Two novels by Julia Phillips
Sisterhood, ambition, bears, Russian lit, and a little bit about Little Women
I’m writing to you from an AirBnB near Portland, Maine. My family has been driving through New England and Quebec for two weeks. During our travels, I’ve read two novels by American author Julia Phillips.
Phillips’ first book, Disappearing Earth, was published in 2019 and I’ve been meaning to read it ever since. Disappearing Earth is called a novel, but it’s actually a series of linked stories about the disappearance of two young sisters in the Kamchatka Peninsula. Each chapter takes place during a month in the year after the sisters disappear and features a different set of characters who are impacted, directly or indirectly, by the event. I’ve never read anything set in Kamchatka—a remote part of Russia that I mainly associate with the game of Risk, but parts of Disappearing Earth vividly reminded me of the summer when I studied in Russia, in 1997. Reading a scene set in a banya (sauna), I could smell the birch and eucalyptus in the little banya at my host family’s dacha, see my host sister’s shy smile as she told me how her father had built the structure with his own hands, feel the steam coming off the hot rocks and burning my throat. I arrived in Russia right after the summer solstice, at the tale end of the White Nights. I wish I’d known back then about the indigenous people of Russia who celebrate a new year at the summer solstice. I studied Russian for years in college and grad school, but I never encountered this fascinating tradition until Disappearing Earth.
Phillips’s second novel, Bear, is also about sisters in a remote and forested part of the world, but this time it’s the San Juan Island off the coast of Washington. Bear is stranger than Disappearing Earth. (Kudos to Phillips for using the cred from her successful debut to publish an unapologetically literary novel.) From the outset, an epigraph from the Grimm Brothers’ story, “Snow White and Rose Red,” informs the reader that we’re in fairy tale territory. But Bear is not a retelling of the Grimm fairy tale about two sisters who befriend a bear. Phillips uses the fairy tale trope to signal the presence of modern-day monsters: climate change, violent men, healthcare debt, rude tourists.
When an actual bear swims into their lives, Sam considers it a threat to her long-term plan to sell the family home and leave the island with her sister. Elena has a very different reaction:
A creature that did not exist on their island, did not belong in their lives, had nevertheless come. It swam long miles in the wet black night to arrive at their home. Made an exception of itself, and of them, to every rule. It was supposed to be gruff but was instead tender. It was supposed to be wild but behaved like it was tamed. It came to Elena on the path as gentle as a suitor. Is that not wonderful?, she asked Sam. Doesn’t that seem like magic to you?
In a previous post about pandemic novels, I wrote that I wanted to read about the pandemic from the perspective of characters without white collar jobs. Bear fits that category: sisters Sam and Elena are employed in the service industry , and the pandemic throws them further into financial ruin as they take on debt caring for their terminally ill mother. It’s no accident that the title of this novel lacks an article—Phillips wants us to consider all that these women are bearing in their lives.
Sam’s instinct is to run away from the bear, but the bear strengthens Elena’s connection with San Juan Island. In that way, Bear is a story about those who stay and those who leave.
Isn’t it interesting how often we find that dichotomy in stories about female relationships? I’m thinking of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, in which the third installment is titled, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and also The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, a novel about two girls in rural France that I didn’t love but might revisit after reading Bear. Hell, I’m even thinking of Louisa May Alcott, whose novel, Little Women, my daughter is reading for school and whose home in Concord, Massachusetts, my family visited on this trip. Alcott served as a nurse in the Civil War, but in Little Women it’s the father who goes to war. On the tour, we learned that Alcott wrote her novel this way because readers prefer male characters leaving female characters at home, not the other way around.
I read all of Alcott’s novels when I was a kid. It made me sad that Little Women was the only one mentioned on our tour of Orchard House. When the tour guide showed us the little white writing desk that Alcott’s father built for her, I thought about the sheer force of her ambition—she trained herself to be ambidextrous so that she could switch hands when writing for 10-12 hours a day—and it was just like reading Little Women for the first time. I was jealous on behalf of ambitious, dutiful Jo when her little sister Amy got to travel to Europe to study art; I was so confused when Jo stayed home to marry a middle-aged German professor, the deliciously-named Mr. Bhaer.
