14 January 2022 The Guardian WeeklyCulture 57
▲ Struck down
The book’s
bowling alley is
a fiction within
another fiction
SMODJ/GETTY /
ISTOCKPHOTO
I
n a bowling alley somewhere in post-
apocalyptic rural America, a 10-year-old
savant is celebrating his birthday. His
mother has chosen this moment to tell
him, via the unusual method of a murder scene
rendered in icing on his cake, that his father
killed his grandfather. The baker, though, has
erred, and topped the cake instead with an edible
version of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, an
image so disturbing it causes the child to ques-
tion his own existence. “Saturn ,” a party guest
helpfully informs him, “represents Time, which,
with its ravenous appetite for life, devours all its
creations.” Later we will learn that the bowling
alley never existed, and that some or all of these
characters may very well be dead.
Welcome, if you have not been here before, to
the world of Joy Williams – widely praised, sadly
not quite as widely read. My Vintage paperback
of 2001’s dazzling The Quick and the Dead carries
admiring quotes by Don DeLillo , Raymond Carver
and Bret Easton Ellis. Williams’s 2015 short story
collection The Visiting Privilege was heralded by
all who read it as a major literary event.
On the surface of it, Harrow, her fi rst novel in
more than 20 years, seems unlikely to broaden
her audience. This is not to say the book is not
brilliant – it is. It’s simply that Williams has made
no concessions; she remains wonderfully and
determinedly herself. What might be
a little diff erent, though, is the world
into which her work emerges, and the
reality she so daringly alchemises into
her vision.
Attempting a pr ecis of this novel
feels like exactly the kind of mis-
guided endeavour Williams would
scorn, but allow me to try. Harrow is
set in an undefi ned near future ; the
global environmental situation has
gone from being on “the verge thatpeople thought would go on forever” to all-out
catastrophe. Khristen , the novel’s not-quite-
central character, briefl y died as a baby, or so her
mother adamantly believes, and may never have
entirely returned. Post-disaster, amid a hallucina-
tory terrain that may or may not be an afterlife,
she fi nds herself at The Institute, where a loose
collective of geriatric terrorists “in the worst of
health but with kamikaze hearts” plot suicide
missions targeting vivisectionists and pesticide
salesmen in the hope that this will “refresh,
through crackpot violence, a plundered earth ”.
Language, not narrative, is the connective
tissue. To read Williams is to be fl ung every
which way: from the spiritually profound to
the farcically bizarre. One minute we observe
“unprepared souls, moments from the clarity of
their deaths”. The next, we are invited to con-
sider the condition of a very old man’s penis: “She
wondered if his pecker was as shredded and grib-
bled and nicked as the rest of him or whether it
hung wondrously, impossibly smooth and aloof,
its head like burled oak.”
Every sentence is lathed into startling per-
fection. At the bowling alley, serious bowlers
“held the afterward of their poses for a vanity
of time”. A crashing car fl ies “like a crumpled
Kleenex into a cement utility pole by which it was
trephined with glittering effi ciency”. A salesman
is so talented he “could sell a shock collar to a
Doberman”. Even seemingly offh and phrases
glitter with wit.
Zeroing in on our collective complacency
and denial, Williams is both wry and merciless,
lamenting “twelve lane highways with bicycle
supplements” and people “who think they can
still save the earth by grinding up some modest
nut or bean for pancake meal”.
“We all lead three lives,” Khristen is told.
“The true one, the false one, and the one we
are not aware of.” This life we’re not aware of
is Williams’s great subject. She peels back the
visible and known, revealing death and chaos.
Part of what makes Williams’s work so
destabilising is that agency has almost no signifi -
cance. Her characters are lost and baffl ed, their
actions and ideas stripped of meaning. These
are people who “suspected they were meant to
be more or diff erent but fumbled about in the
smoky light of half-realised lives”. With free will
in question, and the borders between life and
death or reality and delusion queasily blurred,
individuality itself begins to fray. ”
Harrow reminds us that, as a
consequence of climate collapse,
trauma and grief are the condition of
our collective existence. As our world
disintegrates, it will take what we
think of as reality with it. Addressing
this in fi ction will be the job, partly,
of a certain kind of modern mystic.
Williams – great virtuoso of the unreal- is one of them.
SAM BYERS IS AN AUTHOR AND CRITIC
FICTION
Hell on Earth
A visionary US author
tackles our insecurities
around the chaos of
climate change with
a brilliant portrayal
of collapsing reality
By Sam Byers
BOOK OF
THE WEEK
Harrow
by Joy WilliamsBooks