Concerning the Future of Souls
“Joy Williams is a master of the short story . . .”
Joy Williams is a master of the short story, and her sixth collection marks her second since 2015’s increasingly miscategorized New and Collected Stories. That year gave us the new Ninety-nine Stories of God, also from Tin House, and this summer brings us that book’s companion, the even newer Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael. While an appreciation of the latter does not necessitate a reading of the former, it wouldn’t hurt the left hand to know what the right hand has already written. More than any two books by Williams, these stand in unmistakable conversation.
As its subtitle suggests, Williams’ latest collection features 99 stories, all short. None is over three pages. One is one word. Several contain images in place of words. All stories are numbered at the front and given titles only at the end.
While some titles risk inscrutability, most serve as shibboleths, punchlines, or decoder rings, some doing double or triple duty in this department, as when the title of one seven-sentence story, composed entirely of dialogue, reveals the nature of the setting, circumstances, and one of the story’s speakers: “Human Resources.” This, for the record, is the story of Alph, that sacred river from Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, interviewing for a job, with the HR rep ultimately telling Alph, “I don’t think you’re right for this position.”
Yes, you’re allowed to laugh. As with much of William’s work, how can you not laugh? Despite the morbid subject matter, or perhaps because of it, many a grotesquerie arrives filigreed with spun sugar.
Even tragedies are, at times, undercut by a deadpan tone, as when the narrator of story #24 considers the demise of Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton, noting: “That Death would seek him out by means of a malfunctioning appliance seems preposterous but one shouldn’t make too much of it.” The story is titled “The Fan,” after the appliance thought to have short-circuited and electrocuted the man.
Among parables, protestations, and observations, Williams weaves a rousing mythology. Revealed primarily through conversations between Azrael and the Devil, the story of the longsuffering Azrael, transporter of souls, is revealed. Azrael is a being with a thousand eyes and four thousand wings. But Azrael’s job, of late, is unclear, his duties murky.
With the planet dying and nature in disarray, what is a soul’s final destination? “Where can they go?” Azrael asks. “Nature’s vesture is no longer available. Indwelling anywhere there is impossible. The mountains have been stripped of their holiness, the oceans of their mysteries.” Given a cosmology in which souls return to nature, what happens when there remains no nature to which a soul might be returned?
And here we are reminded that Williams is also the author of 2001’s Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Williams does not hesitate to condemn humankind’s destruction of the planet, to point a finger at Florida’s fertilizer industry and the radioactive material created as a byproduct, or to open our eyes to the 60 tons of marine life killed by just one toxic waste dump into Tampa Bay in 2021.
The connections between the mythic and the real, between the celestial and the terrestrial, are never tenuous, not in Williams’ hands. As the Devil reminds Azrael, regarding the state of his charges: “The soul’s afterlife is assured but it’s not a personal afterlife. It’s not connected to life.”
Instead, the soul, after death, is connected to the earth. Or it’s meant to be. But where might Azrael ferry these souls when “the forest had been a living being and now it was not”? How to do his job when “his methods were being disrupted by the sheer precipitous magnitude” of deforestation, pollution, and mass extinction?
Is there hope? For us? For the planet? Concerning the Future of Souls offers no saccharine answers.
It is no wonder that the collection’s cover features the image of a white rhinoceros. At the time of this writing, only two Northern white rhinos exist. As both are female, the subspecies will soon be extinct.