20 The New York ReviewHarrow
by Joy Williams.
Knopf, 204 pp., $26.Joy Williams published ten editions of
her guidebook to the Florida Keys be-
fore she gave up the gig in 2003, after
her novel The Quick and the Dead
(2000) was named a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. I make the
following endorsement without hesita-
tion: Should you read a single guide-
book in your life, make it The Florida
Keys: A History and Guide, though
it has not been updated in nearly two
decades, even if you’ll never visit Flor-
ida, even if you have no interest in the
Keys. It can be read as a helpful, if
somewhat dated, guide (“Chad’s Deli
(853- 5566) makes good sandwiches for
your boat trip”); as an assault on lei-
sure travel (“To be a happy tourist is to
remain determinedly ignorant about a
great deal”); as a sleeper- cell sabotage
of the genre itself (“The guidebook
writer is beneath the travel writer, the
nature writer, the journalist... probing
the very bottom of the literary pile”);
and—scaling a fifth epistemological
peak—as an unstinting critique of Wil-
liams’s own motivations for writing
the thing: “I must admit, I’m unsure
as to what those aims exactly were. I
believe they were benign. Maybe, as
a breed, guidebook writers are a little
simpleminded.”
Above all, however, The Florida
Keys is a work of mournful and omi-
nous natural history that, like all of
Williams’s writing, manages to be un-
compromisingly entertaining. Its orig-
inal publication was delayed because
her editors balked at her relentless
emphasis on the Keys’ desecration by
the very people who had “developed”
the islands into a tourist destination.
Williams pauses over ecological deg-
radation wherever she finds it, and she
finds it everywhere. To the most galling
examples she dedicates sidebars, the
kind guidebooks typically reserve for
amusing historical tidbits or charming
slices of local color. We learn of the
savagery of John James Audubon (“the
premier avian slaughterer of his time”),
the ransacking of the Everglades by
the sugar multinationals, and the near
extermination of an endangered deer
by “Cuban immigrant hunters who
jacklight them at night, kill them with
two- by- fours, and take them home to
eat.” Even a casual reader will be left
with the unescapable conclusion that to
visit the Keys is to be complicit in their
strangulation, notwithstanding the fact
that Coco’s Cantina at mile marker
21.5 has “turkey dinner on Wednesday
nights!”
In a 1987 interview with South Flor-
ida’s Sun- Sentinel, Williams spoke
more candidly of her interest in the
assignment, saying that it gave her
“an opportunity to discuss my envi-
ronmental concerns, something I’ve
never been able to do in my fiction.”
This observation is striking when read
today, since in the last quarter- century
such concerns have come to dominate
Williams’s fiction. It is possible to
find peripheral references in the early
work—the tropical vacationers unable
to see the fish beneath the scrim of
suntan oil floating in the water (“Rot,”1987), the maimed pelicans (Breaking
and Entering, 1988), the stray apoca-
lyptic pronouncement: “The land it-
self is no longer safe. It’s weakening.
If you dig deep enough to dip your
seed, beneath the crust you’ll find
an emptiness like the sky” (State of
Grace, 1973). But it remained no more
than a motif, like the lush weirdness
of her former home state (“Outside it
was Florida”), the young children who
speak like socialites in a Dawn Powell
novel, the delirious wives and bovine
husbands.
As with any unclassifiable writer,
Williams frequently inspires her critics
to pursue fruitless taxonomies of her
fiction, with a woolly consensus gath-
ering around such weightless terms
as “minimalism” and “dirty realism.”
Yet hindsight reveals that Williams
and our global environmental disas-
ter have been converging for decades.
