PositiveThe NationLike Williams’s other novels, Harrow is not didactic, but advances a commitment to the examination of human behavior as part of a broader ecosystem we are all responsible for preserving. The heroes of Harrow...are the kinds of people to whom Williams continually returns out of a combination of awe, pity, and gratitude: People who are willing not just to take up their responsibility to the ecosystem, but to die for it ... Things get weird quickly. This is how Williams’s novels work: People already on the brink of collapse somehow hold it together as the world around them contorts to reveal new dimensions of wild horror ... The stubbornly principled activists of Harrow are projections of Williams’s political values as well as her status and way of life as an artist.
Valeria Luiselli, Trans. by Christina MacSweeney
PositiveElectric Literature...a dense play of texts that interrupt and reflect each other, illuminating the empty spaces between them ... In vignettes that succeed rapidly and move freely between the novel’s many spatial and temporal zones, the different first-person narrators ruminate through and around paradoxical notions of fiction, space and death. Their ruminations echo and respond to each other. Ghosts recur, but not quite as a conventional theme or symbol. Questions pertaining to who is alive and who is dead, what is real and what is imagined, and whether it is the real or the imagined that is alive or dead, are always present, and the answers are either absent or multiple and conflicting ... in these spaces between the vignettes...the narrator, the author, and the reader of the novel are all hiding, because it is here in these spaces that open at the end of the novel that the writing of fiction really begins.
