In her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Quick and the Dead, the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. "She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a “resort” on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call “Big Girl.” In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature’s beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this “gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth”? Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams’s searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons—against all reasonableness—to try and recover something of it.
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A seething, heartbreaking, often hilarious book about the emptiness at the heart of the human urge to make transformative, systemic change, to have an impact, to have life mean something in the face of absolute indifference. Throughout HARROW there is a powerful feeling of rage– at being voiceless, at wanting to DO SOMETHING (!!) in the face of relentless stupidity– which is made manifest in direct action which this book does not flinch in exposing as empty, narcissistic fantasy.
I experienced a deep connection to these feelings while reading the book, to the bleak humor that sits atop a wrenching feeling of helplessness in the face of preventable, man-made catastrophe, and I think HARROW truly captures the feeling of impotence– despite our words, our ideas, our hopes, our beliefs– that sits at the center of contemporary experience. I really loved this book and found it immensely comforting to discover so much of my own darkly comic despair reflected in the story (speaking of narcissism ha). It took me a minute to get into its rhythms and style, but this is definitely a book I'll be thinking about for a long, long time.
SPOILER-ISH SIDE NOTE:
The feeling of the book called to mind, for me, an echo of THE LITTLE PRINCE, if that makes any sense at all, with Khristen in the position of the narrator, “crash landing” in a hostile landscape, and brought into a world of loss and isolation before being ultimately left behind prior to her final meeting with Jeffrey, who represented (for me) the infantile, arbitrary self-satisfaction of the state with which she ambiguously reconciles(?). This is more tonal than narrative, but I couldn't shake it.
