Her work glows with cruelty and humor; her sentences showcase the dread at the foundation of our lives. Not much happens in a Williams novel, but that doesn’t matter when you feel the trembling that her characters go through on every page ... Harrow, like purgatory, is a place that leaves you wanting more. Harrow reads like a young person’s novel because it is concerned with the question of what, if anything, comes next. It was nature that used to allow Williams’s characters to see beyond the barren human landscape they inhabited. Now nature is gone, replaced with Twitter posts filled with impotent rage ... Harrow leaves us with confusion, and a conviction that at least we should recognize our boredom in this purgatory. But how do we get out of this in-between space where everything needs to change but nothing will? It is unfair to demand that Harrow answer that question, but it does set it up.
Williams’ tone is caustic and discomfiting; it brings to mind the moment in which we are living, when matters of science and public health are regularly ridiculed or redirected in favor of political or economic platitudes...At the same time, her vision is too capacious for Harrow to be read so narrowly ... The implication is that chaos is both our invention and our destiny, which means there can be no solace or forgiveness for our collusion with it. This is the source of Williams’ fierce and unrelenting anger, and it invests Harrow with a potent moral weight ... a piece of writing in the vein of Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka, its humor weaponized by rage ... 'Before the eyes can see, they must be incapable of tears,' Williams tells us — excavating, as she does throughout this magnificent and moving novel, the middle distance between silence and experience.
Harrow reminds me very much of Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but, with apologies to the boys, it’s better than both of their novels put together. Harrow belongs at the front of the pack of recent climate fiction, even as it refuses the basic premise (human survival is important) and the sentimental rays of hope (another world is possible!) that are the hallmarks of the genre. This novel doesn’t care who you vote for or if you recycle ... a crabby, craggy, comfortless, arid, erudite, obtuse, perfect novel, a singular entry in a singular body of work by an artist of uncompromised originality and vision. For all of its fragmentation and deliberate strategies of estrangement, Harrow feels coherent and complete, like a single long-form thought or a religious epiphany. It’s also funny as hell ... To read this novel is to know and to be known (Galatians 4:9) by a profound and comfortless alterity, to encounter the cosmic otherness at the very core of the self.
It’s easy to imagine an alternative version of Harrow that proceeds in this fashion for its full two hundred pages—a prose poem of disembodied monologues, interrupted by postapocalyptic panoramas. It’s easy to imagine because Harrow periodically withdraws into this mode, as if pulled gravitationally, the plot abstracting into a bedlam of voices, alternately outraged, numb, and screamingly insane ... To imagine that our pious efforts to stave off environmental collapse might succeed is insanity squared. It is hard to think of another American novelist brave enough to structure a novel around this theme ... Williams’s reverence for the magnificence of the nonhuman world can only be glimpsed in its reverse image, as if through a mirror—the funhouse mirror of the planet that we’ve trashed ... triumphantly, ecstatically antihumanist, mercilessly unforgiving of human foibles. Its voracious misanthropy is the source of its comedy ... Williams’s misanthropy is also the source of the novel’s exhilaration—for it is thrilling, enlivening even, to read a novel so contemptuous of the domineering pieties of our age.
... a blackly comic portrait of futility ... This is sarcasm of a high, artistic order, reminiscent of no one quite so much as William Gaddis. The story occupies the boundary of absurdity and incomprehension in the same way that humankind exists on the verge of annihilation, perpetually undermining itself in the process of rebuilding. The book’s structure is equally volatile ... This seems perverse until one recalls that it’s what Moby-Dick does, as well. Ms. Williams’s novel, a work of strange, disruptive 'holy havoc,' presents a ship of fools adrift in a drowning world.
On the surface of it, Harrow...seems unlikely to broaden her audience. This is not to say the book is not brilliant—it is. It’s simply that Williams has made no concessions; she remains wonderfully and determinedly herself ... Williams’s method is one of adjacency more than linearity. Language, not narrative, is the connective tissue. To read her is to be flung every which way: from the spiritually profound to the farcically bizarre ... Every sentence is lathed into sleek and startling perfection ... Even seemingly offhand phrases glitter ... Zeroing in on our collective complacency and denial, Williams is both wry and merciless ... This life we’re not aware of is Williams’s great subject. She peels back the visible and known, revealing death and chaos beneath ... Part of what makes Williams’s work so destabilising is that agency has almost no significance. Navigating a world that makes no sense, her characters are lost and baffled, their actions and ideas stripped of meaning ... Harrow reminds us that, as a consequence of climate collapse, trauma and grief are the condition of our collective existence. As our world disintegrates, it will take what we think of as reality with it. Addressing this in fiction will be the job, partly, of a certain kind of modern mystic. Williams—great virtuoso of the unreal—is one of them.
