In Ninety-Nine Stories of God (2016), Joy Williams explored — and occasionally skewered — divinity via flash and microfiction, casting God and mere mortals alike in small encounters that touched upon our connections with the universe. Now eight years later, the author returns to similar territory with Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael, a collection that complements her earlier book by focusing on Azrael, a.k.a. the angel of death, as well as Azrael’s relationship with the Devil. Like Ninety-Nine Stories, this new volume is presented entirely as short-short stories, with some as brief as a few words, and throughout, Williams’ trademark humor and dry wit persist. Yet a darkness also materializes on nearly every page of Concerning the Future of Souls, mostly in the suggestion that humanity has pushed Earth beyond its breaking point for survival, resulting in a book that haunts as much as it entertains.
Over a dozen of the stories in Concerning the Future of Souls are structured around conversations between Azrael and the Devil, and these talks lend the book a solid narrative spine on which to hang various tangents. Williams describes Azrael thusly: “He had four thousand wings. This was simply a fact. The feathers of each wing — innumerable … He also had a thousand eyes but not, as has been rumored, four heads.” As for the Devil, who lives in envy on Earth after being cast from heaven, the author tortures the fallen angel with a cruel inner voice referring himself as “a sop, a concession, an afterthought.” Azrael and the Devil share a love-hate relationship, with the Devil teasing Azrael for so closely following God’s orders (“You are utterly under His command”) and chastising the angel for sneaking into his living quarters uninvited. Meanwhile, Azrael sees the Devil as a sensitive confidant despite the endless jabs, paying him compliments (“You’re irreplicable”) and working to make the curmudgeon smile. The duo covers vast topics in their chats — what music to listen to, forestry, their own faults and fears — and while some interactions are slight, as the conversations amass, a genuine companionship is forged by Williams, and the pair become something akin to an old married couple on the page — weary, sniping, yet still appreciative of each other’s company.
Branching from these interactions, the remainder of the collection is stocked with stories starring well-known literary names like Vladmir Nabokov, Dante Alighieri (naturally, based on the subject matter), and Thomas Merton, as well as nameless protagonists facing death and loss. Plenty of good humor and irony can be gleaned in these tiny treasures. Nabokov, in his dying breath, laments the fact that he will never again capture and kill a butterfly for his numerous collections. The Merton story describes the monk’s frustration at his home abbey in Kentucky — “so many visitors … and there was the noise of the hunters’ guns in the surrounding hills” — which leads him to travel to Asia where he ends up dying after electrocuting himself on a standing fan. “Disappointing” gathers its entire narrative from an actual newspaper headline: “Washoe, chimp who learned sign language dies at 42 without signing goodbye.” “Pass the Envelope” juxtaposes Pythagoras’ expertise on the human soul with the fact that he also invented “a joke drinking cup, copies of which are still sold in Aegean gift shops today.” And in “On the Rocks,” a couple’s affection is tested while discussing whether a soul can be destroyed. When one half says that they understand the idea that a soul “is immortal but not indestructible,” the other counters with “I think you’re pretending to understand,” leading to an argument over where to grab a drink and exposing fissures in their love.
Just as she did in Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Williams holds off on presenting the title of each story in Concerning the Future of Souls until after one finishes the body text. This reversal of expectation can serve as a sly punchline or propose an alternative perspective on a narrative. New to this collection, though, is the addition of asterisked endnotes after certain stories, which provide the reader with Williams’ inspiration for the story’s title. These references range from Bible passages to poetry and song lyrics, and they make for a potentially dense interaction with the volume. I found myself reading with my phone or laptop open, constantly tapping in searches for Reverend Gary Davis songs, Christopher Hitchens quotes, and bird guides of the southwest, to name a few. In this way, stories that take less than a minute to absorb evolve into longer multimedia experiences, full of sound and image. For a book that dwells on the soul and what makes us human, such added dimension sparks life through a reader’s curiosity, placing narratives into specific spheres of pop culture.
Worth noting, too, is Williams’ smart verbal echoing within her prose, which links stories and at times binds otherwise dissimilar narratives. “Thicket” sees a man sitting in his garden with his dog, and “Emergency,” which comes next in the collection, recounts a 911 dispatcher hanging up on a caller because he “sound[s] like a dog barking.” Similarly, the Nabokov butterfly story, “Career,” is followed by a conversation between Azrael and the Devil about gnostic interpretations of the insects in “Those Gnostics.” A less obvious echo occurs between the collection’s first and thirty-fifth stories. In the first, titled “Kitsch,” Williams writes, “It was the park, his parents said. You were supposed to say the park” (emphasis Williams’). The later story, “Ant,” features the lines, “As a toddler she had caused a sensation in her family when she announced she wanted to live in a little hole like the ant. Not an ant, the ant” (again, emphasis Williams’). Matching verbal patterns, not to mention identical emphases, fuse these tales in the mind. Add in multiple visits to grandparents within stories and more than one animal named after a god or emperor and the collection gathers a multitude of impressive connecting points.
But the longest recurring thread within Concerning the Future of Souls is Williams’ persistent reminder that humans are destroying the planet. We receive our first hint of this in “Dunce,” which appears early in the book. The story recaps the thinking of philosopher and Franciscan John Duns Scotus, particularly his concepts of haecceity, “the ‘thisness’ of every thing,” and The Univocity of Being, “the argument that we all are one in the oneness of God,” before explaining how Scotus’ thoughts were eventually replaced by Renaissance humanism with its “emphasis on the self and the centrality of the human in the cosmos” (not to mention how Scotus also became the model for the dunce cap). This shift from Scotus’ theories, the author seemingly submits, aids mankind’s ruin of Earth thanks to our own thoughts of superiority. Animals lose status, and “Sentience” speaks of the slaughter of 1,400 dolphins in the Faroe Islands when a traditional hunt gets out of hand. Respect for the land evaporates, and “Uluru” reports of tourists “knocking off fragments of the half-billion-year-old” Australian sandstone monolith for souvenirs. Azrael visits the “smoldering stumps” of a “vanished forest,” and the Devil claims that the moon will “not tolerate forever human beings’ rude assaults — the probing and prodding and poking and collecting.” While considering metempsychosis (the transmigration of a soul between two beings), Azrael admits, “I wish I could do that exclusively. But times have changed so,” pointing out extreme biodiversity loss and the extinction of countless species. “Fertilizer” details Florida’s decision to dump excess radioactive waste into the waters of Tampa Bay, killing 60 tons of sea life, and in “Room 111 & Room 112” Williams tells a story without a single word, instead inking an empty square on the page to represent the space where 19 lives were lost in the 2022 Uvalde, Texas school shooting.
With Concerning the Future of Souls, Joy Williams has written a book that feels like a puzzle begging for multiple readings, for with each one, additional pieces fall into place. As in Ninety-Nine Stories of God, the fun is found in watching the mosaic come together. And not all is doom and gloom in Williams’ fictional and funny worlds. In “8,” a woman’s life story is told through the various trees she planted along the way, while “Leopard” tracks a man with dementia as he visits his ailing wife for possibly the last time in the hospital. “Oh my dear, my dear, I hate leaving you like this,” he says, and as a reader, the emotional charge of these words fires from the page. Regardless of our terrible nature, Williams shows us that humanity still retains the empathetic core necessary to make things right. In the end, Williams wants her readers to laugh, but also to seriously consider what is happening to this one planet we share.
[Published by Tin House on July 2, 2024, t176 pages, $22.95 US/$29.955 CAN, hardcover]