Khristen is born, dies, and is resurrected. The character conjures three verbs that even the most cautious minds would hesitate to string together in any sentence, and the act of conjuring unfolds even before speech has fully formed. The life he has lived through death convinces him that a comeback should shine with extraordinary significance. His mother believes she is destined to steer humanity, drawn to the blinding white light of Hades in order to illuminate the living. Yet Khristen is not restrained by others’ expectations; he perceives what everyone else overlooks. This is not a Greta Thunberg-like visionary returning from purgatory, because Earth itself feels like purgatory, a drag on the planet where the breath of life is spent. In his first novel, a work that reads like a revelation written two decades later, the narrative follows Khristen’s journey through an apocalypse without martyrdom or salvation — it resists any didactic sermon. The ecological dystopia feels less a manual than a map of a world already damaged beyond repair.
Readers move closer to the unpredictable poetics of disaster, where the background murmur resembles a blend of Don DeLillo’s cool precision, the stark realism of the desert, and the stark moral gravity found in a Cormac McCarthy landscape. Yet there remains a strange, undeniable compassion that radiates from the pages, born from Khristen’s orphaned adolescence and his stubborn encounter with a world of “girls” when the gifted children drop out of the school his mother has placed him in. The term agriculture has lost its meaning, and the ecological manifestos that erupt with words like drought, desertification, invasion, destruction, degradation, salinization, and urbanization take on an almost grotesque aspect — the language, at times, seems like the excrement of insects. The protagonist’s friendship with Jeffrey adds a layer of humanity to the tale. If the voice sometimes sounds like a philosopher, it also echoes a Ballardian unease about how decaying clumps of the world bend and restrain the atmosphere. The critique of neoliberal capitalism unfolds like a map of a dystopia that everyone helped design, a resort turned research institute where apocalypse never fully arrives.
What lingers is a sense that the characters are real through language alone. Ecocritics, scholars who study the awakening of ecological thought in literature beginning in the 1970s, are drawn to the way the mystique of nature — both hypnotic and inscrutable — is shaped by narrative choices and rhetorical moves that destabilize anthropocentric readings. Williams’s prose, especially in its dialogue, moves the story forward while inviting readers to question their own assumptions about humanity and the natural world.
In this light, the figure of Khristen can be seen as an allegorical thread — a modern fable about our relationship with the planet. The Earth itself, as it collapses and seems to drift toward a void where rebirth is unthinkable, becomes a hieroglyph that looks fascinating and impenetrable at the same time. The puzzle is augmented by human invention: we built and forgot how to interpret the signals we sent back to ourselves.
Drag
Joy Williams
Translation by Javier Calvo
six barrels
320 pages. 19.90 €