Harrow

Starred review from May 24, 2021
Pulitzer finalist Williams (The Quick and the Dead) returns with a dystopian saga of environmental cataclysm that is by turns triumphant, damning, and beguiling. Sometime in the near future, Khristen is sent to a boarding school in the desert of the American West by her mother, a woman haunted by the fact that she believes Khristen briefly died as an infant and came back to life. After the school is shut down, Khristen sets off across a decimated landscape only to end up lodging at a remote hotel inhabited by elderly ecoterrorists, visionaries, and would-be assassins, led by their host, Lola. Among these residents, Khristen also meets a strange 10-year-old named Jeffrey, and together they face the environmental ruination and human depravity that mark the new world these characters all inhabit, while still remembering “the old dear stories of possibility” and noting how “no one wanted them anymore, but nothing had replaced them.” 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.

Starred review from July 1, 2021
Master short story writer Williams (The Visiting Privilege, 2015), winner of the 2021 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, returns to the novel after a long absence to portray a bleak near-future. In this blasted America, the harrow, a farming implement used to break up the earth, has become a morbidly unifying symbol, given that harrow also means to torment or to pillage. All apply as young Khristen, homeless after the abrupt closing of her grim, bookless boarding school, journeys stoically through rack and ruin, searching for her mother. She arrives at a decrepit desert conference facility beside a dark and polluted lake called Big Girl. The cancer-afflicted proprietor, Lola, allows Khristen to stay; the only other guests are a martini-swilling woman and her son, Jeffrey, a 10-year-old jurisprudential savant. The regular residents are a band of renegade elders committed to going out with a bang in violent acts of protest against those who destroyed the planet's web of life, valuing only the human made. Nature "has been deemed sociopathic," as has anyone who tries to defend it. 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.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from July 1, 2021
A memorable return for renowned storyteller Williams after a lengthy absence from long-form fiction. "Something definitely had gone wrong. Even the dead were dismayed." Something has gone wrong indeed, but in her first novel in 20 years, Williams doesn't reveal the precise contours of what that something is. There are portents at the outset as the young girl known first as Lamb, then as Khristen, contemplates a bit of family lore recounting that as a newborn she was resuscitated after having stopped breathing and, thus reborn, "was destined for something extraordinary." So Khristen's mother believes, in any event, sending her to a boarding school where, Khristen says, "my situation would be appreciated and the alarming gift I had been given properly acknowledged." Instead, the school dries up, for by Khristen's third year there are no incoming students. Why? There's no resolution in sight anywhere in Williams' deliberately paced pre-post-apocalyptic novel: All the reader knows is that something is definitely off, signaled by such moments as when a fellow student, asked to contemplate an orange while pondering creativity, protests, "I haven't tasted an orange in years." Khristen takes her place in an odd community on a "razed resort" alongside a dying lake known as Big Girl, populated by the likes of a gifted, spooky 10-year-old and a Vicodin-swilling matriarch named Lola. If nothing else, the place has a working bowling alley, one good place to await doomsday. 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 ("He was in excellent physical condition, lean with rage"), and all along with subtly sardonic humor: Williams' imagined world of the near future is so thoroughly corporatized that even the blades of wind turbines have advertisements on them, and she offers a useful phrase for obituaries to come: "What did he die of?" one character asks, meeting the reply: "Environmental issues." An enigmatic, elegant meditation on the end of civilization--if end it truly is.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.