Review by New York Times Review
LAST YEAR JOY WILLIAMS published "The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories" to thundering, near-universal and thoroughly deserved acclaim. She has followed it up now with her most hermetic book since "The Changeling," a bleak magic-realist novel so critically reviled upon publication in 1978 that it stayed out of print for three decades. (It was reissued in 2008 by Fairy Tale Review Press. All her other fiction - including the National Book Award-nominated "State of Grace" and Pulitzer finalist "The Quick and the Dead" - has been published by major commercial houses, and remains in print.) The new book, "Ninety-Nine Stories of God," is a collection of micro-fictions, and itself something of a changeling. It was first published as an e-book in 2013 by the digital upstart Byliner, to critical as well as authorial neglect. In an interview with The Paris Review Williams boasted that she had never seen the finished e-book version and did not care to; neither was it mined for her collected stories. It appears now in boards and paper for the first time from Tin House Books, a small independent press with a well-earned reputation for punching above its weight. Though technically a reissue, most readers will consider this the collection's inaugural incarnation. Wry and playful, except for when densely allusive and willfully obtuse, "Ninety-Nine Stories of God" is a treasure trove of bafflements and tiny masterpieces. The title is mostly borrowed from Rainer Maria Rilke's prose collection of pseudo-folk tales, "Stories of God," while the "Ninety-Nine" seems drawn from the hadith of Sahih Muslim: "Verily, there are 99 names for Allah. ... He who enumerates them would get into Paradise." Notably, there is no definitive consensus on what these 99 names are, but they tend to be action verbs, and some appear to contradict each other (al-Muqaddim is the Expediter, al-Mu'akkhir is the Delayer) - all the better, one imagines, to underscore his omnipotence as well as his unpredictability. Tonally and structurally, Williams pays explicit homage to Thomas Bernhard's "The Voice Imitator" and Franz Kafka's "The ZUrau Aphorisms." Bernhard's book contains 104 stories of at most a page, including anecdotes, biographical sketches, jokes, paraphrased gossip and summaries of newspaper articles about heinous crimes. Kafka's consists of 109 numbered but untitled philosophical fragments, including such gems as "Goodness is in a certain sense comfortless" and "A cage went in search of a bird." Williams has adopted much of Bernhard's methodology - there's a good bit of cribbing from newspapers, and notable cameos by Dante, Philip K. Dick, O.J. Simpson and the Unabomber, among others - but the stories are numbered like Kafka's fragments, with their titles appearing below their endings, right-justified and in all-caps, where they function more like punch lines or answer keys. ALL WILLIAMS'S WORK is informed by a learned yet half-feral Christianity. While Marilynne Robinson seeks to recuperate the legacy of John Calvin and the liberal strain in Midwest Protestantism, Williams casts her lot with the desert mystics - as well as the actual desert. Sand and saguaro, coyote and stone, have as much or more claim on her empathy as any man or woman. Animals and ecosystems, after all, have not chosen despoilment and self-destruction, whereas man has chosen it for them as well as for himself. Williams is a vociferous and despairing pantheist, more Spinoza than St. Francis (though she does love dogs). Her apocalyptic worldview often translates on the page to comedy, albeit of a brutal and comfortless sort. "Ignorance," for instance, begins with an adult's recollection of a childhood field trip to a slaughterhouse, called off in the building's parking lot out of late-breaking concern for what the students might witness there. All they end up seeing are "gleaming refrigerated trucks, their engines idling" and "vast brown lagoons." The remainder of the story shifts focus, recounting a local news item about a pet pig who saved a man from drowning in a lake. The reporter asks "would the pig have rescued the man if she had known that he and his companions had just enjoyed a picnic of ham sandwiches? The pig's owner replied that pigs are intelligent, more intelligent than dogs, but they are not omniscient." The next story, "Satan's Leathery Wing," describes a conflict over how to preserve the smokestack of a defunct slaughterhouse. (The title is borrowed from J.M. Coetzee's novel "Elizabeth Costello," in which an explicit connection is drawn between animal exploitation and the Holocaust.) The Historic Preservation Commission's plan to landmark the smokestack is supported by the local animal rights group, though the latter's specific hope is to build "a museum addressing animal cruelty" at the site. The group's idea is denounced as "divisive and inappropriate" and its membership as "practically terrorists." The story concludes with the observation that the facility "mostly processed horses." I tended to read "Ninety-Nine Stories of God" in short bursts, 10 or 15 at a time, and found that on each pass different individual stories as well as runs of stories stood out to me. Chains of association appeared and disappeared like currents in a swift-flowing stream. Some stories were arresting or impressive on first read, while others required more time and attention to blossom in my understanding. "We can only know what God is not, not what God is," Williams writes in "Naked Mind," a piece that makes no pretense of being anything other than spiritual instruction, and which I took for the collection's thesis statement. "We must push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing." What to make of this? The phrase "darkness of unknowing" samples both "Dark Night of the Soul" and "The Cloud of Unknowing," two essential texts of Christian mysticism. It seems strange at first that Williams has replaced the typical notion of ascent toward God with an endless descent, but in "The Cloud of Unknowing" it is told that God's "love is his breadth; his power is his height; and his wisdom is his depth." In this formulation, then, to strip away knowledge (or what passes for knowledge in a culture of self-satisfied death-bent delusion) is to gain wisdom, and to dive ever deeper into the darkness is to draw ever closer to God. In the third story here, a "noted humanist" smugly argues that "nothing could be discovered" on other planets "that could write a symphony ... or be capable of appreciating the symphony" and that any world without mankind would be "the worst thing he could imagine ... even if these worlds were populated by other intelligent and enterprising life-forms." After his talk he goes to a restaurant and orders trout, but "to his discomfort, he detected from the plate the faint sound of the most beautiful music. It was exquisite, joyous yet heartbreaking, a delicate furling of gratitude and praise gradually diminishing, then gone." The humanist attacks the waiter and the chef and winds up committed to a mental hospital, where "his ravings about the trout" are "no more appreciated than the ravings of any of the other lunatics there." The story is an indictment of the limits and exclusions of so-called "humanism," while also serving as a reminder that from biblical Abraham on down to the present day the recipients of revelation have always been hard to tell apart from madmen. This story - viciously, deliciously - is titled "Aubade," i.e. a song of the new day's dawn. Williams's apocalyptic vision often translates to comedy, of a brutal and comfortless sort. JUSTIN TAYLOR is the author, most recently, of the story collection "Flings."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Fans of Williams will not be disappointed in this latest offering. The stories, rather than devotional, or a sweet reminiscence of divine intervention, are a series of vignettes that throw into sharp relief the rippling something in the back of humanity's daily lives. When God appears by name, he is a character, bemused and sometimes befuddled by the creatures he has created, curious and sometimes surprised by the features humanity has bestowed on him. The Lord appears intermittently, trying out new material. It's as if Williams took the song What If God Was One of Us? and gave it flesh, pondering God's visit with wolves or adoption of a turtle. Though God does not appear by name in every story, something of the divine echoes in each, something larger than the humans that populate each chapter. Each story is brief, with some less than a paragraph. Some amaze, some are quietly powerful, some gracefully absurd. Much like the divine, Williams' prose is simple and brutal, thoughtful and haunting. A spare but startling book.--Engel, Christine Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Williams's hands (The Visiting Privilege), a "story of God" can apparently be almost anything. Her slender new collection includes in its 99 stories pithy flash-fiction pieces about mothers, wives, writers, and dogs, anecdotes from the lives of Tolstoy and Kafka, newspaper clipping-like meditations on O.J. Simpson and Ted Kaczynski, conversational asides (the story "Museum" consists entirely of the line "We were not interested the way we thought we would be interested"), and, finally, actual stories about God-a particularly put-upon, bewildered God who seems to have lost the thread of his creation somewhere along the line. Here, the Holy Ghost is just as likely to alight in a slaughterhouse as to visit a demolition derby or appear to William James or Simone Weil, both of whom have their own brush with transcendence. The best of Williams's humor, and her wonderful feel for characters, is present in pieces such as "Elephants Never Forget God," in which James Agee describes a movie he'd like to make, or "Giraffe," in which an aging gardener suddenly feels the presence of the divine. Somewhere in the neighborhood of Jim Harrison's Letters to Yesenin, these stories are 100% Williams: funny, unsettling, and mysterious, to be puzzled over and enjoyed across multiple readings. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
As Pulitzer finalist Williams observes, "Franz Kafka once called his writing a form of prayer," and these stories are indeed prayer-like in their sculpted simplicity-and proverb-like in their investigation of the world's mysterious ways. A humanist goes mad countering the idea of intelligent life elsewhere, a brilliant painter continues her work after a debilitating accident, a child and a lion discuss near-death experience, and a man denies his long sober mother a martini on her deathbed as "she'd regret it." From a reading of Dante's Inferno on Good Friday to Philip K. Dick's asking about a girl's golden fish necklace, belief figures as both backdrop and content here. But the Lord's intervention in our lives can be uneven. VERDICT Perfect little gems; it's rare when such short works (many the length of this review) can truly satisfy. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
"Hell is unpleasant. Heaven is more pleasant." Williams, maker of superb short fictions, plumbs the distinction in this slender, evocative collection. Absent a direct statement otherwise, we should understand the deity here to be something along the lines of what old John Lennon said: "God is a concept by which we measure our pain." The God that lurks in Williams' brief, elegant stories is very often puzzled by creation, as when he tries to understand why humans should so have it in for wolves: "You really are so intelligent," he tells one pack, "and have such glorious eyes. Why do you think you're hounded so?" Ever gracious, the wolves thank God for including them in his plan, leaving him to ponderwell, never mind, since we don't want to step on the punch line. Suffice it to say that sometimes God shows up on time, sometimes not, sometimes not at all; sometimes he extends grace, and sometimes, as with a colony of bats he's been living with in a cave, he "had done nothing to save them." This isn't theology in the Joel Osteen vein, but it is deep and thought-through theology all the same, and even when God doesn't figure in the narrative by name, the divine presence is immanent. And sometimes, of course, God is there without announcing himself, taking the form of, say, that homeless fellow who mutteringly assures us, "You don't get older during the time spent in church." Seldom occupying more than a couple of pages, Williams' stories are headed by a number, one to 99, but carry an "undertitle" at the end that glosses the tale in question, sometimes quite offhandedly: in the case of that heaven and hell distinction, for example, it's "PRETTY MUCH THE SAME, THEN," while an argument about the impossibility of really knowing God is slugged, rather more mysteriously, "NAKED MIND." Admirers of Williamsand anyone who treasures a story well told should be onewill find much to like here. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
