Joy Williams and the Missing Souls

By Max Gray on July 10, 2024

Joy Williams is a legendary short story writer, and don't we know it. Praise abounds everywhere from her book jackets to her adoring profiles in The New York Times. But one of the salient things about Williams — her strangeness — remains a footnote in these sources.

Her new book, Concerning the Future of Souls, resembles a collection of linked stories (or implied stories; some are as short as a single word). I'm not sure if Williams herself would consider these spare, pearl-like vignettes to be stories. It is perfectly valid to think of them as chapters. The jacket of my review copy describes them as "illuminations." What strikes me, above all, is the unabashed strangeness that flows from a highly influential and award-winning writer at the height of her powers who long ago outgrew any interest in the commonplace or quotidian.

As an artist, Williams has gradually grown into herself since her first publication about half a century ago. And now, in 2024, she has further enhanced a hallowed literary career with Concerning the Future of Souls, a singular collection of microfiction that distills the strange into a pure concentrate, showcasing the essence of her unique voice.

In fits and starts, the vignettes recount an ongoing conversation between the Devil and Azrael, the angel of death. Azrael's provenance in theological history is varied and complex; he is often depicted as a guide for souls who are about to depart this world. Williams bestows Azrael with a thousand eyes that correspond loosely with the souls living on earth. She softens this fearsome visage by endowing him with gentleness and fallibility. In one funny exchange, the Devil pointedly questions his knowledge of the solar system, leading to Azrael's visible embarrassment.

We are left to construct Williams' view of mortality for ourselves by piecing together the epigraphs between chapters (many of them referencing poetry, for "Azrael had read a great deal of poetry") and cryptic symbols, like the recurring image of geometric cones. After a near death experience, one character envisions "the turning back, the forced retreat, the unpleasant feeling of being drawn down a kind of funnel, a cone…" Later, Williams' version of Dylan Thomas experiences a drunken, hallucinatory vision of cones. One chapter in the book consists of nothing but a reprinted diagram of a cone, the so-called "cone of memory" created by the philosopher Henri Bergsen. Notably, it was Bergsen who argued that human beings are best seen as sophisticated animals, a view that complicates Williams' concern for the souls of creatures, from dolphins, whales, and steer to horses, chimps, and dogs. One chapter, in its entirety, reads: "The older dog's death." And the epigraph: "What a puzzlement this / being gone."

The book rewards multiple readings. At first, it presents itself as a series of lovely but inscrutable koans, each capped with an intriguing epigraph that either repeats an idea from previous pages or cites work by, say, Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Gustave Dore. A narrative begins to cohere upon a second reading. Many of these vignettes — sketches, chapters, or whatever you might call them — capture the moment preceding a person or animal's death; for example, a woman engaged in assisted suicide imagines what a lethal dose of medication would taste like. Azrael's conversation with the Devil intersperses these sketches and situates them within a larger context. When the Devil asks his opinion of metempsychosis, or "the passing of the soul at death into another body, either human or animal," Azrael replies:

'I am so fond of metempsychosis! …But times have changed so. The possibilities aren't there anymore.'

'Other forms of being becoming unavailable are they? Extreme biodiversity loss? Species winking out right and left? 70% of this gone. 70% of that. It adds up.'

Sadness descended upon Azrael. His many eyes closed for a moment. His feathers trembled.

But I must have faith that this is intended, he thought."

A lonely epigraph at the bottom of the page reads "Disturbing Arithmetic." This, I think, is the quandary at the core of Concerning the Future of Souls. Animal species across the planet are disappearing due to human activity. But if souls are meant to reincarnate, then what will become of them when their options for reincarnation dwindle? Where will those souls go, and what is poor Azrael to do with them?

In this way, the book operates as an extended rumination on the devastation of wildlife caused by human beings, and the dialogue between Azrael and the Devil ultimately contributes to a long-running preoccupation with the subject that dates back years. In fact, Concerning the Future of Souls extrapolates on ideas that germinated a quarter century ago in her essay collection, Ill Nature, in which she lambasts humanity's reckless violence toward animals. In the essay "Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp," Williams invokes Aristotle's claim that "all living beings are ensouled and strive to participate in eternity." Indeed, her last story collection, 99 Stories of God, belongs on the same shelf. Concerning the Future of Souls is a hybrid creation; it functions both as a powerful polemic and as a genre-expanding experiment in short fiction. The author's decades of experience and her artistic talent make for a largely successful experiment.

Williams' work has moved gracefully in this direction for decades, and it is fascinating to contrast these diamond-like meditations with the lengthier, more traditional stories she published in the 1970's and 80's — stories like "Taking Care" and "The Lover." But a certain obliqueness, a mastery of the unexpected unites all of her work. In a 2014 interview for The Paris Review, as part of their series The Art of Fiction, Williams offers a brief insight into her relationship with the form. A good short story, she says, "should be able to do a lot in less than twenty pages."

And so she does. Her last chapter is just a single word. In this way, Williams affirms her well earned status as one of our most celebrated, living iconoclasts whose superpower may derive from her refusal to traffic in the familiar, and who, by sheer bravery, manages to keep us on our toes even now, after all this time.