Disappearing Earth a Remarkable Novel

 

 

 Disappearing Earth (2019)

By Julia Phillips

Knopf, 261 pages

★★★★

 

If the name Julia Phillips sounds familiar, it’s because of Bear, one of this year’s literary sensations. I enjoyed Bear so much that I picked up Disappearing Earth, her debut novel and a 2019 finalist for the National Book Award.

 

Phillips apparently has an affinity for isolated places. Disappearing Earth is set in a place that few Americans have visited: Russia’s sparsely populated Kamchatka peninsula. One might ask how Phillips chose her subject, as she hails from New Jersey and graduated from Barnard. Blame Barnard; she spent an undergraduate semester in Moscow and then got a Fulbright scholarship to go to Kamchatka to research how women are treated on an everyday basis.

 

Disappearing Earth  was a bold effort in that her “novel” is a series of vignettes about how different women were affected by the disappearance of three young girls. It's a month-by-month look at that mystery through linked short stories. It opens in December, a year after two girls disappeared. You might initially find it useful to consult the book’s list of characters, as there are names that might be unfamiliar. This is complicated in that Russian and indigenous names often appear in variants of the official name.  For example, Alexander is often nicknamed Sasha. You will catch on to the important characters, but the list will make that task easier.

 

The Kamchatka peninsula is closer to Anchorage than to Moscow. If you look at a map of Russia, Kamchatka is the northern thumb that points downward towards Japan. The only real city is Petropavlovsk, which holds nearly 56 percent of Kamchatka’s 291,700 people. Disappearing Earth centers on women, but it is also about place, race, and modernization. North of Petropavlovsk lie various small settlements characterized by the clash of old ways and new. Phillips focuses on three places that embody such changes. Petropavlovsk is a vibrant city dominated by Russians, but the village of Esso is a mix of Koryaks and Evens who call Russians “whites,” in an unflattering way. Both Evens and Koryaks are linguistically and racially distinct from white Russians. The village of Palana, located on the Sea of Okhotsk, is a mix of dire Soviet apartment blocks and semi-nomadic Koryaks. If you infer racial tensions analogous to those in the United States, ding!

 

Alyona (5) and Sophia (8) disappeared from a Petropavlovsk beach. Their mother Marina, a journalist, is obviously distraught. There is only one possible witness, a woman who glanced at two girls in a large black vehicle. Searches, posters, TV appeals, and harbor dredging ensue, but investigations yield nothing. By contrast, the fate of Lilia, an 18-year-old Even girl from Esso, gets little attention. Local police assume she has simply run away and Petropavlovsk-based authorities have no time for communities north of the city. Phillips writes, “In the city, Lilia might as well have never existed.”

 

Phillips alerts us that indigenous communities also grapple with modern problems. We meet Ksyusha, a university student; her brother Cegga; Ruslan, Ksyusha’s sometime boyfriend; and Nadia, a single mother and Cegga’s on/off girlfriend. How to make white and indigenous worlds collide? Marina remains an emotional wreck a year after losing her daughters. She insists she can do her work, but her superiors know better; they concoct a mental health break by handing her a “soft” assignment of covering a summer solstice event. There she meets Alla–who has her own sorrow–but becomes Marina’s guide to cultures about which she, a Russian white, knows nothing. Although distracted and cynical, Marina confronts worldviews in which the lines between folklore and everyday life are thin. Can shadows speak?

 

There are other side stories. Oksana and Max, researchers at a volcano institute, and Kolya, a police detective factor into the novel. Still another involves Kamchatka-raised Masha, who left and achieved relative success in Moscow, but carries emotional baggage. Returning to Kamchatka won’t help. Former friends disapprove of her demeanor and lifestyle. Phillips deftly moves between the side stories, racial tensions, and cultural clashes. It’s not always totally clear how everything connects to the disappearance of the three girls, but it is remarkable that Phillips knots as many threads as she does.

 

Some readers have complained that the novel’s denouement is contrived. I mildly disagree, but I understand how an upbeat tonal shift appears out of character. You might disapprove with how Disappearing Earth ends, but you will certainly learn a lot about Kamchatka and the messiness of “Russian” identity.

 

Rob Weir