I find this subset of stories about female relationships interesting. Maybe that’s because I’m a person who leaves.
Last week I was in Burlington, Vermont, visiting a friend I’ve known since I was a grad student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the end of the last century. Our relationship was based on long walks, beverages, and books. We were always either very caffeinated or drunk. We were always talking about stories. We still share long walks, books, and beverages (albeit fewer of the alcoholic variety), but our career paths diverged. She stayed in grad school and is now a professor of Russian literature. I left grad school to work in publishing, left my job at a literary agency to go to law school, and now I’m leaving the law to write.
Here comes an anecdote about person I met once in Madison, in between the overcaffeinated and drunk times of day. I was standing in line to use the Xerox machine at the university library, and a guy in line behind me asked what I was copying. I’d never seen this guy before. He was bigger than me, stout, with a faded T-shirt, a scruffy brown beard, and small wire frame glasses. I told him I was copying a collection of out-of-print essays by Marina Tsvetaeva, a Russian poet who lived in the 1920s and 30s. The guy told me he studied Bulgarian. I was studying Russian, Polish, and French.
“I want to know a little bit of every language,” I said. “I’d rather speak a lot of languages poorly than speak only one language really well.”
“Oh no,” he said, “You’re wrong.”
I listened politely while he told me about his Bulgarian folk dancing group, and then I took my sweet time copying the entire book of Tsvetaeva’s essays.
People don’t often tell me that I’m wrong; I tend to remember when it happens. So I’ve thought about that guy in the library often over the years. At this point in my life, I’ve accepted that I could never be like him. Presumably, he speaks perfect Bulgarian. My language skills are not what they used to be. But I’m still interested in those out-of-print essays, in which Tsvetaeva wrote about her childhood in fin de siècle Russia in a magical realist style that would be familiar to readers of Carmen Maria Machado today. I wrote my best work in grad school on Tsvetaeva’s essay, “Mother and Music.” Now that I write essays about my own life, motherhood, and, occasionally, about music, I think about Tsvetaeva often.
I couldn’t seem to devote myself to one area of study in the way that I would have needed to survive in academia. And yet, some fascinations endure through enormous changes in circumstance. Disappearing Earth reminded me of why I used to study the Russian language and culture. Bear tapped into more primal themes of female ambition and desire that have never ceased to fascinate me, and which now seem more important than ever.
Other interesting things
Do you, like me, read the acknowledgments first? If not, maybe you should! You can learn a lot about a person from how they express thanks. In the acknowledgments section of Bear, I was elated to read Julia Phillips say that the novel’s “most crucial support came from my family’s childcare providers, whose work makes my work happen.”
I can’t help but wonder if Disappearing Earth would have been as successful if it had come out after Russia invaded Ukraine. Since that war began, my friends in Slavic Lit have adjusted their teaching to acknowledge Russian as a colonial language and literature. In “Rereading Russian Classics in the Shadow of the Ukraine War,” Elif Batuman writes about learning to see Russian novels as an expression of Russian expansionist ideology.
See this thoughtful piece in Noema for a discussion of Elizabeth Gilbert’s decision, after criticism by Ukrainian readers, to cancel the publication of her historical novel set in Russia. I don’t necessarily agree with the author’s criticism of Gilbert. Maybe she took a hard look at her own book, saw that it promoted a brand of essentialist hogwash about the Russian soul, and decided the world would be better off without it. If that’s the case (and I have reason to think it is), Gilbert’s decision was courageous. Nonetheless, her situation provides an interesting case study.
This New York Times piece about a manuscript buried under a cherry tree in Ukraine is everything I loved about studying Russian and Polish literature of resistance.
The Paris Olympics opening ceremony was long and weird, and I didn’t see any moments that came close to the joy and silliness of the Russian Military Choir singing “Get Lucky” at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2016.