Reading Joy Williams is like scrambling up a muddy embankment . . . but there is no top of the cliff, it's all scrambling; Harrow is set at a cryptic boarding school with strange slogans and then the school closes and then the main character Khristen-- if you could call her that-- finds herself in an odd post-apocalyptic world, a world that has gone beyond the "verge" that we've been at for so long and falls into a slightly more chaotic state-- there are strange episodes at a bowling alley, where a cake with a depiction of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son offends a youngster, and then a long strange section about seditious geriatrics living around a toxic lake, plotting revenge against ecologically corrupt humans . . . but these plans come to naught, raising the question: why aren't old people more violent and rebellious? they've got nothing to lose, right? . . . I think Joy Williams might be a modern-day Kafka, and she refers to him-- I don't think this book is her best work-- I was more compelled by The Changeling and now I'm making my way through The Quick and the Dead and that one has some roots and rocks in the mud to hang on to, but it does feel a bit like reading Pynchon, except the vocabulary is right there and easier to ascertain and comprehend-- each sentence a little masterpiece, but how do you connect them together . . . or should you?
3 comments:
“each sentence a little masterpiece, but how do you connect them together . . . or should you?” One might say that about SoD.
so true, so true . . . you should be a literary critic
Didn’t we write a screenplay about old people committing crimes?
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