E-Mail This Article to a Friend Black beauty Joy Williams’s Honored Guest BY JULIA HANNA
	Honored Guest By Joy Williams, Alfred A. Knopf, 224 pages, $23.

Death, disease, or disappearance figures in each of the 12 stories collected in Honored Guest, Joy Williams’s follow-up to her darkly satirical 2000 novel, The Quick and the Dead. In the title story, a mother dying of a terminal illness and her high-school-age daughter blunder around the edges of a numbing, inescapable new reality. "At the beginning, death was giving them the opportunity to be interesting. This was something special. There was only one crack at this. But then they lost sight of it somehow. It became a lesser thing, more terrible. Its meaning crumbled. They began waiting for it. Terrible, terrible."

Not exactly jolly reading, but anyone who has sampled Williams’s fiction knows that she’s not interested in telling a tidy story that can be digested and hummed over at the end of a long day. When the stakes are life and death and what happens in between, the path is not straight and smooth. For that reason, some may find a few of these stories bewildering in their lack of structure and resolution. But hang in there.

The surfaces of Williams’s narratives don’t suggest that anything of particular importance will be revealed — the characters who populate them all have a low-key, slightly distanced affect, and they live in a recognizable world filled with everyday banalities. "Congress" finds Miriam married to Jack, a forensic anthropologist and professor who takes up bow-hunting at the suggestion of his adoring student Carl. Six pages in, we get this casual report: "Then, late one afternoon when Jack was out in the woods, he fell asleep in his stand and toppled out of a tree, critically wounding himself with his own arrow, which passed through his eye and into his head like a knife thrust into a cantaloupe." (Anyone familiar with Williams’s essay "The Killing Game" knows that she must relish this particular hunter’s fate.) Jack is now a semi-vegetable, and Miriam bonds with a lamp made from four cured deer feet. "She often found herself sitting beside it, staring at it, the harsh brown hairs, the dainty pasterns, the polished black hooves, all fastened together with a brass gimp band in a space the size of a dinner plate. It was anarchy, the little lamp, its legs snugly bunched. It was whirl, it was hole, it was the first far drums." While Carl dotes on the invalid Jack, Miriam’s affinity for the lamp grows stronger. We learn that it enjoys Moby Dick and, having read a smattering of Kierkegaard, "felt strongly that thought should never be confused with existence." That’s as far as any summary of this story — which includes a road trip to a bizarre taxidermy museum — can go to capture its peculiar energy and rhythms.

The sudden, arbitrary nature of life and death is an ongoing puzzle for Williams’s characters. In "The Other Week," Francine tells Dennis, a lovelorn gardener mourning the death of his long-ago nanny: "Now, it sounds as though you had a very fortunate childhood until you didn’t. It’s what I always think when I see cows grazing in the fields . . . that they have a very nice life until they don’t."

A dead man mystifies his friends in "Substance" by burdening each of them with one of his odd belongings. Guilty and annoyed, they begin the slow process of discarding the objects — except for Louise, who has been left a dog. Ambivalent at first, she grows attached to the animal, refusing even to sell it to the dead man’s brother. Then in the course of moving to a new apartment, all of her worldly possessions (except the dog) are stolen. As she mourns her grandmother’s silver tea service, a friend reminds her that she never used it. " ‘But it’s gone,’ " she responds plaintively. And then thinks to herself: "It was gone, of course, but there was something else, something worse. She had made all these choices. She had discarded this and retained that and it hadn’t mattered."

That yawning indifference of fate and our inability to encompass it lie at the heart of these stories. A woman begs to have her fortune told, only to find she can’t read the language in which it’s written. A doomed librarian proclaims, "Words aren’t much more than a waste product now, space junk. We’re living post-literately. It’s all gleanings and tailings." Honored Guest is not a comforting or a comfortable book, but it buzzes with life. Far from being gloomy, Williams’s fiction embodies a weirdly exultant energy as it explores the edges of what can be a very nice life — until something happens to change it.