in a man's eye while prepping him for the surgery that's supposed to do exactly that.  Denis Johnson is the writer those guys all wish they could be, or maybe think they are.  For one thing, he can write circles around them, as in this drugged-out vision of the Iowa countryside:

Glaciers had crushed this region in the time before history.  There'd been a drought for years, and a bronze fog of dust stood over the plains.  The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed , wilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings.  Most of the farmers didn't even plant anymore.  All the false visions had been erased.  It felt like the moment before the Savior comes.  And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.

But also, Jesus' Son has a kind of warmth and generosity those authors can't match.  Johnson has a sincere affection for those who are down and out, like Fuckhead, which is all the more remarkable because it doesn't require the kind of gritty realism that we usually think of us being the hallmark of empathetic literature about the lowest strata of our society.  Dreams and visions, induced by pills or otherwise, are respected as part of human creativity and ingenuity.  And both Johnson and Fuckhead are aware that much of human life is the product of circumstance and luck:

"You just don't realize.  Being a cheerleader, being on the team, it doesn't guarantee anything.  Anybody can take a turn for the worse," said Richard, who'd been a high school quarterback or something himself.

About Dundun, a sadistic man who tortures a friend of Fuckhead's, he writes:

Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart?  His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing.  It was only that certain important connections had been burned through.  If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into something like that.

The collection zips from Iowa to Chicago to Seattle, but it ends in Arizona, where Fuckhead is all cleaned up and trying to live a sober life as an orderly in an old folk's home.  He spends his afternoons and evenings spying on a Mennonite couple who live nearby, trying to peer into their inner life.  He's interested in them before he knows they are Mennonite, but the story says something like this: even the most straitlaced of us have inner lives that are unique, perhaps even bizarre, that we are all as weird as the drifters and addicts of Jesus' Son, thought not all of us live close enough to risk for that part of us to emerge.  "All these weirdos," Fuckhead writes serenely at the end, "and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them.  I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us."