Williams’s prose in Harrow is animated by the tension between her virtuosic command of the language—from the bumper sticker to the Old Testament—and her recognition of language’s impotence in the face of ecological ruination. She has the syntactic equivalent of perfect pitch in a fallen world where, as one character says, 'the names which have been given to worldly things are the occasion of great error' ... Harrow is not an overt comedy, but it still throws sparks on every page ... Among other things, Harrow is a vision of the curse she believes that we, like Gracchus, bring daily on ourselves. But Williams does not hector or harangue ... On the evidence of Harrow, Joy Williams writes them to wreak havoc on complacency of all kinds. Long may she vex us.
Williams’s fifth novel, a parable of the climate emergency with a distinctly apocalyptic theme, is, like much of her writing, preoccupied with death, it but also manages to be extremely funny: a prescient, yet abstract, and absurdist work ... her writing reverberates with the moral gravity of Flannery O’Connor, and its bleak black comedy evokes more recent American writers, too, including the work of Nell Zink. Harrow’s short, dense pages unfold into a world of Kafkaesque distortion, its sharp wit and cruelty pierced with dreamlike language and imagery, and moments of almost unbearable poignancy. As the book draws to its dark conclusion, a hint of something miraculous, borne out from its opening chapter, flutters over the final paragraphs. In Williams’s shattered world, destruction appears almost like the possibility of renewal.
As Williams’s books go, this isn’t a very good one. Her wit misfires more than usual; the ecological themes are overly familiar; there are no real characters to hang onto, and very little plot, not that anyone comes to Williams for scenario ... Expectations are funny things, though. If you blacked out Williams’s name on the cover and told me that Harrow was written by a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I would probably have thought to myself, 'A wild one has escaped the infirmary! I greet you, wild one, at the start of an interesting career. Please stop making me laugh while unspooling my intestines'...Such are the mental contradictions when reading a lesser Williams novel ... Williams’s characters strike poses and dispense thought bubbles, verbal pellets; they can seem to have stepped out of a Jules Feiffer strip. Everyone skitters sideways, as if they were crabs. Her humans are given to epiphanic exclamations that often have nothing to do with anything that’s happening. They’re trying to remain sane in a demented world. They’re total weirdos, in the best sense ... You skim Harrow, as if it were a book of poems, for the author’s observations, threaded as they are with acuity and chagrin and strange harbingers and vestiges of old mythologies ... Williams isn’t that kind of nature writer, one of the tenderheaded, cry-of-the-loon variety. Even if this novel is half-realized, like a wire frame awaiting clay for its head, its skepticism and sanity are consistently on display.
It's a good thing this is a short book, because if there were much more of its crazy brilliance, a reader's head might well explode ... Grim and/or elegiac as the novel mostly is, it is also an oddly reassuring repository of cultural history, philosophy, psychology (pop and not), environmental concern, and mythical and linguistic lore—all put in perspective and often punctured by Williams' wry, goofy, generous wit. Sometimes it seems like Denis Johnson, Margaret Atwood and J.M. Coetzee got together, consulted Hegel, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and came up with a story—and then Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll and Terry Gilliam piled on. But it's all Joy Williams.
Harrow is about climate change the same way Twin Peaks is about who killed Laura Palmer. Its concerns—time, death, the afterlife—are more fundamental and eternal. The loose design of this strange and comic novel is something of a very slow picaresque, with the orphaned Khristen going to one place, then another, then one more ... Williams gestures toward plot, but there isn’t tension so much as stuff happening ... is thick with weighty symbols, but they are scattered, and looking for meaning in them can feel like reading tea leaves. Something is being suggested, but rarely precisely ... All of this—the pictograms, the philosophical conversations, the oddball characters—is tied together by the sense of a singular writer doing whatever she wants ... The prose here is quintessential Williams, her diction alternating between formal, occasionally lofty fare and folksy slang... And there’s no living writer I trust more with an adverb ... Williams has always wielded time as she pleases, making it appear to pass either very quickly or not at all. And she’s performed a neat trick with it here. Twenty years may seem like a long time to wait from one novel to the next, but Harrow connects so cleverly to her previous work that the familiarity has a way of collapsing the span between them. The past repeats itself even as it becomes the present. Time is cyclical and permanently ongoing, whether or not we’ll be here to witness it passing.
