The less noble side of activism is its performance, which seems to have reached its peak in recent years. In 2019, even “I Voted” stickers can feel a little show-offy, as though the wearer were broadcasting her moral high ground before scrolling through Instagram or buying an iced coffee. So it surprised me that Joy Williams wrote “The Quick and the Dead,” a novel that hinges on one teen-ager’s adamant support for eco-terrorism, in 2000, long before Trump’s election. In the novel, activism is all performance, but the world is in such a state of wreckage that it’s hard to say whether that’s a bad thing. Sure, it would be better if we could do something to save the sea turtles, but no one can say what, exactly, can be done. So why not feel good just talking about it?

“The Quick and the Dead” is set in an unnamed desert town, where men shoot cacti and sometimes, accidentally, people. Alice, a motherless sixteen-year-old who has fully adopted the radical politics of her grandparents, with whom she lives, befriends two other motherless girls, Annabel and Corvus. The three have almost nothing in common but shared loss. Annabel is a pretty, consumerist popular girl whose mother was run over by a car, and Corvus is nearly dead with grief—she lost both her parents to drowning and then set her own house on fire. The three teen-agers spend the summer drifting between life and death, volunteering at a nursing home, navigating a taxidermy museum, and, at least once, tying up a boy for killing a sheep.

Alice has good reason to be angry. The residents at the nursing home are being fed greyhound meat (one elderly gentleman questions whether this is the case; “Doesn’t taste much like greyhound to me,” he says, “it doesn’t taste fast”), there’s litter all over the state parks, there are very few places she can go to feel close to nature anymore, and people are killing animals for sport. She considers sending Annabel’s father an anonymous missive to deter him from eating meat: “A HEART ATTACK IS GOD’S REVENGE FOR EATING HIS LITTLE FRIENDS.”

The anger, though, results only in a lack of autonomy. The boy whom the girls tie up eventually gets killed by the men shooting cacti. An eight-year-old protesting the taxidermy museum ends up adopted by the museum’s owner. And Alice meets a kid passing out candles for a company that hosts vigils for a different cause every night, so that people can feel better about their lack of control over the world. “Caring doesn’t have to be elitist,” the candle boy tells Alice. “True compassion is wordless and hopeless of effecting change.”