22 The New York Reviewspaces. “Something,” we’re told, “defi-
nitely had gone wrong.”
Khristen boards a train without a
destination. Before long she’s the only
passenger. The train stops in the mid-
dle of a barren field. Khristen wanders
to a green grove littered with packages
of plastic- wrapped supermarket meat.
Over a hill comes a man hauling a
giant Styrofoam cross, painted black.
“Where you headed?” he asks her, in
an exchange that assumes greater reso-
nance on a second reading:“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Yup, that’s the answer I get
most frequently.”In a promising development she joins
a roving cult of giddy young nihilists
called the Fallout, but they soon disap-
pear as well.
Khristen ends up at the Institute,
a repurposed vacation resort on a
noxious black lake. The Institute is
a training academy for elderly envi-
ronmentalists who plot to commit
murder- suicides. Their targets include
trophy- hunting conventions, bulldozer
dealerships, and the city of Phoenix
(“They have fountains there which is
criminal!”). The suicide bombers don’t
believe their murders will shift pub-
lic opinion or change anything at all.
They just hope, however halfheartedly,
that their deaths will achieve some
small measure of redress. “They don’t
believe in absolution, and you know
why?” asks the Institute’s director.
“Because absolution for what has been
done is impossible.” Khristen does not
really understand where she fits amid
this elderly cabal, nor does Williams,
nor do we. At this point—about a third
of the way through the novel—Khris-
ten’s story effectively ends.
She remains intermittently present,
drifting in and out of the plot, but no
longer holds our attention, or the au-
thor’s. Williams trades the first person
for the third, allowing her access to the
thoughts and misadventures of the “de-
pressed and misguided elderlies” and
those they encounter on their sprees.
(Williams has always been an expert
manipulator of the roving third, a high-
wire act not to be risked by amateurs.)
The novel’s final section takes place in
the chaos outside the Institute, as a ten-
year- old judge named Jeffrey presides
over a continuous court session that
makes the trial in Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland look like Law & Order.
“The whole situation is opaque,” ob-
serves Jeffrey. He demands that his pe-
titioners, among them Khristen, solve
puzzles and conduct critical readings
of Franz Kafka’s “The Hunter Grac-
chus,” a parable that mocks the human
desire for coherence and finality. Then
the world’s last tree is cut down and the
sky turns black.In a 2018 review of Richard Powers’s
The Overstory, Williams questioned
the credibility of the novel as a literary
form in an era of environmental col-
lapse. “I have thought for some time
now that the novel has to address some-
thing other, become something other,
or it will die,” she wrote.The novel concerns itself with our
human drama—it always has....
But to suggest that human beings
aren’t the most important or in-
teresting items around is to invitecensure. The novel must be for-
giving of human foibles, certainly
never judgmental. To be judgmen-
tal would be anti- humanist. To be
anti- humanist is to be unaccept-
ably dissonant, a crank. In the mid-
dle of William Gass’s ecstatically
anti- humanist and under- valued
novel, The Tunnel, glistening like
a turd in a toilet, is this perception:
This is how the world looks. The
world looks...trashed.
Which is very much the case.
And should we not be affrighted
and enraged by this every day and
strive to un- trash it? And should
not the novel—slumbering giant-
ess that she is—awake and guide
us by increasingly wily stratagems
and effects and old- fashioned illu-
minations and impassioned rhet-oric to perceive the magnificence
and complexity of the non- human
world?
Of course it should. It must. But
it hardly ever does.*So does Harrow pass the Williams
test? No, but only because the novel
doesn’t even bother showing up for
the exam. At no point in Harrow does
Williams attempt to use “old- fashioned
illuminations and impassioned rhetoric
to perceive the magnificence and com-
plexity of the non- human world”—the
thought of her doing so is laughable.
It is fascinating to read of her admi-
ration for Powers’s novel, since Har-
row reads like the anti- Overstory:
anti- activist, anti- sentimental, anti-
pedagogical, anti- redemptive.
Williams’s reverence for the magnifi-
cence of the nonhuman world can only
be glimpsed in its reverse image, as if
through a mirror—the funhouse mir-
ror of the planet that we’ve trashed. In
Harrow the nonhuman world has been
eradicated, reduced to baked soil, arid
farms, dead orchards, and poisonous
aphotic lakes: “The very earth had been
pressed to chalk, to clay, as through a
mangle.” Most of the animals have van-
ished: “The wolves, the bears, the great
fish (which he had never seen) gone,
even the harmless snakes and frogs of
his childhood. If someone claimed he’d
seen an eagle, he would not be taken
seriously.” The few creatures that we
glimpse have already been butchered
or are in the process of being tortured
and slaughtered. The novel’s indelible
images include an old oil drum “brim-
ming with amputated wings,” a staged
brush fire “ringed by sportsmen shoot-ing the crazed creatures trying to es-
cape the flames,” a fish vendor selling
extinct baiji dolphin meat out the back
of an ice truck. A man dreams of a
horse galloping through an apartment
window and falling several stories to
the sidewalk. “I felt kind of sorry for
it,” he says, “but it looked kind of stu-
pid down there too.”
