America is an increasingly strange place these days, but perhaps the strangeness was always lurking in the things that made its culture seem familiar, even comforting, to those who were reared elsewhere. Take, for example, the use of the word “God”, who is always blessing America. He is not much invoked by politicians on this side of the Atlantic (except in Ulster, where He also did a great job), because we would find that specious. Nor do we have religious novelists, like the great Marilynne Robinson, who writes from a place of belief and teaches theology in her spare time. Faith and the problems of faith still animate American fiction. Even the bloody sacramentalism of Cormac McCarthy can feel religious, if only by opposition.
Like Robinson, Joy Williams is acquainted with the devil and she knows what it is to be saved. Williams’s father was a congregationalist preacher and her grandfather a Welsh Baptist minister. She has the same spiritual rhythms as Robinson, but the stakes are higher in Williams, and a lot more fun. She does horror and incomprehensibility as well as the ecstatic, and she does it all deadpan. I want to say that if you banged a Robinson novel off one by Cormac McCarthy, the sparks that flew would be something like Williams, except that neither of those writers does funny and Williams is the kind of funny you can’t explain. In her new collection Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael, the humour comes from Williams’s wryness and her brevity, the way she whisks a joke away, obliging the reader to follow on.
