Joy Williams tries to build a novel around ideas - and around three wisecracking young furies

"The Quick and the Dead" is fierce, lively, and shocking, and it possesses a tooth-and-claw beauty as dangerous and breathtaking as a cougar on the move.

Poet of the ironic and damned, Joy Williams delights in turning the world on its head: She can make a sunset into end-of-day carnage and the day's carnage into an act of natural grace.

Few writers choose to inhabit these high crevices, where the pitch is steep. But Williams could scarcely live anyplace else. Her writing is so infused with terrible truths and dark comedy -- imagine Cormac McCarthy bumping into Flannery O'Connor -- that it's difficult to imagine her on tamer ground.

Williams has applied her considerable intelligence over the years to the short story and novel as well as naturalist nonfiction, and "The Quick and the Dead" is her first novel in more than a decade. Its cast of characters has the familiar Williams stamp of transcendent idiosyncrasy: an eco-warrior teenager who's smarter than most adults; a dog more interesting than his human nemesis; a recently deceased woman who returns as a ghost to torment her husband (and give him stock tips). Together, they form a montage of the more colorful aspects of that great, pulsing monster we call life -- which is, for some people, a euphemism for the necessary condition preceding death.

Because really, "The Quick and the Dead" is a death trip writ large in gorgeous calligraphy: perfect scenes and dark intent and uproarious cosmic jokes, usually in search of sacred targets. Its loosely woven garment of a plot concerns three teenage girls, all motherless, who are thrust together by geographical circumstance one summer in the Arizona desert. There's Alice, the aforementioned genius-punk who understands corporate greed and imperialist mayhem better than most teenagers understand the Backstreet Boys. There's Annabel, her dialectical opposite, who thinks the world can be changed only by better nail polish or a daring tan. And finally there is Corvus, the heart of these three Furies: Corvus, who lost both her parents to drowning, takes dire action to purify her own life, then devotes herself to the half-living spirits at a nursing home called the Green Palms -- a place we are introduced to as "state-of-the-art End of the Trail."

Williams follows her wisecracking Furies through a web of intersecting journeys; if the novel seems willfully episodic, it's partly because everybody here is on his or her way to someplace else. Ruthlessly unsentimental and ruthlessly serious, "The Quick and the Dead" is, almost by necessity, held together by comedic ballast -- how else can you describe a world where a 300-pound, near-comatose patient is kept alive against his will, while a laboratoryful of animals are being tortured to test mascara? "God is the net," Alice's suicidal friend tells her. "We are the creatures within the net."

That image -- comforting and claustrophobic at once -- suggests Williams's vast, multilayered wit; she cracks jokes while quoting Dante and Schopenhauer, puts poetry and theology in the mouths of the unsuspecting (or guilty) to make her point. It's hard to get a purchase on "The Quick and the Dead," and the au courant picaresque milieu is both perplexing and frustrating. But sentence by sentence, scene by scene, the novel can be mesmerizing and even brilliant. These characters exist in order for Williams to deliver the startling consciousness within; when we meet Alice, at the opening of the novel, it's at the end of a baby-sitting job gone bad -- and within five pages of slate-gray sensibility and pitch-perfect dialogue, she's won us over for good.

Williams is equally smooth at depicting the even stranger folk who pass through the story: When Ginger, Annabel's dead mother, reappears in her husband's bedroom, it's a stand-up routine from the other side -- she makes fun of his new boyfriend and refuses to tell him what the afterlife is like. Ray Webb, a deluded young drifter with doom written all over him, is somebody out of a Robert Stone novel; accordingly, his appointment in the desert portends a certain bloody grace even before he gets there. That Williams is able to render both ends of this divide -- a Joan Rivers ghost and a wounded-boy sacrifice -- is eerie testament to the novel's dimension.

What's less convincing is her effort to turn all this spooky, astonishing prose into a novel. If you don't mind getting your hands dirty with the mysteries of life, "The Quick and the Dead" is daring enough to try to get near most of them. But sometimes Williams is too idea-laden for her own good. She puts opinions in the mouth of tough-talking Alice that sound suspiciously authorial, and thus veer more toward the polemical than the successfully creative. Williams ought to have known better: You can change more hearts with one wounded elephant than you can with an entire manifesto about poisoned oceans. Most good novelists are well aware of this central tenet, which is what leads them to write novels to begin with. When you can feel Williams's passions eking into dialogue and influencing her fictive structure, "The Quick and the Dead" stumbles instead of soaring.

Mostly it soars, or rather hang-glides, one brief flight at a time. There are moments of ghostly insight (Ginger notwithstanding) that are unparalleled in most contemporary fiction; line by line, the rewards here are great. A cruel, frighteningly articulate nurse at the Green Palms turns her guns on Corvus near the end of her quest: "You saw some cruddy thing," she accuses her, "that had within it all the importunate treasure of being, some cruddy thing that turned radiant in the light of your regard. So you've come back to wait without waiting, as one waits for the dead." The beauty in this novel is without mercy and the mercy often without beauty, and Joy Williams -- keenly, unwaveringly -- knows the difference.