Joy Williams’s quietly splendid fifth collection, “Ninety-Nine Stories of God,’’ is a slim little thing, but the book has a surprising heft when you hold it in your hands.
This is only fitting. The prose inside is airily laid out, and some pieces are only a single sentence long, yet Williams is a master of the miniature. There is weight to these stories.
Even as I read the book for the first time, I began to envision my copy some years from now, the pages well thumbed, smudgy at the corners. It is that kind of collection: funny, sage, and as meditative as a book of prayers — or as I imagine such a volume might be to someone who believes in God. I believe in art, and “Ninety-Nine Stories of God’’ feels like prayer to me.
Williams, whose father was a minister, places God explicitly in only some of the stories. “The Lord had always wanted to participate in a demolition derby,’’ one parable begins. Williams (’’The Visiting Privilege’’) puts him behind the wheel of a pink Wagoneer, managing in a scant couple of pages a perfect balance of absurdity, light humor, and stabbing poignancy.
“The Lord was in a den with a pack of wolves,’’ starts another tale, whose God is a benevolent father. Sympathetic to the animals, he is unable, as it turns out, to save them from being demonized on Earth.
“Thank you for inviting us to participate in your plan anyway, the wolves said politely.
“The Lord did not want to appear addled, but what was the plan His sons were referring to exactly?’’
Many of the stories, though, are rooted in a more realistic human world. These are potent, layered, astonishingly efficient sketches of how we live — the depths of our barbarity, the tenacity of our ill will, the boundlessness of our stupidity — and how fearful or eager or reluctant we are to die. The harm people do to animals, children, the Earth, and one another is a prominent motif.
But Williams is not a religious moralizer, even if she does assign each of her stories a number, as in a hymnal.
Number 16, “If Picked or Uprooted These Beautiful Flowers Will Disappear,’’ begins sneakily, with two older women taking a summer walk. A burst of Old Testament violence turns the story gothic, but by then we already hate the victim. Based on a handful of utterances, we judge her a callous, harmful creature, and her demise is intensely satisfying: biblical justice.
In number 36, “Dearest,’’ a woman named Penny rents out the house that her late husband loved, though she never warmed to it, and comes to detest the tenants, who cherish the place. “Penny found them irritating in any number of ways — they were ostentatious, full of self-regard, and cheap. They also did not read.’’
These are, of course, exactly the sort of petty assessments we make of people, but then Williams adds this: Penny knew “they irritated her because they had found happiness in a simple place where she had not.’’ This bracing self-awareness does nothing to alter her hostility or her scorched-earth behavior.
Elsewhere Williams writes of visions and mystics, of biblical commandments utterly ignored, of the disconnect between spiritual practice and quotidian behavior.
Number 26, the acid-etched “Satisfaction,’’ begins with the words: “There was a preacher at her parish whom she simply loathed.’’ He’s not a bad guy, just a bungler. Still, the woman is determined to order him away from her deathbed if he ever comes anywhere near it. Not that she’ll be dying anytime soon, as far as we can tell.
Those with a sunny view of human nature won’t find much to reflect that in this collection, yet it’s not that Williams is a cynic. A tenderness lurks inside her acerbity, apparent in her sympathy for animals and her evident conviction that God doesn’t keep company with cruelty.
As she envisions him, he’s the kind of guy who would stand in line to adopt a tortoise, mildly answering a volunteer’s screening questions.
“Are you responsible? They need access to water.
“I try to be very responsible.
“That sometimes isn’t enough, she said tartly.’’
This is another of Williams’s motifs: that intention alone will accomplish nothing, that prayer on its own is insufficient, that life demands action.
Action begins with thought, though. With “Ninety-Nine Stories,’’ Williams has given us something to meditate on.
NINETY-NINE
STORIES OF GOD
By Joy Williams
Tin House,
168 pp., $19.95
Laura Collins-Hughes can be reached at laura.collinshughes@gmail.com.
