The clearest through-line's that of the three teenagers - Alice, Annabel and Corvus - ranging motherless and wild in and around what I'm fairly sure is a smallish city, or perhaps other urban development, in desert-laden Arizona, and they're also the most intriguing for a range of reasons, well, especially Alice.
But the many others who intersect with them and each other in various direct and indirect ways - Annabel's father Carter, who is very literally haunted by his dead wife Ginger; the only slightly older Ray, whose encounter with them in the desert leaves him tied up and abandoned for the supposed crime of killing a ram; Sherwin, the dissolute piano player with whom Alice somewhat takes up; late-appearing eight year old Emily Jane Pickless; and more - are just as integral to the design of The Quick and the Dead, as the novel circuitously roams through its many oblique perspectives on life and death, which Williams evidently considers as both a dyad and a many-dimensioned spectrum.
The Quick and the Dead is sharp, funny, stormy and elusive, in a way which sometimes reminded me of those first few Pynchon novels. There are characters and they have arcs, and there's a strong sense of a morality working its way through the events, but not in the sense that individuals seem to meet their just deserts based on anything like conventional ideas of responsibility for their actions or character (in the other sense) - and indeed several come to what could be considered untimely ends along the story's twisting path, while others (Ray's parents, say) really seem only to have walk-on parts. As a whole, the novel feels like it can't be grasped through any conventional approach - it's too sideways-of-conventional and slippery for that.
There's something of the jagged lightning-flash nature of Williams' short stories - in The Visiting Privilege and Ninety-Nine Stories of God - without quite the same sustained effect. But that's an extremely high bar and The Quick and the Dead is its own beast - including a permeating air of the grotesque and even gothic - and quite something marvellous at that.
But the many others who intersect with them and each other in various direct and indirect ways - Annabel's father Carter, who is very literally haunted by his dead wife Ginger; the only slightly older Ray, whose encounter with them in the desert leaves him tied up and abandoned for the supposed crime of killing a ram; Sherwin, the dissolute piano player with whom Alice somewhat takes up; late-appearing eight year old Emily Jane Pickless; and more - are just as integral to the design of The Quick and the Dead, as the novel circuitously roams through its many oblique perspectives on life and death, which Williams evidently considers as both a dyad and a many-dimensioned spectrum.
The Quick and the Dead is sharp, funny, stormy and elusive, in a way which sometimes reminded me of those first few Pynchon novels. There are characters and they have arcs, and there's a strong sense of a morality working its way through the events, but not in the sense that individuals seem to meet their just deserts based on anything like conventional ideas of responsibility for their actions or character (in the other sense) - and indeed several come to what could be considered untimely ends along the story's twisting path, while others (Ray's parents, say) really seem only to have walk-on parts. As a whole, the novel feels like it can't be grasped through any conventional approach - it's too sideways-of-conventional and slippery for that.
There's something of the jagged lightning-flash nature of Williams' short stories - in The Visiting Privilege and Ninety-Nine Stories of God - without quite the same sustained effect. But that's an extremely high bar and The Quick and the Dead is its own beast - including a permeating air of the grotesque and even gothic - and quite something marvellous at that.
