Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams Review by Donna Vatnick

Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams

Review by Donna Vatnick

Publisher: Tin House Books

Publication Date: July 2, 2024

ISBN: 978-1959030591

Pages: 176

Joy Williams has long been obsessed with humanity’s all-destructive existence. Known for her misanthropic fiction, as well as her beautifully scathing essays on American greed and the devastation of the environment, Williams always seems to drive into the very heart of American fear. Called “one of the county’s best living writers of the short story” by The New Yorker’s Katy Waldman (2021), Williams creates precise and otherworldly prose that brings readers in contact with undefinable eternal truths. Her 2013 short story collection, Ninety-Nine Stories of God, explored the elusive and arbitrary Creator. It gifted readers what Tin House described as a “Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass.” Several of my friends told me they have earnestly used it as a prayer book. Now, Williams confronts the incomprehensibility of our doomed fates in Concerning the Future of Souls: Ninety-Nine Stories of Azrael. And it’s great timing because we need it.

Just as our time on Earth is short (as Williams keeps reminding us), these stories are short: never longer than two pages, sometimes barely one word. Each one has a wisdom of its own. To read her prose evokes Thomas Wolfe’s “I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.” Each story is powered by dark humor, disorientation, paradox. At times, Williams becomes lyrical and sincere, other times she turns sharp and casual. With no hesitation, she will throw a Coca-Cola machine, whale slaughter, and a lonesome beach vacation onto one single page. 

The backbone of Concerning the Future of Souls is the playful dialogue between the Devil and Azrael, the angel tasked with transporting souls. In the surrounding stories, Williams curates a commonplace book—a compilation of proverbial wisdoms and factroids—to help us remember useful concepts or challenge our thinking. Following the commonplacing traditions of hundreds of philosophers, from Seneca to Francis Bacon to Thoreau to Virginia Woolf, Williams gives us scraps of the news, lyrics from songs, philosophical quotes, and even shapes and figures. She orchestrates a chorus of voices, from Don DeLillo’s The Names to Pascal’s Pensées to Ted Hughes’ She Seemed So Considerate; she collects wisdom from Rilke, Calvin, Pythagoras. She makes a fable of Kafka’s dreadful roach and Wideman’s newborn baby thrown down the chute. 

In reading this book, one has the feeling of brief but warm encounters with thousands of souls. As Williams eliminates the boundary between fiction and reality, her stories become even more evocative. Williams devotes each of her ninety-nine stories to dismantling the idea that human beings are at the center of the universe. She prioritizes our humility as she makes the claim that maybe we really can’t save ourselves. Her characters ask an all too intimidating question: what happens now that we know we’re doomed?

To approach this, Williams weaves together the tensions of fiction and reality. In the fictional tension, we get attached to the protagonists. We want them to be okay. The Devil, vain but irresistible, and Azrael, humble and feather-bodied, are trying to get along. But they’re not natural friends. Here and there, they appear in a story, discussing souls or milkshakes. The deeper we get, the more the dialogues darken. In story #70, Azrael is tasked with collecting the souls of “octopi and sharks, great fishes and rays and turtles, even the glittering lowly ones, the little ones.” He can’t tell if he’s weeping or if it’s seawater. The story that directly preceded this one was, however, nonfiction: a crafted report of radioactive waste that has been allowed to leech into Tampa Bay, with every single living thing washing up dead, and with scientists “monitoring the situation.” How familiar. The tension should rest on the Bay, but Williams wants it to also rest on Azrael: What if there really are a fixed number of souls, like Plato had said, and like the Devil suggests? Then what will Azrael do with all the souls in this era of extinction? Clearly, the many-eyed angel is overworked. We feel bad for him because we know it’s our fault.

Meanwhile the Devil, who Williams paints as all too human, with “his infinite supply of sneakers” that he never wears twice, is increasingly tired too. The Devil and Azrael throw little quips at each other, to ease the feeling of doom, but Williams surprises us with the Devil’s own wisdom: 

“I have found,” he says, “that the feeling that the end is near has abated among human beings…Don’t you find it strange? When the end is in fact so very near?” 

This is a prophecy that Williams refuses to shy away from. What will happen to the Devil, who has less and less work to do, since we do it all to ourselves? She doesn’t let us find much relief in sentimentality. Somehow, it feels healing to be held accountable by her.

We are reminded that there are many ways to read Williams. One way is to come to the page with only what you know, and what she gives you. No google, no encyclopedia. The effect is, to say the least, dizzying. References to thinkers or concepts both obscure and famous. To those who may balk at this on a first go, there seems to be purpose in the approach. In its opaqueness, Williams argues that art imitates life, and vice versa, with nothingness at its center, and the pursuit of meaning all around. The feeling resonates with T.S. Eliot’s, “That is not it at all. That is not what I meant, at all.” 

Williams does not leave the reader completely unguided, however. She teaches us to read her by giving us the title at the end of each story—underlined, and in all caps. Much like being alive, we can’t comprehend the meaning of a Williams story until we reach its end, and have time to look back, revisit, reflect. In one particularly striking example, Williams tells the old story of the Yaqui, an indigenous tribe of the state of Sonora, who heard of two rifle-clad men hunting in the desert. In this story, the men shoot a small deer, again and again, but it always returns standing and watching them. Later, the Yaqui, hearing of this tale, thought it did not “bring good news.” Then the title drops: “NEWS.” A pause. What does this mean? One must go back, read again. It narrows the scope just enough to help you feel like the title is a key to a code Williams made for us to crack. 

With the aid of a search engine, Williams’ short stories transform again. Treating her more mysterious allusions as opportunities for exploration, I found myself going to rabbit holes of other thinkers. Each story bloomed the longer I spent with it. While the subject of doom can feel quite bleak, and even tedious, her stories are medicine. Another exquisite layer of paradox.

Williams’ Azreal thinks to himself, “But I must have faith that this is intended.” And don’t we all? The reader is left remembering yet again the painful irony that the one species desperate to know itself cannot.

Donna Vatnick is a journalist, essayist and science writer based in Providence, Rhode Island. She was the Senior Writing Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis after graduating with her MFA in nonfiction.  She is currently working on a book about the cultural history and future of the liver. Her scientific research has appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Case Reports, Gynecologic Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Insight and more. 

Joy Williams is the acclaimed author of five novels, including The Quick and the Dead and Harrow, as well as her essay collection Ill Nature, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also authored five short story collections, and now returns with a sixth: Concerning the Future of Souls coming out July 2024. Widely anthologized and honored, Williams has received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the Paris Review’s Hadada Award, and many more. She lives in Arizona and Wyoming.

23 October 2024