A New Yorker review by Katy Waldman introduced me to Joy Williams, the 79-year-old cynical environmentalist writer who wrote an essay titled “The Case Against Babies,” spent a “craft” discussion talking about Kraft cheese and condemning “Botox escapist lit,” and wears sunglasses at all times of the day.
I have a bad habit when reading book reviews from my favorite critics: I get so caught up in how good the writing is that I ignore what is actually said about the book being reviewed. I assume it will be good by association with the review. A thrice-read New York Times review led me to read the first 60 pages of that 1,000-page, single-sentence novel from 2019. I was afraid this would happen with Williams, so I read the review carefully.
Waldman’s review was of “Harrow,” Williams’ 2021 novel. Waldman gave enough examples of the novel’s strange, tilted descriptions to convince me not only that I had to get my hands on “Harrow” but that I had to prepare myself for the reading experience by fully entrenching myself in Williams’ work.
I thought her earlier novel “The Quick and the Dead” would be a good place to start. Williams’ humor was as dry as the book’s desert setting, but I loved it. Her off-kilter descriptions inspired me as a writer, as did her lack of adherence to the sensical. Why couldn’t a character’s dead wife haunt him and shame him for his crush on another man? It didn’t matter to Williams that the book contained no other supernatural elements. I felt a freedom in Williams’ prose. As a writer, she could choose to do whatever she wanted. It’s a sentiment shared by many writers, but I have rarely felt it so viscerally in every word an author fits together on the page. I decided this was one of my favorite books.
The next summer, I read “Harrow.” The book is 224 pages long, so I lay in the hammock on the edge of the woods outside my parents’ house and figured I could finish it in a day. It ended up taking me a month. The humor was there; I found the same awkwardly perfect word choice and bizarre concepts that seemed to be metaphors for things I couldn’t put my finger on but which evoked certain feelings: confusion, curiosity and understanding shrouded by depression or fear. Williams writes that a character “died of defenestration”; she uses the word “lachrymose”; she writes that the days had a “rubbery, unforgiving texture.” She wrote lines that I couldn’t help but photograph: “Legitimate murder is no match for illegitimate mayhem.” I would have to think about what that meant, but I liked it.
But those 224 pages also contained the most depressing story I have ever read. The “certain feelings” it evoked — unlike the perplexity, admiration and victory I was flung between while reading “The Quick and the Dead” — were either a deep despair or a flicker of something else that had been swallowed by that despair. The book takes place in and around a retirement community, and the main character describes the setting as “outside the perimeter of death.” It is a book about a world destroyed — in the way we are currently destroying our own. Human negligence has rid the world of greenery and animal life.
Water may be a symbol of life — something we search for to confirm that life is possible elsewhere, something that writers have written is almost synonymous with humanity — but in “Harrow,” the only water is a personified lake called “Big Girl” whose blackened depths speak of her gloom. Her waters are “sick.” Her surface is “flabby.” Descriptions imply that she is either dying or several years dead. When is a lake dead beyond resuscitation? When I read this book, it seemed hope for life itself was a thing of the past.
I shambled on through the book with the image of its sunglass-clad author, her expression grim, that appeared at the back. I picked up that book because the review had been good and because I had liked Williams’ last book, but I only finished reading it because of her. I liked her. She was mysterious. She was cynical in a way that read as cool, relatable, correct and radical all at once. I wanted to like her work so badly, and I knew that in theory, “Harrow” had its own humor hidden in the sticky nihilism. Environmental destruction is something I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about, and in small doses, the book validated my concern in ways at times lyrical, at times elusive. A whole book of this cynicism, this hopelessness, though, made me wonder if it was too much. What good was this doing me?
What is the point of a cynical environmental figure? And what of a cynical literary figure? I felt relief at the end of “Harrow”: Yes, this is what we’re doing to the Earth; we should be upset and angry and frightened because we have ruined our planet. Her words seemed like a truth others wouldn’t speak. I felt like something inside me had been expressed and put in my hands as a physical object. But I didn’t know what to do with it, once I was done feeling. In the book, if there was any hope for the characters, it was too buried for me to notice. After reading the book, the effect on me was similar. Descending into cynicism with Williams seemed like the most appropriate option because at least there I could rage and feel like that anger, as effortful as it was, was doing something, even when nothing changed as a result. When I lowered the book and looked at the forest in front of me, I could already see the trees turning to sticks and the forest floor turning to sand.
When I read “Harrow” and, later, essays from Williams’ collection “Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals,” I despaired while looking up to someone who also despaired, someone who cared so much but still despaired, to understand and feel less alone. I wanted someone to understand my fears, and her writing grasped the scope of them. In her work, I found adoration and a strange humor, if not hope.
We talked about hope in the class I am student teaching this semester. Is it necessary? Is it worth it? The professor thought so. She did not include any of the excerpts from “Harrow” that I recommended for the class, although she did include a perhaps less experimental, less soul-crushing article about what to do about our own conflicted feelings about climate change, which sparked more anxiety in me than anything in “Harrow.” Maybe part of hope is not reaching the point where you’re too desolate to care.
My environmental pessimism feels egregious. There is hope out there — not optimism, but hope. Optimism is naive and unproductive. Hope can be mixed with sadness and anger and uncertainty. We read a piece by Rebecca Solnit that said uncertainty was inherent to hope. When I think about this, I question Williams. What does she want from me? As someone who cares about the environment, her writing mostly just left me depressed.
I still think about her almost every time I write, though — certainly every time I write fiction, and every time I try to write something persuasive (she effectively made me consider swearing off children, after all). I wrote a story recently in which a character gets a call from her dead sister. The story was literary fiction, but I thought, if she did it, why can’t I lean into the surreal just because I feel like it? The unusual descriptions of “Big Girl” inspired me. The careful, strange word choice, at times sparse and at times overtly literary, fascinated me.
Maybe to see Williams as hopeful, you have to be a writer. There is something in her creativity, her lack of adherence to conventions, how much she cares about every word she sets down and every point she stitches into a piece, that seems almost like the solution we need to avoid the destroyed worlds of which she writes. If we are to solve or ease the problems of climate change, these things are vital.
I have seen pictures of Williams when she isn’t scowling. Sometimes she smiles. The first time I saw one of these photos, it looked wrong. What was she happy about? What did she know? What was still out there to hope and be happy for when she had poured out so many reasons to abandon those feelings entirely? I think I have found a piece of it in her prose. What her sentences and themes lack, her writing style displays brilliantly: a hope for change, and permission to break whatever rules necessary to achieve it.
Managing Arts Editor Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.