The devil is a flower plucked from a cloud: on Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams

not a book review but also not not a book review

In Concerning the Future of Souls, Joy Williams follows up Ninety-Nine stories of God with another ninety-nine stories but this time centered around Azrael, Death, and the Devil. For someone raised pretty strictly Catholic up until a mandatory Confirmation I am pretty ignorant when it comes to religious iconography concerning Death and the Devil. Truthfully, most of my knowledge of that comes from like, a bunch of exorcism movies. Prior to Concerning the Future of Souls, I had only read Harrow by Joy Williams and was bewildered, moved, and captivated by it. I think bewilderment was my main take away and so I hesitated to really dig into her canon. 

Concerning the Future of Souls doesn’t really absolve any of the bewilderment but Williams’s writing continues to turn me upside down and make me really appreciate how clever and experimental but still grounded writing can be. In “Uluru,” Williams writes about the very human impulse to visit some land and immediately try and claim it as your own, only to let that piece of land crumble to dust like some long forgotten tchotchke in a junk drawer. Some of my favorite stories were the ones like “Uluru” where Williams excavates the relationship humans hold to nature and the reverence or lack of reverence we hold for it. The same happens again in “8” where we follow a character who plants a different tree every 10 years to varying and mostly disappointing results. It ends with one of my favorite lines  “...though the Buddha was certainly no fool he had certainly overestimated our abilities to be responsible by a great deal.” 

That line feels like the book’s thesis, as throughout it figures like Carl Jung, Vladimir Nabakov, and Thomas Merton ruminate on the existential nonsense of living. Animals also exist in the book to ruminate sometimes, but mostly to observe and be the innocent bystanders of human destruction. They also exist as witnesses to the conversations between Azrael and the Devil, sometimes taking sides but usually just quietly observing, attempting to exist. Williams reminds us, to the very last page, that their mortality is tied to our morality and even when we are conscious of that we fail, like in what is essentially the punchline to “Recompense.” Were it not for Williams’s bizarre sense of humor, Concerning the Future of Souls would feel like another report on the state of the world: bad. It’s not positivity porn either, but it’s intense realism that is poetic and profane. 

Joy Williams and her dog.

I read this book via receiving an ARC from Tin House. Thank you to Tin House. You can purchase Concerning the Future of Souls, which is out 7/2/2024, here.

The title of this post was taken from the recently released “Hear the Children Sing” by Bonnie “Prince” Billy & Nathan Salsburg & Tyler Trotter. It’s a cover of a Lungfish song. Video below.