Harrow by Joy Williams

Hope no longer found a place to dwell. Even the insects felt it gone. The colt, the cub, the calf, the stones that would be precious jewels deep within the earth. The flowers who, as Wordsworth knew, enjoyed the air they breathed, were aware of nothing but hope's absence. Something definitely had gone wrong. Even the dead were dismayed.

Dystopian fiction is having a moment. Where once it was the story of state power run amok--the old anxieties of the Cold War imagined at an accelerated pitch--today's dystopias are all ecological disasters, climate fiction: cli-fi. As the possibility of mitigating the advent of climate change grows dimmer, these books ask us to imagine a world that is both unimaginable and certain. In Lydia Millet's A Children's Bible, for example, storm and disease separate children from their irresponsible parents, sundering a reckless past from a burdened future.

But Millet's book feels underwhelming because as the future becomes depleted old modes of narrative feel false. If you can't write poetry after Auschwitz, can you write a novel before the death of the Earth? As Joy Williams puts it in her new novel Harrow--the only book I've read that really captures the bewildering horror of climatological crisis--"The old dear stories of possibility. No one wanted them anymore, but nothing had replaced them."

Harrow's heroine is Khristen, who, her mother tells her, died briefly as a baby before returning to life. Khristen's father doubts this belief, as does Khristen and everyone else, but the belief clings to her and shapes her life. She holds the key to living through the age of apocalypse, maybe, having ultimately recovered from death. As the ten-year old judge Jeffrey describes her: "As an interesting case she could anticipate no present moment, she possessed only the future, which she was still powerless to change."  In contrast to Khristen are the small band of elderly eco-terrorists--with whom Khristen resides after her school closes and her mother disappears--living in a ruined motel at the edge of a black lake. These elderly folks are all past and no futurity, and they dither about not making good on their plans to blow up factories and murder pharma profiteers because on some level they understand that the gestures are futile and empty. Alice, the budding eco-terrorist from Williams' The Quick and the Dead might age into such a person.

These elderlies are anomalous, of a past world; though we might expect the exacerbation of ecological collapse to radicalize most people, Williams unnervingly suggests the opposite might occur: people decide that nature has betrayed them and hasten its demise, treasuring plastic, cutting down the last few trees for committing the offense of simply being alive so long. The elderlies are essentially, symbolically, literally too late; strategy does not matter because apocalypse cannot be converted:

The owls lay fuddled and miserably starving in their hollows--their home, darkness had been taken from them. The very earth had been pressed to chalk, to clay, as through a mangle. 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 possibility of seeing an angel or a witch on a broomstick would be treated with more polite agnosticism. The fouling of the nest was all but complete, the birthright smashed.

Harrow is recognizably a Joy Williams novel: no one else is as capable at making every line glitter, or as incapable of writing a sentence that is boring. ("The spider brings the web out of herself and then lives in it. Remarkable.") But Harrow is not like The Quick and the Dead, which at the very least takes place in the swimming pools and arroyos of something resembling a very real Arizona. Scenes and images in Harrow are completely disconnected from each other and realism has been abolished. It seems like an attempt to discover a narratological mode that matches the nature of the crisis. Whether it is successful seems almost beside the point: strategy doesn't matter, etc., etc.

The middle of it sags a little bit when the focus pulls away from Kristen and onto the elderlies, but the ending is wonderfully cryptic and intense: a little boy named Jeffrey Khristen meets at the hotel becomes, as he has always wanted, a judge in a nearby courthouse. The cases that come in front of him have nothing to answer for but their entire lives, and though Jeffrey denies the simplicity of the accusation, he feels a little like an image of God. Should we be comforted or terrified that the "judgment" part of the End of Days has not been forgotten? When Khristen comes before him, he becomes fascinated with her, the "interesting case." He senses that there is something different in her, that maybe there is a way of being in this new world, of dying, and then living on.