The first fifty pages of Harrow feel like falling down a rabbit hole while the person who pushed you in maintains steady eye contact.

Another falls with you — you try to grab their hand, but they don’t need you to. They’re looking elsewhere. They know where you’re going. You don’t. No one blinks.

Joy Williams builds this universe in fragments that feel fully formed and evasive at once. You understand them too quickly, too intimately — like an acquaintance you’re desperate to know better, slightly ashamed of how fast you think you’ve figured them out. You want them to see you too, but what you’ve fallen for is the version you’ve constructed.

The dialogue is relentless and precise; it makes me jealous as someone who simply cannot shut up in conversation or in prose. It's infuriating and mesmerising how everyone speaks as if they’re half-mad and entirely correct. You’re in kitchens, trains, classrooms, deserts, bedrooms — mid-conversation, mid-memory. The narrative mimics opening tabs you never close. Click, click, click — every tangent matters. You try to clear your cache but end up scrolling through the log of everywhere you’ve been.

There’s a school, but it feels scrambled. The mother is poor but erudite, defining “daedal” while believing in an insensitive idea of reincarnation. Brittany on the train is suburban post-humanism with Tumblr residue. The father hovers like a ghost of mid-century masculinity — a miner, an accountant, a pilot, a man who loved boats in the way male authors once loved boats. Lucinda and Jack smirk and vanish. The Fallout group paint their faces, hold heads on sticks, and are terrified of everything. Every character is irritating. Every character is transfixing. Even those who appear once linger.

Everyone is ageless. My only critique is that I wish the protagonist remained genderless, not because it's a 'point', but I reckon it's a writerly challenge that I haven't seen nailed, and I think Williams could do it and it wouldn't be gauche, annoying or trite. It would be good. And that, that would be annoying.

The protagonist (Lamb? Lion? Khristen?) is four and twenty-five at once. The book floats between crib and commute without friction. They were meant to be named Lion. They are named Lamb. Suddenly they’re Khristen. It all matters. I hate how Khristen is spelt — is that deliberate? Am I meant to feel resistance this early?

I’ve judged too quickly. I suspect Joy knew I would.

Then the world tilts, or steadies? Children who haven’t seen an orange in years. You realise you’ve been inside an apocalypse without being told. Mourning becomes surreal. Reality becomes conditional. By page thirty-six I was physically reacting to these feelings — flinching, shifting, making faces. Williams writes with such fine pressure that even a passing line (“the colt, the cub, the calf”) feels charged. At 51 pages, you think they should all leave this maddening world. Instead, you stay. Not trying to escape. Just wanting to be as mad as they are.

The first book closes exactly at page fifty. The second begins at fifty-two. This is so smug, but with a slightness, because you know it's completely and utterly earned. 

I could not recommend the first 51 pages more highly, what a book I hope this to be. And I hope it finds the right hands. Joy is a mad hatter and a genius and I want her to tell me secrets and then disappear into the night, never to be seen again, until she sends me her next book in the mail with an inscription that says: 

'Haha, I've done it again.' 

And she bloody will have. :|