This is another day,” Joy Williams writes toward the end of Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael. “I know not what it will bring forth, but make me ready, Lord, for whatever it may be. If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely. If I am to sit still, help me to sit quietly. If I am to lie low, help me to do it patiently. And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly.”
The lines come, or are adapted, from The Book of Common Prayer, although what Williams is after is more than mere homage. Rather, she is, as ever, engaged in a meditation, or a series of meditations, on mystery and meaning, sense and spirit. She is making of the language something new and entirely her own.
Concerning the Future of Souls, after all, is not a daybook, although many of its “stories” are drawn from outside sources. It is a radical reconsideration of both literature and form. A companion volume to 2016’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God, this book too is composed of 99 installments, some related and others independent, and many as brief as a sentence or two. The result is a kind of offhanded brilliance, a series of sketches that adds up and also doesn’t, a pitiless reimagining if not quite of resilience, then, perhaps, of faith. “When Azrael,” Williams observes, describing the Islamic archangel of death who appears throughout these pages, “was an infant cub colt pup gosling, before tongues and eyes began covering his form and wings commenced to appear, each one more splendid than the one preceding, he had many questions, but after he met God only a few remained.”
The reference to God is a call back to Ninety-Nine Stories, although in many ways Concerning the Future of Souls is the devil’s book. In that regard, it is, perhaps, a mirror image, reflected through a glass darkly, portraiture from the end of the world. Like Azrael, Satan assumes a central presence, emerging in a variety of guises. When first we encounter him, it is through the filter of his dissatisfaction, his inner voice “still small…, that little piece of God caught inside him like a fish bone, trying to make him feel bad.” Who knew that the devil could be so vulnerable? Who knew that the fall had been so traumatic, leaving him to feel like “a sop, a concession, an afterthought”?
Compare this to God, who, upon deciding to create a human, sends an angel to gather the necessary dust. “One of God’s favorite elements,” Williams tells us, “was water so that would undoubtedly be involved in turning dust into whatever He had in mind, but what else might be added the angels had not a clue. Maybe nothing. The Divine was rumored to like working with very little.”
God doesn’t appear a lot in Concerning the Future of Souls, which seems only fitting since, as Williams established in Ninety-Nine Stories, He doesn’t always (or often) allow himself to be seen. “One should not define God in human language nor anthropomorphize that which is ineffable and indescribable,” she writes there. “We can only know what God is not, not what God is.”
The sentiment recalls Nancy Mairs, who in her riveting spiritual memoir A Dynamic God frames the conundrum this way: “The need to reduce God to a person having mental states with which we are familiar—desire, anger, retribution (but seldom, alas, a sense of humor)—does God little service and ourselves even less. We would do better to stand before God in silence, allowing the Holy to open to us without our definition or direction. Only God can say what God is. We can only allow ourselves to be taught.”
At the same time, I think of Robert Stone, who in a 1985 interview with the Paris Review declared, “I feel a very deep connection to the existentialist tradition of God as an absence—not a meaningless void, but a negative presence we live in terms of.”
Williams, I feel compelled to mention, is not as hopeless as all that. Or maybe, it’s more accurate to say she has held on to some aspect of belief. Like Mairs, she writes with a flinty humor, highlighting every absurdity. In “Emergency,” a man dials 911, only to be told he is talking too fast. “I’m going to hang up now,” the operator insists. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying. You sound like a dog barking. Do you know your location? Call back when you’re calmer.”
Other pieces eschew language altogether: “This Image Is No Longer Available” features only a blacked-out box, whereas “Arrival” repurposes the score of a Chopin “Prelude.”
The point is the insufficiency of language to reckon with what we’re facing: spiritual desolation, environmental collapse. Such matters have long driven Williams’s work, although that focus sharpened in her 2021 novel, Harrow, which imagines a planet where the apocalypse has come and gone, even as human civilization (or some degraded version of it) remains. “Denial is now an art,” she writes, “a social grace, a survival tool, as is apathy which has become a sign of refinement.”
If God is an absence, in other words, it is not because He has abandoned us so much as that we have driven Him away.
Williams makes this explicit when Azrael and Satan are forced to consider “that souls are leaving a person before the body dies”—a disruption of the necessary order of things. “It was inevitable,” the latter posits. “The soul wants out. Not being fed what’s necessary. Requires a better host.” Here again, we confront the absurd, the bitter humor, the universe as enormous cosmic joke. Still, there is a deeper enigma at play. If Azrael is a collector of souls, what will become of him if the souls disappear? “His duties would be eliminated,” reflects the devil, “the manifest of all the souls he carried obliterated.” Even the angels must be affected, Williams wants us to recognize, by the slow collapse of the existing hierarchies. Even the angels must be affected by the dissolution we have caused.
What does it mean to be alone in the universe? What does it mean to have faith without hope, or is it the other way around? Regardless, in these koan-like miniatures, Williams creates a series of overlapping vistas that add up to a context larger than themselves. Such a context encompasses despair as well as perseverance. Or maybe it’s that the characters, including Azrael and Satan, don’t have any other place to go. The same, it shouldn’t need saying, is the case for every one of us; salvation has never been the point. Instead, as the author argues in “Migration,” “they must just avoid, by flying higher and higher, the tiny ruthless figures with their incomprehensible purpose massed in the fields below.”
That’s us down there, Williams is saying. The tiny ruthless figures are us.•
CONCERNING THE FUTURE OF SOULS: 99 STORIES OF AZRAEL, BY JOY WILLIAMS
