An enormously animated and slightly cracked voice answers from the other end of the phone, in New York. It is about the American cult writer Joy Williams (Chelmsford, 1944), who had students like Chuck Palahniuk in her literary workshops, and whom we imagine responding to us behind her everlasting sunglasses. After more than twenty years since 'The Living and the Dead' and a solid career as a storyteller, she returns to the novel with the dystopia 'La Rastra' (Seix Barral), in which the world has suffered a horrible climatic catastrophe and a teenager searches for her mother, accompanied by a 10-year-old boy she has met at a school for young prodigies. Her investigations will lead her, in a kind of animated road movie, to a dilapidated resort that has been taken over by a group of elderly vigilantes, some "geriatric eco-terrorists", terminally ill people willing to do anything. Little friend of the interviews "because everything we authors say about our books works against them, we are never as good at speaking as when we write them."
The grandparents' resort "is based on a place I knew in the years I lived in Texas teaching, I went to a cheap resort with my dogs where there was no one, practically I was the only person, the feeling was very strange, with those huge pools empty of people, there were also some rooms full of paintings, others with mirrors..."
Specifically, "the apocalypse has made a third of the world disappear, but the other two-thirds can be operated," which include "the Disney World amusement park, the bowling alleys and the car dealerships, which are still open. Those places they could survive when everything collapses. It is a somewhat prophetic novel of what we have experienced with Covid, after which there has been no change in our behavior with respect to the planet.
Williams is a great narrator of desolation and isolation, and here she establishes a parallel between the surrounding nature and the inner soul of her characters. The new world suffers from "scarcity of water and has much fewer plants and animals. Our planet is already dying, we can see fewer and fewer terrestrial wonders. The planet will not disappear, but it will shrink, degenerate a little more and more, until that bears no resemblance to what we remember of him".
The novel starts with a false death, that of the girl. "My publisher wasn't happy that it was a novel narrated by a dead woman, so she didn't really die, although it seemed so for a short time. Her mother thinks she's risen and is interested in what her daughter felt when she was in the other world, which exasperates the girl". Her mother, first an alcoholic and then a tea addict, embraces a succession of pseudo-religions.
Jeffre, the companion, "is a 10-year-old boy who wants to be a judge from a very young age, and he is always studying for it, so he adopts judicial language, which he applies to everyday events. He reads a lot of Kafka, like his grandfather, which helps him a lot to know the procedures of justice, and he especially reads 'The Gracchus Hunter', where a dead man in a boat speaks with the living, and even writes its sequel".
