Harrow (2021) by Joy Williams

 Audiobook Review

Harrow (2021)

by Joy Williams

    I take some flack in my book group for reading prize winners but I stick with the approach because ANY literary prize is handed out by a bunch of people who take literary fiction seriously and are trying to make a point by awarding a specific prize to a specific book.  Any work of literary fiction that can win a major or minor prize is worth taking note of, because the over-under on "number of people who think a random work of literary fiction is great" is roughly zero.   I had checked out this very same Audiobook back in 2021 only to abandon it a couple hours through the eight hour listening length.   I revisited it after coming across the information that it had won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction back when it was published.  The prize itself only dates back to 2014 but it's done a decent job of picking relevant titles. James by Percival Everett is their pick this year, Heaven and Earth Grocery Store was last year.  By those standards Harrow- a dystopian eco-thriller{?} and first novel by the well-known writer of short stories is a real left field pick. 

  What I remember from my first go-round in 2021 is that I had little idea what was going on- my number one indicator for gauging whether a book is "serious" literary fiction or not- lack of narrative guard-rails for the reader is the signal accomplishment of literary modernism.  But 2024 me would think that the combination of literary fiction and dystopian sci fi would have been appealing to 2021 me, so I wanted to unravel the mystery.   Second time through I had just as hard a time figuring out what was going on.  Like, sitting here right now I can't describe the third part of the book in relation to the first two parts.  Williams and her approach very much reminded me of the approach taken by George Saunders in his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo- also a literary prize winner.  There, Saunders animated the graveyard with a polyphony of voices.  Here, Williams similarly throws voices like a short-story writer getting paid by the idea.  Her protagonist, Kristin, is a high-school/college age girl who is dismissed from her confusing boarding school situation after some kind of "final" collapse of civilization.

   She wanders in search of her Mother, who was last seen on the shore of a lake in what feels like Upstate New York at some kind of wellness conference.  When she arrives at her destination she doesn't find her mother but rather a run-down motel inhabited by a collection of elderly people who are each trying to commit a final act of terrorism against what is left of the world before they die, a quiet suicide now being somewhat de rigeur for Americans of a certain age.  There is also a 10 year old boy named Jeffery who constantly recites legal doctrines as a coping mechanism ("Before this he needed an inhaler") and his alcoholic mother. 

   But so far as anything happening in the book, there isn't a lot, just this girl Kristin talking to different people and those people relating their own stories before the focus goes back to Kristin.  There were passages where I could hear the greatness but getting that wrapped up in the listening experience would cause me to lose my grasp of the over-arching narrative- which is a very rare event in my reading life.  It really says something about the complexity of Harrow.