Harrow may fail the Williams test,
but it aces the Gass test. (Williams
uses the line from The Tunnel as an
epigraph.) The novel is triumphantly,
ecstatically antihumanist, mercilessly
unforgiving of human foibles. Its vora-
cious misanthropy is the source of its
comedy. (One elderly ecoterrorist to
another: “That light show at the cor-
ner of your eyes is not a celebration
in your honor, it’s the tumor moving
in.”) Williams’s misanthropy is also thesource of the novel’s exhilaration—for
it is thrilling, enlivening even, to read
a novel so contemptuous of the domi-
neering pieties of our age.Williams wastes little time on the ob-
vious villains: the herbicide salesmen,
the corporate scientists who inject ex-
perimental drugs into lab animals, the
wild- game hunters; they are summarily
sentenced to suicide bombings. (She
has already dealt with their kind in Ill
Nature and The Quick and the Dead;
in the latter a dog abuser has his dick
blown off.) In the world of Harrow,
climate denialism has evolved into
nature- hatred. Townspeople knock
down an old tree out of spite because
they suspect it will live forever. “Peo-
ple think the planet is attempting
to make threats—the withdrawal of
spring—and nonnegotiable demands,
and it pisses them off,” she writes.
“Let this fucking land of ours that has
turned against us burn, is the prevail-
ing sentiment.” In a novel of absurd-
ism, this is one of the more realistic
prophesies, a logical terminus of the
anti- environmental tendencies of the
American right. Deliberate ecocide is
only a few refinements past the “roll-
ing coal” guerrilla activism of Trump
supporters who disable their trucks’
emission controls so that they can spew
black clouds of exhaust on electric cars
they pass on the interstate.
Yet Williams reserves at least equal
ridicule for anyone who hopes to save
us from ourselves—what one character
describes as “all this fakery. Everyone
pretending things will be all right.”
This means “the fools who still want
to recycle their toothbrushes and plant
apple trees. Let them turn the lights offor never turn them on, it can’t matter
now.” The “groups of filthy youth who
think they can still save the earth by
grinding up some modest nut or bean
for pancake meal. Have you ever had
one of their goddamn proselytizing
pancakes?” The scientists who, in their
efforts to study endangered ecosys-
tems, destroy their subjects “by sim-
ple human commitment.” (There is an
echo here of the episode, recounted
in The Florida Keys, when a ship of
marine scientists runs aground on the
Keys’ most beautiful coral reef, turn-
ing much of it to rubble.) Even the el-
derly suicide bombers are ultimately
dispatched as “brooding over- the- hill
eco- nuts whose concern for the tusked
and shelled, the finned and winged,
made them the shame of their species
and more outcast than any Azazel goat
of the Hebrews.”
Those who preach adaptation, mit-
igation, sustainability, technological
mastery—those who dare to imagine
so much as a future for humanity—
only humiliate themselves. To cast
ourselves as the heroes in a battle to
save the world reeks of the same vanity
that got us into this mess. Check that—
don’t even call it a battle: “It’s just be-
come a garrulous and utterly useless
call to fight a battle which long ago was
lost.” Poets are useless too, even those
“who hate and despise the world we’ve
made.... Who write unsentimentally
with cold disgust... ” Their efforts have
only compounded the general mayhem.
If there is any salvation to be found, it
is in the relief that the whole thing will
soon “be taken out of our hands.” This
is the relief of oblivion. A return to an
oblivion from which, Williams sug-
gests, we’ve never actually emerged.
N i h i l i s m of t h i s s or t k now s no b ou nd -
aries—it laughs at boundaries. It is un-
surprising, then, that its radioactivity
seeps into the form of the novel itself,
destabilizing the characters’ identities,
the setting, the plot, the novel’s inter-
nal clock. Harrow offers a black wed-
ding of theme and form. Could it end
in any other way than disintegration?
Williams has called for another kind of
novel to address the nonhuman world,
and she has delivered one. “The old
dear stories of possibility,” writes Wil-
liams. “No one wanted them anymore,
but nothing had replaced them.” Har-
row has.
It is tempting to offer a timid protes-
tation to Williams’s glittering night pa-
rade. Even if one readily concedes that
literature has no power to change the
course of global affairs, that a novelist
intending to impart moral lessons is no
more than a pretentious propagandist,
that atonement is impossible, and that
the so- called battle to save the world
from ecological collapse has already
been lost in a rout—even if one grants
all of this, might there still be another
use for literature? Might a great novel
nevertheless help a reader to reexam-
ine her own biases, delusions, hopes,
desires, and fears? Might a novel, as
Harrow does, help us to understand
ourselves in an age of civilizational
freefall? If so, is there not some mean-
ing, even value, in the endeavor?
Someone could offer that protesta-
tion. I won’t. I’ve seen what quick work
Williams makes of sentimentalists.
Safer to end on her own conclusion in
1987 to the Sun- Sentinel. “It all seems
pretty hopeless,” she said. “There
doesn’t seem to be much that good peo -
ple can do.” QFlooding caused by unusually high seasonal tides, Bahia Honda Key,
Florida, October 2019Joe Raedle /Getty Images*Book Post, December 21, 2018.Rich 20 23 .indd 22 11 / 18 / 21 7 : 30 PM