The Quick & the Dead

As twitchy and vicious as an insect’s dream, The Quick and the Dead swarms with tiny violent deaths: picnic umbrellas stabbed through sea turtle nests, greyhounds ground up for children’s meals, cacti dismembered by bored hunters. Amid this roiling Technicolor desert, three motherless girls, a hapless stroke victim, a self-centered ghost, and scores of other characters all clang and crash into each other, scattering fates like broken glass. Joy Williams’ first novel in more than a decade is a rumbling rumination on the predatory demands of living; it’s hilarious, desperate, dazzling. A