The Quick and the Dead
by Joy Williams
Knopf

On the inside jacket flap Bret Easton Ellis raves — in red ink, no less — that with "The Quick and the Dead" Joy Williams has declared herself "the rightful heir to the mastery, genius, and poetry of Flannery O'Connor." Now, short of infusing the pages with anthrax dust, I don't think that Alfred A. Knopf could have done anything to make me want to read a book less than to have Bret Easton Ellis compare it to Flannery O'Connor. But I will concede that there are certain similarities between the two, most notably a keen sense of place coupled with an apparently insatiable appetite for everyday human cruelty, insanity, and suffering.

Fortunately Williams is a lot funnier than O'Connor, and this book does not prominently feature racist old women, black people speaking in dialect, or men in their twenties who hate their mothers. But as with much of O'Connor's work, it is location that allows us to at least partially decipher this book.

The novel's three main characters, Corvus, Alice and Annabel, all displaced, malcontented, and motherless teenage girls, carry the action with them through the desert where they live. This is a desert that teems with vicious life, constantly at odds with itself, full of dead bighorns and hummingbirds impaled on cacti in bloom.

It's this viciousness that informs the tone of the entire novel, which is saturated with the struggle between life forms and other life forms, not just locally but globally. The loves, hates, petty grievances and supernatural experiences of the characters serve as echoing variations on Williams' theme: the terrible rapaciousness of the cycle of life and death. (For an introduction to Williams's thoughts on this subject, read her essay, "The Case Against Babies.") Fetuses and corpses, human and animal, shamble like so many vindictive golems through Williams's beautiful and unforgiving desert.

There is a sizable array of secondary characters, each with his or her own peculiar relationship to death or the unborn. There is Ray Webb, prone to strokes since childhood, whose life was saved by a vivisected monkey who lives on as a kind of spirit animal in Ray's head. There is Annabel's father, Carter Vineyard, who has been dividing most of his attention between the very literal ghost of his wife and his increasing attraction to his handsome gardener. There is Stumpp, a big-game hunter making a fortune selling eggs harvested from aborted fetuses. And perhaps most prominently there is Ginger, Annabel's mother, whose spats with her husband have only grown more persistent with her death. ("You've turned into an old queen, Carter. You look so silly when you're infatuated. Your eyes practically cross.") And serving as a kind of character in itself is the eerie, soul-crushing nursing home Green Palms, where the girls act as volunteers amid crazed elderly people who are neither fully alive nor properly dead.

Everyone in this novel is struggling to be born or to die, or to do either or both, or to figure out the difference between the two, which makes one wonder why Williams felt the need for main characters at all. Indeed, the sections that concentrate on the girls are often the weakest in the book. Brooding, silent Corvus is something of a narrative nonentity; this leaves us with the materialistic Annabel and the hard-nosed environmentalist Alice, and it's clear whose side Williams is on. It seems unfair that Annabel — who while not brilliant is nevertheless one of the few characters in the book with genuine common sense — should so often be the target of such catty authorial asides as "She was almost out of avocado body butter again, she could scarcely fathom how this had happened." Clearly Williams prefers Alice, who is given to such implausibly articulate rants as "Plastic relies on an unrenewable resource ... It's not truly recyclable, and the petroleum involved requires extensive use of toxics in manufacture. Plus it's the largest trash contaminant of the oceans. As a caterer, you should be aware of this and set a better example." Part of the problem is that it's hard to imagine why Alice and Annabel would have anything to do with each other in the first place. Perhaps this is the reason that Williams tells us that the three girls are "frequently together" but rarely shows them so.

The book becomes most engaging when it veers away from this improbable grouping and looks instead at the ultimately more interesting "supporting" characters like Carter and Ray. Emily Bliss Pickless, a refreshingly unprecious eight-year-old genius, also makes for good reading as she crusades against Stumpp's natural-history museum while stonily coping with her mother's loser boyfriend. ("You had to act dumb around adults, otherwise there was no point in being around them at all.") The book becomes least engaging at those points when Williams awkwardly shifts into magical realism, which she is most prone to do when her characters are conversing with each other. Having everyone speak either in Zen koans or as if reading lecture notes gets old real fast. "Isn't water a remarkable element?" asks creepy Nurse Daisy of Green Palms. "It's exempt from getting wet. It's as exempt from getting wet as God is exempt from the passion of love." This is a provocative sentiment, but its ability to provoke is diminished in a book where even incidental characters are given to such turns of phrase as "one seeks in vain among debased superlatives."

Williams has done a remarkable thing in writing a funny book steeped in horror — not slasher-flick horror but the truly frightening kind, the awakening of the mind to ghastly, inescapable truth. There is plenty of that in Williams's universe because there is plenty of it in our own. Coupled with the horror, just as relentless, just as uncaring, there is also stunning beauty — as in a dream Corvus has during one of her open-eyed "sleep marathons": "This island could be Heaven, with its wooden walls smelling of lemons, the rugusa roses and blueberry bushes pressing against the windows ... There's a claw-footed tub in the yard filled with pansies. There are old blue bottles on the sills that fill themselves with light." Like the horror, the beauty in this book comes when it will and does what it pleases — just as it does in life. Mastery and poetry Williams definitely has — and hell, maybe even genius — but they are all her own. Thank goodness.

— S. B. Kleinman (redguy at mindspring dot com)