Harrow

A novel (Kirkus Prize)

By: Joy Williams

Narrated by: Jaime Lamchick

In her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Quick and the Dead, the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic.

"She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review

Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a “resort” on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call “Big Girl.”

In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature’s beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this “gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth”?

Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams’s searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons—against all reasonableness—to try and recover something of it.

Vivid characters in a story as desolate as the post apocalyptic landscape

Almost a book about a story yet to be told. Odd, quirky characters abound and each has their consciousness thoroughly examined. Yet none stuck with me, perhaps as an author conceit in her ephemeral, rapidly disintegrating world. It is well-written and the narrator works OT to breathe life into the cast of oddballs. The plot, if there is one is just random encounters in the vast demolished wilderness with each enclave weirder than the last. By the end, I couldn’t wait for it to end.

Boring

I was bored listening to this book. It was weird, and it felt like the author was trying hard to be edgy and “modernistic.” The story didn’t grab me at all.

Bad narration

Might be a fine book but uptalking narrator makes it unlistenable. Gave up after one chapter.

Wow

I am not intelligent enough to do this book justice (or probably to have understood properly 1/10 of the illusions or crafty wordplay in the novel). But it leaves you with a deeper feeling for where we are and where we’re going as humans.

Finishing this book is like waking from a fever dream to a better understanding of the world.