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. 

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989) by Alan Gurganus

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989)

by Alan Gurganus

Fells, North Carolina

North Carolina: 9/20

    This book is 700 pages long.  It isn't JUST 700 pages long- it is also a big ole physical 700 page book with smallish type and small margins.  Of course, I'd heard about this book before- Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All  was a monster hit when it was first published- especially for a 700 page work of more or less serious literary fiction.  It spawned a 1994 television mini-series which was also a hit, winning four Emmy's, and a musical version in 2003 (starring Ellen Burstyn) which flopped on Broadway and closed after one show(!).  Its length precludes a ready transition to the internet era, but I'd wager most active readers over the age of forty have at least heard of it.  

   For those unfamiliar, Oldest Living Confederate Widor Tells All is both the title of the book and an accurate description of the plot- a ninety nine year old Lucy Marsden, married to a 50-something confederate veteran at the age of fifteen, lives in a rest home and she is being interviewed by someone- there are frequent in-book references to the tape recording process of the interview.   Over the course of these 700 pages you not only get to hear Lucy's story- child bride, mother-of-eight and put-upon wife- but also the stories of her husband, her mother, her husbands mother, her husband's ex-slave and possibly the narrator's only friend and maybe more that I'm leaving out.  The multiplicity of narrative viewpoints and the use of a spoken idiom both conspire to lengthen Confederate Widow.  

  Lucy is a plucky, humorous narrator, and one aspect I couldn't get over is that her aw shucks, almost exaggerated southern dialect (which, mind you, constitutes almost the only distinct narrative voice for 700 pages) is something that young Lucy adopts to annoy her Mother, who raises her to be better.  Lucy has other plans, those other plans being married off to a fifty year old man before she turns 16.  

   The over-all vibe for me resembled that of John Irving- quirky, eccentric small-town types who experience both humor and great sadness- but in a humorous way.  In fact, if I had to make a one-line pitch for this book pre-publication it would be "John Irving but set in North Carolina"- Irving was at the height of his powers in 1989- that was the year A Prayer for Owen Meany came out. Also, in 1989, Alice Walker published The Temple of My Familiar and Billy Bathgate (E.L. Doctorow) came out so Guraganus was right there and you could argue that this book would be a better representative in the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list than is A Prayer for Owen Meany- one of several Irving novels on that list,

  There is no doubt it's one of the top books from North Carolina and a top 5 title for the sub-chapter (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina) and top 10 for the full chapter.  Still, it is hard to imagine many people taking the time to actually sit down and read this 700 page book in 2024.  The late 1980s were different in that regard- you could publish a 470 page novel like London Fields by Martin Amis and EVERYONE read it.

  

South of Broad (2009) by Pat Conroy

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

South of Broad (2009)

by Pat Conroy

Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 4/14

   I will say that Charleston, South Carolina seems like the only globally interesting culture in this part of the United States (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina).  The whole idea of the southern aristocrat comes alive in Charleston, which is also a genuinely interesting city which I'd someday like to visit.  Pat Conroy, of course, is one of the most well-known authors in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  He achieved huge popular and limited critical acclaim for this novels, most (all?) of which were set in this part of the world.  Several of his books were adapted into big-budget Hollywood pictures that further cemented his place in the literary imagination of America.  

  South of Broad tracks the experiences of a group of friends from their time in high school in the late 60's to the present day- the book ends after Hurricane Hugo.  The narrator is Leo King, an obvious stand-in for the author.  The book traces back in forth in time from Leo's troubled childhood, marred by the suicide of hid older brother (this is the fourth or fifth older brother to commit suicide in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels project) and his own mistake of being caught holding the cocaine of a popular athlete at a high school party.  Leo's Mother is a lapsed nun turned high school principal.  She is also a scholar of James Joyce, a fact that King/Conroy bandies about without it ever impacting the writing style or plot of his book.

  

 South of Broad is a great pick within the parameters of the 1,001 Novels project because Conroy's narrator is a newspaper writer who is himself obssessed with the beauty of Charleston.  He also does a good job explaining the different cultural dynamics of this place, though he seems a bit treacly in his sentiments.  At 20 hours, the Audiobook was no walk in the park, particularly in the early going, but as the plot cranks into gear I found myself enjoying the dramatic third act.

Absolution (2024) by Jeff Vandermeer

 Audiobook Review

Absolution (2024)

by Jeff Vandermeer

   Reading the latest Southern Reach book from Jeff Vandermeer is an exercise in self-inflicted pain.  For those who aren't keep track, Annihilation and it's follow-ups were always referred to as the Southern Reach Trilogy up until this, the fourth book in the series, was published. The reach of Vandermeer's enterprise was expanded by the movie version by Alex Garland, which polarized audiences when it was released but has gone to enjoy a succesful life in the stream-o-verse- I think I've watched parts of it on three or four different streaming platforms at this point.

 So three books in what do we know about The Southern Reach- we know something is going on in there, that the something changes and transforms DNA- turning peaceful bunny rabbits into crab eating monsters and possessing the capacity to create human-like doppelgangers.  We know that the investigation is being run by a shadowy government agency, or maybe even a shadowy government agency secretly ensconced within another, larger, shadowy government agency.

   Beyond that I don't really know, and frankly, I'm kind of done caring after this, the latest episode which mostly tells the story of "Old Jim" a washed-up, alcoholic CIA agent obsessed with his missing daughter who is posted to Area X prior to the time period covered in Annihilation.   There is also a portion told from the perspective of two different members of the all-male expedition that preceded the all female expedition of Annihilation.   Like all the other books in the series, Vandermeer never makes anything explicit, leaving the reader to ponder what to make of it all.   To be fair there were some heart stopping set pieces, like the aforementioned crab eating rabbits and a late scene where the Area tricks one of the male expedition members into eating the flesh of a dead comrade- which is, contrary to the rest of the series, described in such intimate detail that I had to turn the Audiobook off a couple times to keep myself from potentially throwing up in my vehicle.