The disorienting sentences, the decep-
tively plain declarations of fact, the
perpetual sense of a great unraveling,
the bathetic juxtapositions of social
nonsense and bottomless anxiety—all
are perfectly calibrated to our age of
ecological dread. The motif grew into
a major theme in The Quick and the
Dead, about an aspiring ecoterror-
ist, and the essay collection Ill Nature
(2001), which includes excerpts from
The Florida Keys—and it has now,
five decades into her career, become
her totalizing subject. With Harrow,
a screwball fantasia of environmental
collapse and other forms of self- harm,
Williams and the ecological crisis join
in ferocious embrace. The sound is that
of an explosion. “An inhuman sound,”writes Williams in the novel’s final
paragraphs. “A violent crack as of a
great breaking.”Harrow begins with an untitled three-
page prologue in which an indetermi-
nate number of unnamed tourists visit
an unidentified canyon in an unspeci-
fied future. The tourists—or at least
these ciphers who “believed themselves
to be tourists”—observe vague figures
fleeing into shadows and distant shapes
wheeling slowly in the air. Most of the
scene is rendered in dialogue, the char-
acters delivering the kind of absurdist,
ominous, defiantly unhinged non se-
quiturs familiar to Williams’s readers:Where are the antelopes with their
lovely masks.. .Where are the
milty streams...I think the world is dying because
we were dead to its astonishments
pretty much. It’ll be around but it
will become less and less until it’s
finally compatible with our feel-
ings for it....Oh what have we done!! someone
cried.It’s easy to imagine an alternative ver-
sion of Harrow that proceeds in this
fashion for its full two hundred pag-
es—a prose poem of disembodied
monologues, interrupted by postapoc-
alyptic panoramas. It’s easy to imagine
because Harrow periodically with-
draws into this mode, as if pulled grav-
itationally, the plot abstracting into abedlam of voices, alternately outraged,
numb, and screamingly insane.
The novel begins conventionally
enough, at least by Williams’s stan-
dard. The teenage narrator introduces
herself as Lamb, though she is ad-
dressed by that name only once. Her
erratic young mother is convinced that
Khristen (as she’s henceforth known)
briefly died as an infant and returned
from purgatory, making her some kind
of spectral being—a prophet, perhaps.
“What was it like there,” her mother
asks, “the dead world?” Khristen can
offer nothing to support her mother’s
thesis and, together with her mother, it
recedes from view.
Khristen soon enters another kind
of dead world: ours. Or our world plus
a few years (who can tell how many?).
Khristen’s childhood is defined by anx-
iety for “the environmental and moral
challenges of a ruined, overpopulated
world.” By the time she is sent off to
boarding school, society has entered a
phase known as “the verge.” The verge
looks a lot like the United States in
2021:The hiking trails, the aquariums,
the infertility treatments, the ox-
ygen nutritional supplements con-
tinuing in cheerful tandem with
the oil- soaked birds, the twelve-
lane highways with bicycle sup-
plements, the tailings dumps and
filthy rivers and deserts blackened
with solar panels, the billions of
plastic bags translated in magical
symbiosis into ethically responsi-
ble leisure equipment.This litany conveys the particular warp
of Williams’s disdain, which encom-
passes both environmental atrocity and
the familiar solutions offered to let us
off the hook. The failure to notice the
modern world’s ugliness—what Eve-
lyn Waugh called “the grim cyclorama
of spoliation” that surrounds human
experience—is a form of insanity. To
imagine that our pious efforts to stave
off environmental collapse might suc-
ceed is insanity squared. It is hard to
think of another American novel-
ist brave enough to structure a novel
around this theme.The verge, which “people thought
would go on forever,” abruptly ends
during Khristen’s third year at board-
ing school. How it ends, exactly, is un-
clear, apart from a few overheard bytes
of officialese that would feel at home
in a novel by Don DeLillo (an outspo-
ken admirer of Williams and one of her
closest stylistic cousins). “The situation
in the world,” Khristen learns, “had
changed.” “Priorities had changed.”
“There was talk of a third of the once
familiar world outside us being gone.”
From beyond the school walls come
sounds like cars and trucks backfiring
“for a considerably long time.” The
dining hall menu is reduced to pow-
dered eggs and toast, children go miss-
ing, classes are canceled, and finally
the school shuts down. We learn that
theaters and prisons have been closed
and the only remaining businesses are
casinos on Indian reservations. Depic-
tions of a harrow are posted in publicExhilarating Antihumanism
Nathaniel RichJoy Williams; illustration by Ruth GwilyRich 20 23 .indd 20 11 / 18 / 21 7 : 30 PM