Harrow

Shortlisted for the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction A Sunday Times Book of the Year A Times Paperback of the Year In her first novel since The Quick and the Dead (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), 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. 'When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me ' New Yorker Books of the Year 2021 'This is the apocalypse as reimagined by a committee headed by Dalí, Kafka and Yorgos Lanthimos.' Observer Winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the 2022 LA Times Prize Longlisted for the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked for greatness as a baby when she died for a moment, then came back to life. After Khristen's boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and her mother disappears, she ranges across the dead landscape and finds 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. Rivetingly strange and delivered with Williams' searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is a tale of paradise lost and the reasons to try and recover something of it.

About the Author :
Joy Williams is the author of four novels and four short story collections. Among her many honours are a National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as nominations for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.

Review :
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. 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. A magnificent and moving novel [that excavates] the middle distance between silence and experience . . . Harrow is a piece of writing in the vein of Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka, its humor weaponized by rage. Harrow's dark humour, nihilism and absurdist bent bear the author's idiosyncratic stamp ... [there are] glistening nuggets of humour and wordplay amid the doom. Harrow belongs at the front of the pack of recent climate fiction . . . 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 . . . 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. Death-haunted and perfectly indescribable fiction . . . To read Williams is to look into the abyss . . . [She] remains our great prophet of nothingness. The ridiculous, pigheaded, bemused, endlessly distracted and continuously self-sabotaging state of the future is the subject of this wonderfully goading satire . . . A blackly comic portrait of futility . . . This is sarcasm of a high, artistic order, reminiscent of no one quite so much as William Gaddis. Elegantly deranged . . . A hypnotizing novel, funny in places and chilling in others, filled with wacky and tragic characters, that unspools the absurdity in just one of our many very possible bad futures. Williams's tone achiev[es] a new, perfectly hostile register . . . [Her] vision of an annihilated earth seems to have flown from the brain of Francisco Goya . . . As the novel continues, it plumbs ever-deeper zones of dystopian weirdness . . . She practices a kind of hallucinogenic realism, which takes at face value the psychological flights of characters deranged by loss . . . Williams has long written to the side of conventional English, pursuing a form that feels more commensurate with actual experience-with the terror, comedy, and mystery of moving through the world. Who better than Williams to capture pure-hearted but absurd efforts to retrieve paradise lost? Climate collapse is well underway and Joy Williams's Harrow deserves the Pulitzer Prize The return of an American original ... Odd, witty and original. Brilliant and inspiring. Anyone new to her has a treat in store Among the strangest, most exciting authors at work today Praise for Joy Williams: 'One of the great writers of her generation' To read Joy Williams is to be arrested in a state of relentless awe and wonderment ... why we aren't worshipping Joy Williams in public squares is beyond me She belongs in the company of Céline and Flannery O'Connor Williams is a flawless writer Deep, dazzling, disconcerting Joy Williams is simply a wonder Electric and dangerously human Cracked, morbidly hilarious ... a splintered vision of environmental collapse that seems somehow both gleefully nihilistic and yearningly spiritual Beautiful ... It's all pleasure, if pleasure of a bleak and violent sort. It's also often pretty funny, in a deadpan way Her works are almost a well-kept secret. They should be much more widely read. Williams is a writer for our times: both visionary and caustic, knowing yet also full of wonder... 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. Harrow is unyielding in its moral purpose and raucously impious in its methods ... she has the syntactic equivalent of perfect pitch In the murky "postdisaster present" of this novel, "all the prisons had been emptied, the opera houses and theaters closed". Its narrator, Khristen, treks across the desert. This bizarre novel may be a hard read, but its fragmentary, hallucinatory form captures something essential about a world in disintegration Strangely beautiful and grimly funny