Does their newness to life make these characters redeemable? Williams thinks so—the prose evokes the futile cry of those weaned on American privilege then condemned to an adulthood of climate change ... If this sounds bleak—it is!—Williams’s jokes and insights come fast, herding us through a rolling, expansive plot ... The carnivalesque, post-apocalyptic narrative...is a mere occasion for a pruned wilderness of precise, ranging prose ... Worldbuilding comes through dialogue, as breathless recognitions of society’s dystopia. Sentences layer symbolic and actual significance, excruciating sadness and humor ... The novel never feels performative or, God forbid, opportunistic for its grimness—Williams’s humor gives the impression that she internalized this doleful mood long ago. It’s perhaps her most difficult to read: Unfolding in a scant 200 pages, the book contains the comprehensive melancholy of someone in their December years who cares deeply about the living, human and animal alike ... The masterful Harrow provides us with something strange and discomfitingly lifelike: a time-lapse of the elderly fading at their edges, and other doomed characters whose youth, at best, might allow them to run more gracefully out of time.
Energy flickers in and out of this writing, with its flatness and sudden, lyrical bursts. Williams is endlessly interested in the attribute of spirit and who or what possesses it ... summons a more alien palette, with Williams’s tone achieving a new, perfectly hostile register. Characters are ruthlessly dispatched and society’s foibles are laid bare ... Much of this would be hilarious, if it weren’t so sad ... Williams’s vision of an annihilated earth seems to have flown from the brain of Francisco Goya ... There is a way of understanding Williams that connects her imagery to the nature of grief, to how it makes experience gigantic and strange. She practices a kind of hallucinogenic realism, which takes at face value the psychological flights of characters deranged by loss ... Williams seems uniquely sensitized to the pressure that grief exerts on expression ... While the habitat of the novel has gone dry, Williams’s sentences swerve toward lushness. What she seeks is a healing language, something suited to God’s once-unbroken design. One could call this re-natured prose, writing that makes room for the rest of the ecosystem, and the simplicity of Williams’s sentences can have a pleading, encouraging quality ... Williams is evoking, and lamenting, another transformative moment: the Creation, in which God’s Word manifested as the universe, and language and nature met as one.
If you’ve read any of [William's] other books, you’ll know their experimental nature sparks electricity rather than burning readers out, and that’s true in this new, urgent novel as well. Between references to important and sometimes arcane classical literature and deliberately obscure vocabulary (gangrel, yaws, trephined, erlking, carling, to name just a few), Harrow insists that readers pay attention to the decline of the natural world. Williams brings up stories that may be imaginary in 2021 — like uteruses harvested from brain-dead bodies for rich women’s use — but feel all too probable in the world of Harrow ... Unfortunately, this strange plot’s center doesn’t hold.
The message may be bleak but the tone is anything but: Williams is a bitingly funny writer ... If the narrative is fractured, well, so is our world. And that is Williams’s point, one she amplifies with frequent references to physical harrows—spiky tools that break up the earth — which are painted everywhere in her broken land ... a book that is as baffling and frustrating as it is brilliant and, ultimately, inspiring. Anyone new to her work has a treat in store, provided they can get hold of her backlist.
It’s difficult to give an account of Harrow’s plot because it is structured to be vague, fractured, and messy ... The very idea of cause and effect is a consolation of narrative, a kind of myth, where Joy Williams instead asks: Do we deserve to be consoled? How can we be consoled if we don’t even feel grief? ... Harrow might be the most 'postmodern' work by Joy Williams so far. Plots may be introduced but are just as readily done away with, as the novel refuses to bend to narrative expectations ... Characters have no more stability than the plot. They disappear wildly and often, sometimes without comment, at such a breakneck pace that those disappearances or deaths can hardly be reckoned with before there is another ... I fear I may be writing this so far in a way that is entirely humorless when in fact I find all of this deeply exciting ... This book feels so unreservedly Williams that fans of her work should jump for Joy. (Sorry.) The writing is quintessentially tight, yet also whimsical and acidically funny. Williams is a master of the absurd.
To read Williams is to look into the abyss. She places her characters against bigness—the Arizona sky, the rocky Maine shoreline—in order to show us exactly how small they, and we, are ... Nothingness provides Harrow with its most consistent drumbeat. Sentimental language, our profit-maximizing society, and the ravaged world it has left behind: All must be purged before new life can reappear. Grace comes only after harrowing ... Like everything Williams has written, Harrow is a deeply theological work—the desert fathers, Saint John of the Cross, and Julian of Norwich are all mentioned—and the world it imagines is fallen in several senses ... Williams remains our great prophet of nothingness.
