~ Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips ~
This riveting novel starts with two young girls on a beach, occupying themselves while their mother is at work.
Alyona could see, under her sister’s feet, the pebbles breaking the curves of Sophia’s arches, the sweet of grit left by little waves. Sophia bent to roll up her pant legs, and her ponytail flipped over the top of her head. Her calves showed flaking streaks of blood from scratched mosquito bites. Alyona knew from the firm line of her sister’s spine that Sophia was refusing to listen.
Eleven and six years old, Alyona and Sophia meet a man who seems to need help, and after getting into his car, are not seen again.
This opening encapsulates the terrible fears of many parents, but to Americans, is also intriguing. Few middle-class Americans would be comfortable with their 11-year-olds supervising a 6-year-old sibling and wandering around a city all day. Where is this novel set, that such things are possible?
Kamchatka, it turns out. The remote peninsula on the eastern edge of Russia, bordering the Pacific Ocean. Disappearing Earth is a series of linked stories, most of which are set in Kamchatka’s capital city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and a few in Esso, in the interior, and Palana, on the coast of the Sea of Okhtosk.
(I must admit that Kamchatka, to me, was a region on a Risk board, until I read this novel.)
The disappearance of the Golosovsky girls is the fulcrum around which all the other stories pivot, even though each story has a different female protagonist and are set over the course of the following year. Linked stories are sometimes hard to pull off, in that switching to different characters often causes a break in the flow for readers, and some characters inevitably end up being more interesting and better written than others. But in this novel, Julia Phillips has succeeded magnificiently: the reader is emotionally engaged with each protagonist.
The protagonists vary in their background, age, disposition and personal circumstances. Olya is thirteen, and her unworried single mother, a tourist guide who travels frequently, trusts her to look after herself. But other parents are worried after the Golosovsky girls disappear: Olya’s friend Diana is not allowed to go out, and worse, Diana’s mother thinks Olya is a bad influence. Katya is a customs officer in a dubious relationship with the unreliable Max, a researcher. Diana’s mother has a story of her own: a skin blemish that leads to a cancer diagnosis and treatment, and she also works in the elementary school that the Golosovsky girls had attended. Ksyusha is a young woman whose beau wants to control her every action from afar. Zoya is a new mother, trapped in her apartment, with wild dreams of seducing the construction workers. Marina, in the final story, is the desperate mother of the two girls, with frequent hyperventilating panic attacks, nightmares, and thoughts agonizingly turning over the girls’ pasts and possible presents.
Each chapter also provides a rich background and history.
Katya’s family had gone as far north as Esso to meet the natives with their reindeer herds, west to see steaming craters, and south to pull caviar out of what had become unpatrolled lakes. She spent her youth in the brief reckless period between the Communists’ rigidity and Putin’s strength.
Or:
Valentina’s parents had moved to Kamchatka in 1971 for her father’s officer assignment, so she grew up knowing the region at its best. Military funding used to stuff the stores with food. There were no vagrants then, no salmon poachers, and no planes but Soviet military jets overhead.
Phillips weaves in commentary about racism and homophobia:
“A foreigner could have easily taken them.” […] “My husband thinks a Tajik or an Uzbek,” she said.
“Now we’re overrun with tourists, migrants. Natives. These criminals.”
Olya should have kept her tongue behind her teeth. But she asked, “Weren’t the natives always here?”
“Fucking lesbian.” He spoke like he was serious. People died for less. […] Lada could not believe Masha would be naive enough to choose to have a girlfriend.
Some of the characters are ‘native’ themselves:
The last season Nadia lived [in Esso] was the first she spent with Chegga. [..] Nadia’s parents fell all over him: a good boy, native like them, and from a place that was not theirs but seemed enough like theirs, meaning not too white, not too foreign.
Whatever their background, they are all distinct: with degrees of prejudice, introversion, snarkiness, kindness, familial tensions, and relationship problems that are unique to each character.
The history and social issues are woven in smoothly, organically, intrinsic to the characters themselves, so that it never seems like the author is trying to show off her research or knowledge.
A few stories in, a character mentions another girl who disappeared four years earlier. Lilia is from Esso, and a ‘native’: two factors that colour the police response. The village police in Esso spend two days half-heartedly looking for her, and then give up. While Lilia’s mother is broken-hearted and desperate to draw more attention to the case, Lilia’s older sister Natasha is convinced that she had left of her own volition, to escape village life in Esso and their alien-fixated brother.
This is very redolent of America, where the disappearance of young white women gets far more media play than that of black or Native American women. Is it a real reflection of life for women in Kamchatka? I do not know. The characters in Disappearing Earth can feel wonderfully familiar: is this a reflection of shared human commonality? Or of the author generalizing her own American experiences to a different culture?
Phillips’ writing is sophisticated, seamless, disappearing into itself so that the reader is initially riveted by the characters and the story. It’s almost a double-take when one realizes how elegantly a paragraph captures a particular complicated emotion.
Natasha had said these things, yet repeated by Anfisa they were foul. They made her siblings into caricatures.
“My mother, in our kitchen, making dinner…She doesn’t like this picture. She doesn’t like to be photographed. She doesn’t consider herself pretty.” Chander shook his head in silent comment on the wrongness of that, and Ksyusha was grateful once more for how appropriate he was.
Many of the women, both native Even and Russian, are single parents. While some of the other women are disapproving, it struck me that many of the male characters are generally not: they happily absorb their girlfriend’s children into the new relationships.
This is a book where as soon as one finishes, one wants to go back and start reading again, to trace the connections between the characters, to pick out the hints about what happened, and most of all, to appreciate the lovely writing.
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