FICTION
Harrow
Joy Williams
Profile, $29.99
Here are three little moments I couldn’t quite choose between when opening this review of the new Joy Williams.
In the near future, giant pouched African rats are trained to sniff out drugs, land mines, anything. “They could detect cancer in the unsuspecting,” in fact, “but their trainers didn’t want to burn them out with the boredom that too much success brings.”
Harrow is Joy Williams’ first novel since 2000’s The Quick and the Dead.
In the desert, a young woman named Foxy is hanging out with an older gentleman who is talking about the ins and outs of eco-terrorism. “She wondered if his pecker was as shredded and gribbled and nicked as the rest of him or whether it hung wondrously, impossibly smooth and aloof, its head like burled oak. She’d like to coax it out and mock it.”
In one of the campfire tales that Williams likes to put in her characters’ mouths, we hear about a class of kids that wins a competition to design a universal hazard symbol. When the agency decides it doesn’t like their symbol and overturns the choice, the kids are hounded like dissidents. People even come and take the class parrot away: “Marvelous is a good boy, Marvelous is a good boy,” he keeps on saying as they haul him out of there and into quarantine.
Credit:
Welcome to Harrow. Harrow is Williams’ first novel since 2000’s The Quick and the Dead, but she’s much more widely known as a writer of short stories, which are collected in several books and 2016’s wonderful compendium, The Visiting Privilege.
Her stories are gory, flinty, silly, pessimistic, laced with dread. Her novels are exactly the same, thank god, and Harrow is no different, except perhaps that it feels like a distilled version of Williams; all the expected elements are there, but striated into pure and not altogether comfortable shapes.
Harrow is about Khirsten, a girl who supposedly briefly died and came back from the dead as a baby and whose mother is thus convinced of her spiritual import. Khirsten’s at boarding school, in a world that’s pretty post-apocalyptic already, when the valley-bound school learns of some kind of terrible disaster; part of the world, maybe a third, is gone (a manageable loss, someone says).
Things change in the novel, and now we’re at an oily, polluted lake, where Khirsten is slightly older at a place called The Institute, which is not, its residents insist, a “suicide academy” or “terrorist hospice”. It’s both – a training camp for geriatric eco-terrorists; the lake, strangely, is called Big Girl. This is where we spend most of the story, with characters plotting various acts of terror against corporate criminals.
Then things change again – in a smaller way, though it still involves an explosion – and now we find ourselves in a strange, new place for the final part of the story, in a new, elegiac section that somehow takes apart what came before without undermining the experience. This last part is very hard to explain – it involves Kafka – but it’s quite beautiful, as well as remaining funny and filthy.
But the plot isn’t the reason you go to Williams. It’s about the man who doesn’t like seeing people eat because he finds eating “tactless”. It’s the deeply familiar argot from a half-forgotten past – when a character goes to the toilet, he “uses the courtesy of the house” – and the casual felicitousness that seems to come from nowhere. Had you ever heard the word “excrementitious”? I hadn’t. What about “tortrix”? It turns out this is a kind of moth, but Williams takes the word back to its root, where it has to do with the habit of rolling or twisting leaves to make a nest. She’s using it to describe dark robes on a body, the way they twist and spin around the form.
You could say this novel is weirdly perfect for the present because it offers a vision of climate-fiction that is unsettling at the deepest levels – formal, spiritual, characterological, the whole deal. You could also say it’s perfect for our Omicron moment – I read it during COVID-19, and it was a good match for the bruisy intensity of brain fog. When you think about climate, you don’t always know whether to scream or cry or laugh. Williams’ fiction suggests you can do all three at once.
Ronnie Scott’s novel The Adversary is published by Hamish Hamilton.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.
Most Viewed in Culture
From our partners
Source: Read Full Article