Lacerating, bewildering, endlessly opaque and alarming. There's revelation here but I couldn't say what. Joy Williams might be just about the best writer going around, especially her short stories (and her shorter stories). Harrow is a novel, and a bit like the other novel of hers that I've read, The Quick and the Dead, I felt the whole time that it was slipping by without my grasping it properly, but also that the novel is her least ideal form. Maybe both are true? I don't have the words for the style in which she's working - Harrow has something of the parable in its depiction of environmental, social and moral collapse and the surreal (irreal) networks and institutions that populate its hollowed out future America, but its meaning is deliberately difficult to grasp, and its form uninviting in a way that mirrors the devastation it's about.
