The Angel of Death Has Some Reservations About His Job

CONCERNING THE FUTURE OF SOULS: 99 Stories of Azrael, by Joy Williams

Last month, at the Vatican, Pope Francis told a group of visiting comedians that it was OK to laugh at God, so long as the joke didn’t hurt the feelings of believers or the poor. I grew up Roman Catholic; half of me was staggered by this news. The other half of me wondered if the pope had been dipping into the fiction of Joy Williams.

Williams is the daughter of a Congregational minister. Her work is shot through with flinty and anarchic varieties of religious experience. In her last book of short fiction, “Ninety-Nine Stories of God” (2016), the Lord wandered the planet as if he were Jeff Bridges in a floppy bathrobe in “The Big Lebowski.”

He drove a pink Jeep Wagoneer. He stood in line to get a shingles shot. He was a naturalist who thought Home Depot was for wimps. He attended a hot-dog eating contest and called it “the stupidest thing I’ve ever witnessed.” He longed to be in a demolition derby. He probably has $10 on the Mets this weekend.

Blasphemous? In Williams’s fiction, nearly everything she values is a) too important to take entirely seriously and b) fair game for sharp but mostly playful abuse. The abuse is proof of her love. Don DeLillo said it in “Underworld,” and I feel it keenly in my own life: The highest currency that can pass between certain friends is “the stand-up scorn that carries their affections.”

Williams, who turned 80 this year, resembles Mark Twain in the wildcat nature of her literary scorn. One of the best things about Twain’s nonfiction is that he will stop everything and criticize the hell out of a bird or a plant, deliver an absolute drubbing, simply because it happens to be in front of him. Thus, in “A Tramp Abroad,” “the average ant is a sham,” cats have lousy grammar, the Edelweiss flower is beastly ugly and so on. His original rants are longer and vastly more fun. On audio, these will make you stop in the street and bend over, laughing like a fool.

Williams writes with more feeling about nature than any writer I know — or, at least, with more feeling than any writer whose preciousness doesn’t make me want to refund my lunch into my shirt pocket — but like Twain she knows there are more weirdos in the natural world than Audubon can count. When a fern appears in her fiction, for example, it will sit there looking “crazier than hell.” It won’t “have much of an emotional life because it is insane.” Kids? They’re “fickle little nihilists.”Williams and Twain: They’re name-calling peas in a very small American pod.