Bad Decisions and Misery

9 months pregnant in Portland Oregon, with a low level job in tech and a husband who is an unsuccessful actor, Annie is in Ikea buying a crib when The Big One — the massive earthquake that is predicted to slam the US West Coast at some point — strikes. Stuck under piles of Ikea flat boxes, she is rescued by an employee. 

Over the next few hours, Annie walks around the collapsing city, conversing with her unborn baby, and providing flashbacks into her past. 

That would be trauma enough for the start of a novel, but as her backstory emerges, it reveals that every piece of Annie’s life is tenuous. Her mother, her only relative, died of COVID during the pandemic. Annie had a potential career as a playwright in her 20s, but her initiative to write fizzled out during a decade of making ends meet as a receptionist at a tech firm. She is making enough money to survive but watching the tech coders around her make much much more. Her husband is a sweet charmer who has never quite broken into his desired career in acting, and now is aging out of his good looks. They are financially on the edge. Then they decided to have a baby. 

Perhaps deciding to have a baby in their tenuous financial state is an expression of hope that one can hardly criticize. But all Annie’s decisions seem bizarre. Barely able to walk, in deep discomfort due to the pregnancy, she decides to go off to Ikea to buy a crib by herself, although her husband would have happily gone with her. She insists on pulling out the Ikea flatbox from the shelf on her own, even though she is obviously struggling physically. After the earthquake, having made it out of the building, she plods 5 miles to her husband’s workplace, refusing offers of rides. And then walks another few miles downtown. And then decides to walk several more miles home. Desperate, hungry and thirsty, she refuses for mysterious moral reasons to take a sip out of the water bottle of a dying woman (but who would deny her this sip, or criticize her for taking it?)

Not surprisingly, she goes into labour. And after all the physical, mental and emotional trauma of her pregnancy and the last few hours, the birth (in a forest with no medical help) seemed astonishingly smooth, which suggests an authorial desire to wrap things up and make a point, however unrealistic.

Annie is annnoyingly impractical, and given to bad decisions. Financially precarious:

I decide on the most expensive crib. 

And boy, does she complain. About finances, about her sweet but dreamily impractical husband, about her pregnancy, about every other person around. She complains about the fact that their dream vacations in Italy and London are infeasible. She complains about the quotidian details of life:

Home, where I’m going to open the fridge door and everything inside will bore me. 

So, clearly, Annie was the kind of person who was miserable well before the earthquake. Not surprisingly, she is miserable throughout the book, which detracts considerably from the narrative tension.

I think the novel was intended to be emotionally intense. It’s touches on a woman’s urge to protect a baby in dire circumstances, like Gin Phillips’ Fierce Kingdom, but here, Annie is such an annoying character that I could empathize with her only occasionally, and it was difficult to care about her entitled concerns. Besides, Gin Phillips is a much better writer.

I found the metaphor of the earth splitting open, and a woman giving birth, a little obvious. 

Annie talks to her unborn child almost continuously, but I thought this conversation was rather bland.

Here’s how this will go, Bean. Listen to me now. It can only go one way. I will cross the bridge. I will walk to the theatre. Your father will be there. I will find him. He will cry when he sees us. And together we will walk home. We will walk home together. We will be home because we are together. We will be every cliché about home once we are together.

As Annie plods through the town, she comes across some expected apocalyptic scenarios. A woman is dying by the roadside, and the man near her runs off (while Annie stays with her until death). Some feral teenagers attempt to stop her and steal (what?) from her (but Annie is fierce in the defense of her unborn child). None of this, to me, rang quite true and Annie’s reactions seemed random. But then, who knows how each of us would respond in such a crisis. 

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