Harrow by Joy Williams {Reviewed by STELLA}
How do you get geriatric eco-terrorists into a book and make it sound believable, ironic, outrageous, and compelling? When your main protagonist is a ten-year-old with a jaundiced view of the world, but also a surprising innocence, how are we convinced that this could be a future reality? Joy Williams makes us believe because she’s a genius. Harrow, her recent novel, is a sideways dystopia, very strange and difficult to follow — not because it’s pretentious or overly literary but because the end of the world (as we know it) will be confusing, blindingly obvious, and surprisingly full of unexpected consequences. As you read this review, you will notice the inconsistencies — how can it be this, but also that? How can you have a 10-year-old protagonist surviving crossing America alone but somehow be okay — picked up and harnessed by the goodwill of others — even if this is fleeting? How can, and why, do terminally ill geriatrics who can’t seem to get along (there are plenty of petty squabbles at the abandoned conference centre/resort) have a plan (of destruction — we will get to that later) that forces them to be bound together by a mutual ideology? Well, it works because Joy Williams is a brilliant writer and she’s angry, even as she darkly exploits us humans and uses our foibles to create characters who will stick on you. And that’s how it is — Harrow gets under your skin and just when you’re confused the lightbulb clicks on and it’s so bright, you hope you’ll be in the dark again. Darkness may be preferable to the future. This world is destructive — or was. Williams layers out all the issues under this veneer of fictional telling. There’s consumption, capitalism (hyper), deforestation, extinction (there are no more animals), and, really, just collapse. The world has given up and humans are swaddled by what’s left — entertainment and distraction. The rebellion has been overcome, aside from the geriatrics with their inconsequential acts — small violences do not a change make. Especially when the worst excesses of capitalism and environmental destruction have rebooted full throttle. And this is the world that Khristen at ten has the job of navigating. After her boarding school closes and the rich kids have been collected in their SUVs and other vehicles of a survival nature, the teachers take off and deposit Khristen at the train station. It’s not too much later that the end of the line approaches, i.e. the trains stop and K has to walk on in search of her mother, who she last heard (a few years back) was headed to the aforementioned resort. No surprise, she doesn’t find her there. Yet, the matriarch of this outfit takes her in for a bit and we get a front-row seat as witness to the shenanigans of the motley crew, as well as a paying guest, a mother with her precocious 10-year-old son, who’s determined to be a judge — he spends his days quoting legal jargon. They have their own side hustle story which involves murder, family dispute, alcohol, and expectation. Yet they are on holiday, so standing in the putrid lake, known as Big Girl, fishing is how Khristen first encounters her future judge.
