Recent Reviews
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on June 4, 2019
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/disappearing-earth-reveals-life-in-russias-remote-east/
Few Americans have traveled to Kamchatka in Russia’s Far East. A nine-hour flight from Moscow, this volcanic peninsula juts out into the Pacific Ocean. In 2011, Julia Phillips journeyed there to study at Kamchatka State University as a Fulbright scholar. Clearly, the people and place inspired her. The result is ‘Disappearing Earth’, her intense, evocative and haunting debut novel. It is a captivating book that conveys the unique ethos of this remote region.
As the story begins, two sisters Alyona and Sophia Golosovskaya, 11 and 8, are walking on the beach near their home in the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Their mother writes for a Russian newspaper and is away at work. When the girls accept a ride from a seemingly friendly young man, they are kidnapped instead. The police search, posters appear, but the girls are not found.
The plot then shifts. Each subsequent chapter explores the ripple effects of the girls’ disappearance on the Kamchatka community. Clues appear about the identity of the kidnapper and the fate of the girls, but the outcome is not revealed until the final pages. The bigger mystery here is Kamchatka and the character of its people.
The peninsula itself has a distinct presence in the story. Phillips writes, “Air and sea were the sole options for leaving. Though Kamchatka was no longer a closed territory by law, the region was cut off from the rest of the world by geography. To the south, east and west was only ocean. To the north, walling off the Russian mainland, were hundreds of kilometers of mountains and tundra.” Though the residents appreciate the natural beauty, living on this peninsula requires resilience and fortitude.
Into this terrain, Phillips introduces a rich mosaic of interconnected characters whose lives are touched by the kidnapping. The Kamchatkan people we meet all have their own struggles.
Valentina Nikolaevna is an administrator at the girls’ school with a health crisis and strong opinions: “This never could have taken place in Soviet times. You girls can’t imagine how safe it used to be. No foreigners. No outsiders. Opening the peninsula was the biggest mistake our authorities ever made.”
We learn about Oksana, a researcher at the volcanological institute. She is the only person who witnessed the girls getting into the car. Her attempt to help the investigation only compounds her sense of isolation. Her unfaithful husband has left and her beloved dog has vanished.
We meet Alla Innokentevna, the head of a cultural center in the northern village of Esso. She is not Russian, but Native. Four years earlier her daughter Lilia had disappeared. The police investigation was perfunctory and the police assumed that Lilia ran away.
Finally, we encounter Marina Alexandrovna, the mother of Alyona and Sophia. Her life consists of constant grief and persistent panic attacks. “She pled and sobbed on the evening news in an attempt to bring a breakthrough in the case. She was a fish ripped open for the reporting. Her wet gut spilled out.” Both Alla and Marina’s lives have been turned upside down by the loss of their daughters. Their earths have disappeared.
Phillips gives voice to the struggles of women navigating their daily lives in Kamchatka, lives that become more challenging after the kidnappings. Women seek love and loyalty from their boyfriends and husbands, but often experience disappointment or abandonment. Some fantasize about leaving the peninsula and establishing a new life in mainland Russia or Europe. Yet the bonds of family ultimately keep them in Kamchatka.
The relationships among the characters become clearer as the plot advances and the tension accumulates. We do learn the fate of all three girls in the story’s stunning conclusion. However, the novel’s power derives from the slow unveiling of these characters. They are isolated yet connected, like Kamchatka itself. Phillips’ great achievement in ‘Disappearing Earth’ is that she convincingly transports us into their world.
Wunderland by Jennifer Cody Epstein
Jennifer Cody Epstein’s recently released pre-WWII novel Wunderland startles with its power and intimacy. This gripping story helps us understand on a human level how the horrors of WWII happened. Epstein shines a light on the friendship of two German girls and their responses to the Nazi party’s obsessive focus on blood purity and Anti-Semitic fervor. Rather than offer economic, political or military analysis of the rise of Nazism, Epstein’s novel offers us a perch to observe the reactions of Ilse Von Fischer and Renate Bauer to the increasing influence of the Nazis and the escalating brutality toward the Jewish population. One young woman joins the Nazi youth movement and the other is denied. The demise of their friendship serves as a metaphor for the devolution of the once positive relationship between diverse peoples living in Germany.
The novel opens in New York in 1989. Ava Fischer has received a package from her estranged mother’s attorney. The parcel contains her mother’s ashes and a series of letters that Ilse had written, but never sent, to her best friend Renate. Through these letters, Ava learns about her mother’s nefarious wartime activities and gains clarity about her complicated paternity.
After the devastation of the First World War and the resulting depression, Germans feel beaten down and seek both saviors and scapegoats. Ilse and Renate each respond to the chaos and lawlessness differently. When Jewish kids are mocked, denigrated and expelled from schools, Renate and Ilse don’t like the sadistic cruelty, but it doesn’t affect their lives.
