Joy Williams’ Harrow is a strange, comic novel for the end of the world

Harrow is thick with weighty symbols, but they are scattered, and looking for meaning in them can feel like reading tea leaves. Something is being suggested, but rarely precisely: Khristen finds the word “hell” etched on a table in the hospital where her father dies; on a hill, she encounters a man dragging around a Styrofoam cross; a birthday party takes place at a bowling alley called Paradise Lanes. At the Institute, Khristen befriends Jeffrey, a precocious 10-year-old obsessed with the law who later becomes a rather busy judge. (His big move on the bench is asking defendants to differentiate between two nearly identical pictures.) Were he not depicted in such an absurdly comedic way, a child magistrate in an apocalyptic novel might come across as cloyingly obvious: When it comes to climate change, older generations will be judged by their children. The book’s title is perhaps the most straightforward of these signs. Soon after the apocalypse, depictions of a harrow—an agricultural tool used to break up soil—begin to appear in train stations and government buildings. Passed down from an unknown entity, the harrow is readily taken up by the people for its symbolization of technology’s dominance over nature.

Another key piece of this novel is the idea of eternal recurrence. A professor opens the orientation at Khristen’s school with this question from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: What if you were told you had to live your same life over and over again, exactly as you’ve lived it, without variance? Would you meet the news with joy or despair? The eternal return is treated broadly, through character and plot, but also more granularly. The smallest pieces repeat: boats, horses. Everyone gets two names, like a first and second life: Khristen was once Lamb, while Jeffrey deems himself Enoch after the biblical character who entered heaven without first passing through death. All of this—the pictograms, the philosophical conversations, the oddball characters—is tied together by the sense of a singular writer doing whatever she wants.

Then there’s the recurrence of the novel itself. It’s hard to ignore the topical overlaps between this one and The Quick And The Dead: the eco-terrorism, the orphaned teenage girl, the elderly communal living. To say nothing of the structural similarities, mainly how much the book lives inside its dialogue. The prose here is quintessential Williams, her diction alternating between formal, occasionally lofty fare and folksy slang. (When’s the last time you heard someone say “the whole enchilada”?) And there’s no living writer I trust more with an adverb: She describes the apocalypse as “a permanently ongoing situation” and a man in a car crash as “blatantly dead.”

Williams has always wielded time as she pleases, making it appear to pass either very quickly or not at all. And she’s performed a neat trick with it here. Twenty years may seem like a long time to wait from one novel to the next, but Harrow connects so cleverly to her previous work that the familiarity has a way of collapsing the span between them. The past repeats itself even as it becomes the present. Time is cyclical and permanently ongoing, whether or not we’ll be here to witness it passing.