[A] slim, wry novel ... Precise and distanced, beautifully rendered and sparse, Williams’ prose is fascinating, her voice captivating. The sentences are at once clear and mysterious. The descriptions of this world, one that is not quite ours but close, are striking. The dialogue is haunting and engaging. Harrow creeps into your world. I finished the novel in two sittings and spent days trying to make sense of all that it offers, noticing water and land through a different lens, imagining the possibilities when we believe in the greatness that others see in us, and what happens when we choose not to.
Like 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.
Harrow’s dark humour, nihilism and absurdist bent bear the author’s idiosyncratic stamp. With even less plot and narrative cohesion than usual, however, reading it can be disorienting, as characters float in and out of the story and the perspective shifts from first person to third, occasionally slipping back again ... it reminded me more of Jenny Offill’s fragmentary novel Weather—minable for glistening nuggets of humour and wordplay amid the doom. Language is, of course, inadequate in the face of the abyss ... Unlike other contemporary climate novels, Harrow does not offer a warning and little in the way of hope.
Williams uses the breakdown of civilization as an unassuming launch point to explore what she has always excelled at: vividly rendered characters navigating an ontologically uncertain existence ... Williams pinpoints the bleak humor and hard truths within a group of individuals who wish to strike a blow for a dying planet but whose failing bodies make their goal improbable ... There is a tension in the novel, too, because Williams does not arrive at these conclusions via any finger-wagging screed; rather, the novel presents itself as a frank and pitiless account of human fallibility, of how easily we can change the narrative of seeing ourselves as stewards of the planet once the planet begins to inconvenience us; and all the while there is a subtle undercurrent of tension because Williams makes her vision of the end of the world grimly humorous and utterly engaging ... at times challenging, at times impenetrable, but always engaging. While staring down the shape of the inevitable disaster awaiting us all, Williams does not blink.
... kaleidoscopic ... [a] summary almost risks making the novel sound like a coherent eco-thriller—and it’s nothing of the sort. In her outstandingly good stories Williams has always displayed a genius for letting seemingly ordinary beginnings descend into astonishing absurdity. Here, as Khristen treks across the landscape—with fantastic scraps of imagery ('deserts blackened with solar panels') bobbing up like flotsam of a vanished world—the novel increasingly collapses into a cacophony of voices ... Haunting depictions of environmental apocalypse have been done with greater drama and realism in other 'cli-fi' dystopias ... There’s also a preachy, hectoring tone here (Williams’s father was a congregational minister) that can sometimes sap the narrative of its freshness ... Yet this bizarre novel...lingers powerfully in the memory, slipping under one’s skin like a poem. It may be a hard read, but its fragmentary, hallucinatory form captures something essential about a world in disintegration.
Williams has a delicious ability to land a gnomic assertion and then watch its inherent contradictions twist in the wind. Harrow is less immediately witty – maybe because the tangible reference points are so distant, so surrealised, that the contradictions are inevitably less immediate – but the overall picture is intense, disturbing and always questioning ... this whole book feels as though it is set in a kind of limbo, a period when mankind must decide which way it wants to turn: down to a slow death in the hell of Disneyland or up to resurrection by caring for a planet that otherwise seems doomed.
Balancing creeping despair with mordant humor and piquant strangeness pegged to Jeffery’s fascination with a Franz Kafka story, Williams asks if hope and compassion, reason and responsibility can survive once the wonders of wild and flourishing nature have been utterly destroyed. Brilliantly and exquisitely shrewd and unnerving.
Pulitzer finalist Williams returns with a dystopian saga of environmental cataclysm that is by turns triumphant, damning, and beguiling ... Rollicking with language that is at once biblical and casual, this builds like a sermon to a fever pitch. Williams’s well-known themes of social decline and children in danger are polished to a gorgeous luster in this prescient page-turner. The result serves as both an indictment of current culture and a blazing escape from it.
A memorable return for renowned storyteller Williams after a lengthy absence from long-form fiction ... There’s no resolution in sight anywhere in Williams’ deliberately paced pre–post-apocalyptic novel ... As the clock ticks away, Williams seeds her story with allusions to Kafka, bits of Greek mythology, philosophical notes on the nature of tragedy, and gemlike description...and all along with subtly sardonic humor ... An enigmatic, elegant meditation on the end of civilization—if end it truly is.
