The quick and the dead /

"The dead are coming back. And it had to do with the diminishment of everything else." Williams, masterful short-story writer (Escapes, 1990) and novelist (Breaking and Entering, 1988), has set her parody of modern life in that quintessential land of barrenness, the desert, and peopled it with characters drawn to death in some way or another. The three central characters--perpetually mourning Corvus, lively but somewhat shallow Annabel, and socially conscious Alice--have all lost their mothers. Corvus is so defined by her loss that she surrounds herself with death, devoting much of her time to volunteering at the local nursing home. Annabel misses her mother, Ginger, but it is Annabel's father, Carter, that Ginger misses. In some of the most humorous scenes in the book, Ginger returns as a ghost to plague her befuddled husband, who finds her more alive in death than she was in life. As for Alice, confronted with the new symbol of social consciousness, the candlelight vigil, a character tells her that "concern is the new consumerism." For Alice, whose convictions and sentiments are genuine, it's the ultimate horror. Like the world her characters inhabit, Williams' novel is rough terrain, but it's well worth the trip. --Kristine Huntley

"This was no place to be tonight for any of them, but this was the place they were." Set in the Texas desert, the first new fiction in 10 years from the much-praised Williams (States of Grace) examines the thoughts and hopes of three motherless 16-year-old girls, exploring their connections to one another, to a large cast of difficult adults and to the ghosts that populate their lives. Williams's first chapters introduce her three protagonistsÄbeautiful, grief-stricken Corvus; zealous Alice, always looking for "something that would give her a little edge or obscure the edge she already had, she didn't know which"; and Annabel, whose preoccupations with skincare and sweaters seems practical by comparison. Around this trio, other characters form a web of dependence, trust and mistrustÄa web repeatedly broken by sudden violence. Annabel's father, Carter, lusts after his young Buddhist gardener, but carries on drunken, hostile conversations with the vindictive ghost of his dead wife. There's also stroke victim Ray Webb, a poetic young drifter; Sherwin, a piano player with a death wish; wealthy and bored big-game hunter Stumpp and the object of his affections, precocious and articulate eight-year-old Emily. All of Williams's people have lost something important, and all of them are spending time and energy with people they would not have chosen. Williams's psychology is subtle, her attention to teen diction superb. Like the Midwestern novelist Wright Morris, Williams gives her detailed, poetic novel an episodic, meandering structure, and the book ends without much resolution. But these are deliberate choices, made by an artist attentive to real people's psychesÄand to how even our smallest decisions matter to others in ways we may never know. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Stories about disoriented teens are about as cliched as the phrase a dime a dozen, so one approaches this new offering by Williams with trepidation, regardless of her reputation (she is the author of several highly regarded books of fiction, including Breaking and Entering, as well as a celebrated guidebook, The Florida Keys). It is therefore a pleasure to report that the writing here is fresh and originalDfar richer than the circumstances of the characters themselvesDand the story affecting. Williams's heroines include slightly stunned but determined Alice, who lives with her father and grandparents and plots revenge against a nasty woman who refuses to pay her for baby sitting; cool Corvus, whose parents drowned freakishly; and Annabel, the new girl in this Southwestern town, who is also motherless. Nothing grand happens here, but as the girls circle around one another, they draw in other characters, and collectively these lives reveal that somehow we all survive. A fine choice for most libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/00.]DBarbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A highly original coming-of-ager that integrates the gothic and magical realism in its consideration of families, youth, souls, and the fates of species. Alice, age 16 and living with her grandparents outside Phoenix, rants about ecological disaster and animal slaughter. On her treks through the desert—primers for naturalists—she sees the functions and habits of desert life as comparable to the human spirit and nature: “Plants were lucky because when they adapted it wasn’t considered a compromise. It was more difficult for a human being, a girl.” Despite that difficulty, adapt she does, often miraculously well. Only hours after being ripped off and abandoned in the desert by an adult employer, Alice sits back home eating cheese sandwiches and spaghetti. The story rolls from the disturbing and frightening to the surreally banal, with Alice’s psyche as the roller-coaster’s engine. Her friend Annabel arrives in the desert from back east, where her mother recently died. Her sexually confused and enormously wealthy father, Carter, is trying to escape his dead wife Ginger’s ghost—to no avail. Hilarious scenes between Carter and said ghost raise marital bickering from the mundane to the cosmic. In a somewhat dizzying middle passage that cross-cuts between characters and events, a house burns down, a dog is hung, a 19-year-old drifter carries a dead bighorn ram across his back, a panicked deer thrashes in a swimming pool, a gay piano-player contemplates bathtub suicide, and an eight-year-old poet pickets against taxidermy outside a museum of stuffed animals. In an upended noir motif, Carter tries to hire Alice to kill his already dead wife. The dead, in this novel, are as restless as the living. Williams is in top form here (State of Grace, 1990, etc.), her outrage balanced by a wise, compassionate, bemused overview. Think Denis Johnson’s world, minus the drugs—ultimately, though, Williams echoes only herself in a risky, frisky, profound book.