The 10
best books of 2019
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips review – missing girls at the edge of the world
In this impressive but problematic debut, Russia’s far east provides an exotic backdrop for a novel of American concerns and ideas
Sarah Moss
Thu 15 August 2019
J
ulia Phillips’s debut seems at first to be the story of missing girls, the one we all know. Sweet little white girls, left to wander the city in summer while their mother works, are lured into a car and stolen away by a strange man. Posters go up all over town. Good mothers keep their daughters indoors. Husbands and boyfriends track their partners’ movements, worry. Members of the public join the search, and as the narrative swirls through the city, skipping from one household to another and following different women with each new chapter, the reader is also alert for clues, because how else are you supposed to read the story of missing girls?
I was so absorbed I forgot to take notes for most of the first half, not so much because of the tension of the search as because each new domestic world was deftly conjured and fresh. We are in Petropavlovsk, on Russia’s far eastern Kamchatka peninsula, where it’s a very long way to any other city; details of daily life will be exotic to most anglophone readers, and the inhabitants, both indigenous and Russian, are shaped by their relationships to Soviet Russia.
We pause with students from Even reindeer-herding families from the northern tundra; with the wives and children of men far away for various kinds of work, frustrated and bored by ice and darkness; with the strict, slick women who are succeeding in Putin’s Russia but are subject, in the end, to the same structural inequalities as their less prosperous sisters. Phillips is as attuned to ethnic tensions and class hierarchies as she is to weather and landscape, and all in all it’s a pretty satisfying experience for the reader who enjoys narrative gratification along with vicarious travel, fine prose and thoughtful politics.
But there are difficulties with setting a novel in a nation, community and language foreign to the writer and to almost all Anglophone readers. The concerns of this book are timely but also culturally specific – the narratives of gender, violence and trauma are distinctively those of liberal America. Disappearing Earth speaks from and to #MeToo, from and to women silenced and abused by US rightwing politics. The novel’s refreshing concern for missing indigenous girls as well as the central characters recalls the recent Canadian recognition of the national failure to protect First Nations women and girls from abduction, rape and murder. This is a novel as much about the way infrastructure fails women as about the quest for the lost girls, but I wondered increasingly if Phillips was writing about the wrong infrastructure and the wrong girls.
If, as she says in an interview in the Paris Review, “I felt like what I brought to the story and the place were very much American concerns and American ideas,” why set the novel in Kamchatka? “It was like this enormous setting for a locked-room mystery,” she remarks, and there lies the problem: Petropavlovsk, the miles of “wilderness” and the herders’ villages appear here as the exotic backdrop for the projection of America’s urgent stories, a setting for tales from somewhere else. Landscapes are beautifully rendered; the city, shore, forests and villages are distinctive and memorable. Like a good tourist, Phillips takes every opportunity to explore her environment, with mountain rescue teams, tourist guides and an ecology research unit as well as the reindeer herders and the urban dog-walkers and flâneuses. She can certainly write: characters, dialogue, pacing, the fine balancing of what is shown and what goes unsaid are all done with aplomb.
But there’s no essential contradiction between exoticism and good writing, and in my view this novel is both: there’s no space for cultural difference here, no intuition that the lived experiences of women in Kamchatka might require a different vocabulary from those of North America, that readers of a novel set there might reasonably hope to glimpse a different reality. There’s always a conflict, of course, between “othering” and appropriation, between believing that differences of culture, history and language render groups of people incomprehensible to each other and insisting that the whole world is made in the image of one’s own assumptions. No individual book will resolve that contradiction, but one set so firmly at the centre of the dilemma needs at least to recognise the problem.
• Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall is published by Granta. Disapppearing Earth is published by Scribner (£12.99).
