Harrow : A Novel by Joy Williams

What a mercy to encounter a merciless mind in a merciless time.

"I was honored at an environmental conference there, their last one. Loss was the theme. Reflections on loss. Ways to navigate loss. The opportunities in loss. How to make loss work for you...What a bunch of fruitcakes."

It's funny, grim novel set in a near-future of ecological collapse, mostly about a small group of old people gathered on the shores of a dead black lake to plot acts of retributive ecoterrorism: "a gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth." They are outliers; the general populace has turned against nature: "Let this fucking land that has turned against us burn, that is the prevailing sentiment." 

Reading it is like visiting a surreal Golden Corral serving up a glorious buffet of sentences sharp as glass pitilessly articulating the ample absurdities and horrors of self-centered humanity's various ecological cruelties and delusions. There is an acute awareness of the magnitude of loss thrumming through without any attempt at consolation or mitigation, as well as a teen girl adrift, a ten-year-old jurist presiding over a Kafkaesque court of sins, and a nihilistic EMT. I wasn't sure I'd have the stomach to read it (damn feelings!) but it turned out to be restorative, like drinking a glass of water when you don't realize you're thirsty. Truth is bracing, wherever you find it–and much more fortifying than foggy consolations.