In 1933, the year of Hitler’s election, Ilse and Renate are in their early teens living in Bremen, Germany. They are best friends. They wear friendship rings, walk home from school and support each other. By 1938, when random violence and smoldering hatred emerges in their town, they become young women who must choose how they will meet the moment
Ilse is soon seduced by peer pressure and a desire to find a bigger meaning in her life. She joins the NDF, a Hitler youth organization and encourages Renate, to join them as well. In a vivid scene, the German official tells Renate she is ineligible because the German authorities discovered her father’s deceased parents were Jewish. Ilse is already brainwashed, “You can’t join because you’re not a part of the new Germany. You can’t be. I know that’s not your fault, but it’s the truth. We can’t just pretend that it’s not.” Ilse could have expressed outrage, empathy and solidarity with Renate, but she does not. She embraces Hitler’s vision for a new Germany and betrays Renate’s family because of her narcissism, lack of empathy and a growing appetite for cruelty.
Epstein’s shows us through the lives of these young women how contemptuous comments directed at Jews before the war escalated into the horrors of Jewish extermination during the war. She captures the betrayal by the German people of their Jewish neighbors by writing of Ilse’s betrayal of her once dear friend Renate.
Because the novel begins and ends in 1989, there is a sense of hope for Ana. She better understands her mother’s distant personality and her grievous actions as a Nazi propagandist. Though the novel is painful, Epstein has added another dimension to our understanding of how civilized people descended into madness. Ana will eventually make peace with her mother’s past and stop the patterns in the next generation. Given the current invective in our national politics, Wunderland serves as a warning that silence in the face of denigrating and derisive language toward minority groups can lead to violence and tragedy.
Halibut on the Moon by David Vann
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner
on April 14, 2019
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/halibut-on-the-moon-evocatively-details-one-mans-descent/
Some books are read for insight and some for the enjoyment of a good story. Award winning author David Vann’s new novel falls in the former category. ‘Halibut on the Moon’ is a difficult story to read yet provides insight and empathy for a man who suffers from mental illness and dreams of suicide. Vann’s fictionalized account of his father’s life is raw and heartbreaking.
When the novel begins, Jim Vann, a 39 year-old dentist, is descending both literally and figuratively. He is landing in San Francisco, California on a flight from Fairbanks, Alaska. His younger brother Gary picks him up at SFO and they drive to Gary’s home in Sebastopol. Knowing of his brother’s depression, Gary has arranged for Jim to see a psychiatrist who prescribes an unnamed medicine and instructs Gary not to leave Jim alone.
The novel follows Gary and Jim as they visit their parents, Jim’s kids and his oldest friend. Part of the novel’s tension derives from how the characters fail to connect with each another. Jim believes that he has come to review the course of his life, and say goodbye before he commits suicide. While Gary believes that Jim has returned to get help and feel the love and support of family. But Jim’s family lacks the ability to understand and address Jim’s illness.
On the surface, Jim’s problems are apparent. He has two ex-wives, two confused children and a $365,000 debt to the IRS. But Jim seems less bothered by these facts than by the intense irrational thoughts that haunt his inner life. He lives in a dark tunnel that light and love rarely reach.
How he arrived in this downward spiral of mental illness is not known; no doubt a storm of factors starting with lousy luck in the genetic lottery. His parents are another unfortunate piece of the puzzle. They are remote, distant and simple. When Gary and Jim arrive at their childhood home on the shores of Clear Lake, Jim’s hostility is apparent. He says to his mother “You look old now, and you’re bigger, and you have that loose neck.” To his father, “Have you been fat that long?” No one engages as they eat lunch. His mother says grace, “Please help my boy Jim. Help guide him and comfort him and make your love clear. Help get us all through this difficult time.” Jim blurts back, “Where do I get this feeling that I’m a piece of shit?”
These family members cannot connect. Jim’s parents believe that his troubles derive from moral shortcomings not a mental illness. When Jim starts a manic rant, Gary exclaims, “All you have to do is stop.” Jim wishes he could stop, but it is not that easy. He says early in the novel, “Why does anyone think they can control what they feel?”
Carrying his gun, thinking about sex and considering suicide all comfort Jim’s troubled mind. He tells Gary of a NASA experiment when astronauts took a halibut to the moon. “They didn’t mean for it to survive. It was supposed to have one beautiful flight, is all. That’s all any of us are meant to have. None of us survive.”
David Vann’s artistic rendering of his father’s struggle must have helped to repair his own heart. The book’s dialogue captures the wild gyrations of Jim’s mind. Vann reveals the unrestrained euphoria and crushing depression that define Jim’s exhausting existence. It is generous of Vann to share this poignant and powerful story. His evocative writing helps us understand the erratic and illogical thinking that can come with mental illness. We become witnesses to a man stuck in a tunnel of pain while his helpless family cannot reach him. You many not “enjoy” ‘Halibut on the Moon’, but you will likely read it to the end and emerge from the experience with greater empathy for those among us who cannot control the machinations of their mind.
