Fourth in a Series
Brief Book Reviews by Ross Thrasher
The following quotation captures the philosophy that animates this series of eco-fiction reviews:
“Fiction is a form of entertainment, but it is also a way of examining the world. Stories help us derive meaning from senseless or banal events…. If we are going to transform our entire civilization — or even if we are to simply go on living on an increasingly inhospitable planet — our arts and humanities need to be a part of propelling, navigating, and reckoning with that process.”
That declaration appears in the Afterword of Our Shared Storm, Andrew Dana Hudson’s intriguing speculation on five possible climate futures. You can find my review of this eco-novel on the GTEC Blog under the heading Climate Change Scenarios. Below are three other new titles in the genre.
A Fire So Wild by Sarah Ruiz-Grossman (Harper, 2024)
It’s not surprising to see climate-induced wildfire as a backdrop to a story set in California, as several regions of that state have been immolated in recent years. Another new entry in the eco-novel genre, A Fire So Wild, portrays Bay-area Berkeley in the danger zone.
Three households intertwine here: Abigail and Taylor, a well-to-do gay couple in middle age with an adolescent son, Xavier; Sunny and Willow, a younger interracial duo living in a van; and Latino single dad Gabriel, a teacher, with his teenage daughter Mar. Right away the author is ticking all the socio-economic and diversity boxes. But their overlapping stories are capable of holding the reader’s interest.
Mar and Xavier meet at a birdwatching club and begin a tentative romance. Sunny is working on a construction site while Willow divides her time between panhandling and volunteering at a food bank. Abigail is planning a 50th birthday/fund-raising party to support her affordable-housing project, but Taylor is chafing at the stay-at-home mom role after selling her tech business. Gabriel is trying to navigate his post-divorce child-rearing with his ex Camila.
Events follow thick and fast. Berkeley is choking with smoke as a wildfire approaches from the north. Abigail’s judgmental mother arrives from the East Coast for the birthday party. Camila also turns up from nearby San Jose. The cops roust Sunny and Willow’s van from its parking place. Then the fire is upon the city, ruining everybody’s plans.
The variety of outcomes for all these characters brings into focus the differential impacts of inequality in a crisis. As Mar says near the end of the story, “When everything burns, not everyone is left with scars”. A Fire So Wild is a bit of a potboiler, but at less than 200 pages, it’s a quick and entertaining read with some insights.
The Limits by Nell Freudenberger (Knopf, 2024)
French Polynesia is a vast archipelago of 121 islands and atolls in the South Pacific, administered as an overseas territory by the government of France. Two-thirds of its people live on the island of Tahiti, a popular tourist destination. A story set in an exotic locale like this always piques my interest.
In The Limits, Nathalie is a French marine biologist in Tahiti, studying coral bleaching caused by a warming ocean. She is also trying to organize opposition to deep-sea mining in the region. Nathalie and her American ex-husband Stephen, a cardiologist in New York (with a new, younger, pregnant wife named Kate), share custody of their 15-year-old daughter Pia. The year is 2020, which folds the COVID crisis into this family saga.
Pia has a crush on Raffi, a handsome Tahitian who captains the dive-boat at Nathalie’s research station. But she reluctantly returns to her private high school in New York, electing a hybrid class schedule due to the pandemic. Pia’s dad Stephen is working long days at the hospital, and her stepmom Kate, who teaches at a public school, is working mostly from home. Parental conflicts with the rebellious teen inevitably ensue. Pia escapes to a friend’s home on her “virtual” school days. She develops a scheme to fly back to Tahiti to be with her mother (and Raffi).
In a somewhat superfluous side-plot focusing on a different cultural milieu in New York, Athyna, one of Kate’s brighter students, is juggling her studies along with minding her four-year-old nephew on behalf of his neglectful parents. Athyna’s maturity stands in contrast to Pia’s self-absorption.
The author adds a geopolitical dimension to her tale by referencing a dark chapter in French neocolonial history: the nuclear tests conducted by France on Moruroa, a remote uninhabited atoll in French Polynesia. The Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace vessel protesting the nukes, was mined by French frogmen in 1985 and sank in Auckland harbour. The environmental after-effects of the nuclear blasts have included lasting damage to the ocean ecosystem — and a high incidence of cancers among the Indigenous inhabitants of the islands. Will Raffi and his pro-independence Tahitians carry out another nautical sabotage to bring attention to this injustice?
It would take a much longer review to tease out all the strands of this intriguing novel. The Limits is a busy book, weaving complicated personal histories into the tapestry of a planet in distress. Freudenberger makes you care about her characters and the future they have inherited.
Pink Slime by Fernanda Trias (Scribner, 2024)
Dense fog in the morning, followed by a red wind that carries a toxic effluent from the algae choking the nearby river. The unnamed narrator visits her ex-husband Max, a victim of an algae-induced epidemic, at the hospital. She sustains herself by looking after Mauro, a chubby problem-child farmed out by his rich parents.
Pink Slime is described in the flyleaf as “an elegy for a safe, clean world”. The author is Uruguayan, and this edition is an elegant translation of her award-winning Spanish-language original. The title references something seen in a meat factory — processed animal parts — the raw material for the ersatz hams and hot dogs in the supermarket. That vision, pink slime, is an apt albeit gruesome metaphor for the violence and distortion our civilization has imposed upon nature.
The fish are dying, the birds have flown away. Sirens warn of the red wind’s arrival. The narrator is trapped indoors with Mauro. The power goes out from time to time. She has aimless telephone conversations with her nagging mother, who urges her to find a safer haven. One day her neighbour, a victim of the epidemic, is carried out on a stretcher.
But the story is not as unrelievedly grim as this may seem. Happy reminiscences of childhood playmates, home life and market trips with mother are interspersed. Dreams and hopeful plans intrude too. “Past, present, and future pass through the grinder of memory and fall mingled into a sterile vat.” Pink Slime is a tone poem about staying connected and surviving, despite disorientation in a disordered world.
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Photo Credits:
Feature Image – Naja Bertolt Jensen, Unsplash
