I fell in love with Joy Williams’ writing by reading the Changeling, and my love was solidified by experiencing her short stories. Her writing has a king of oblique quality, a way of revisiting the everyday from a new, darkly revealing angle. She is so great at exhuming all the contradictions of the troubled mind, with economy and a poetry that is akin to witchcraft.

“Your empathies are obsolete. The battle’s over.”

So I was very excited to get my hands on her most recent novel. In it, we follow Khristen, a girl navigating the world after an environmental apocalypse, with her boarding school closed and her mother disappeared.

“To be anywhere other than the now is to paint eyeballs on chaos”

The absurdity and chaos after the disaster bring to mind Cat’s Cradle by Vonnegut but of course the execution is entirely Williams’. Although I must say the writing didn’t have the sharpness of my favourite of her works, I enjoyed the atmosphere.

“I think the world is dying because we were dead to its astonishments pretty much. It’ll be around but it will become less and less until it’s finally compatible with our feelings for it.”

Now, I could try to squeeze out a discourse about the way we treat our planet and what the decaying of our planet tells about civilisation. But what is really left is a feeling. A kind of house-, hope-and aim-lessness that grows with Khristen’s meandering. It’s bewildering and uncomfortable. Well done. It made for an engrossing and quick read, and produced a universe that took hold of my brain with scenes that keep playing in my mind.

“A writer told a friend of mine once that words don’t want to do what you want them to do. You have to bend them.”