Book Review: Readings

The Quick & the Dead: A Novel

Knopf, 352 pp., $25

Ten years after publishing the stellar short-story collection Escapes, the critically acclaimed and cult favorite Joy Williams finally returns with her much-awaited fourth novel, The Quick & the Dead. The book is vintage Williams -- odd, funny, dark, heartbreaking, philosophical, and packed with the kind of detail, situations, and dialogue that can only come from her delightfully skewed and distinct fictional universe.

The novel focuses on subjects that have occupied Williams throughout her career, namely, the awkward inner lives of adolescent girls and mortality. A clue to the novel's title can be found in an early story from her collection Taking Care, in which one of Williams' characters uses the phrase "the quick and the dead" to point out that "quick" means "unborn." The "unborn" in this novel are the three teenage girls who lie at its center -- politically conscious and headstrong Alice, quiet and mournful Corvus, and prissy but pragmatic Annabel, all united by the fact that their mothers are dead. These three girls wander through the violent and barren Arizona desert landscape, a place where "nothing had any subtlety, not even the light." Too young to know where their lives are going, yet still aware of its hardships and cruelties, the three pass their summer days not doing much of anything other than waiting for life to either get better or truly begin.

Other characters pop in and out of the narrative: Annabel's widower father, Carter, who's in love with his Buddhist gardener, Donald; Annabel's dead mother, Ginger, who literally haunts Carter, popping in at inopportune times to brow-beat him; a disturbed young stroke survivor named Ray; a precocious eight-year-old zealot named Emily Pickless, her slutty mother, and her mother's dog-hating boyfriend, J. C.; assorted oddballs from the local nursing home (essentially the living dead); Stumpp, a crusty wildlife museum owner; and Sherwin, a gay piano player. All of these characters interconnect, either indirectly or directly. Some of them die (one has his penis blown off), others live, and through them Williams explores one of the central questions of this novel: "What is the difference between being not yet born and having lived, being now dead?"

The Quick & the Dead, like Williams' previous novels (including the haunting State of Grace), is mostly plotless and episodic. The characters float in and out of the story and sit around talking or thinking, frequently about very odd things (one man talks to a monkey walking around inside his head). At times it's also a bit cold, emotionless; it's as bleak as its desert setting. It's not for everyone, and it's true that this book is not as successful as her best short stories, which retain all of the weight of the novels, but with more emotional clarity and power (see "Honored Guest" in The Best American Short Stories 1995 for a devastating portrait of impending death). But Williams' lovely sentences, her perfect diction, and her ability to make even the most mundane details alive and new will amply reward true fans and other readers who pick up this book. The Quick & the Dead marks a much-welcome return. It's also (pardon the awful pun) a cause for joy.