The New York Review of Books - USA (2021-03-25)

4 The New York Review

The Emergency Everywhere

Regina Marler

The Inland Sea
by Madeleine Watts.
Catapult, 260 pp., $16.95 (paper)

Ruthie Fear
by Maxim Loskutoff.
Norton, 282 pp., $26.

Fire season in California ended in mid-
December, but I can’t bring myself to
unpack the boxes near the front door.
I threw them together overnight—fam-
ily photos, backup drives, mementos,
passports—in late September, when
three wildfires merged, creating the
Glass Fire, and burned west into rural
Sonoma County, where I live. The Wal-
bridge Fire, which came closer, had
been contained only ten days earlier.
For weeks I kept the gas tank full and
wore a respirator mask on my trips
out for groceries and bottled water.
(The electricity had been cut, and with-
out it the well doesn’t work.) Mostly
I stayed in with the windows shut,
watching birds materialize through the
smoke to land on the feeder. Black-
ened, blistered bay leaves spattered the
driveway.
At night, I woke hourly to scan the
surrounding woods for an orange glow.
What if no warning came? Like al-
most everyone in the Bay Area, I have
friends who’ve fled fires at night, driven
through flames. I ran my risk assess-
ment daily. You could say the fire had
already gotten me.
Climate fiction is a genre of necessi-
ty—a new, rapidly expanding chorus of
alarm. It’s beginning to seem strange
not to mention climate change in real-
istic fiction, and not only because it’s an
existential threat. As Bill McKibben
wrote in these pages, “we are entering
a period when physical forces, and our
reaction to them, will drive the drama
on planet Earth.”^1 The term “climate
fiction” itself came into use around the
turn of this century. (Its catchy abbre-
viation, “cli- fi,” was coined by a blog-
ger and environmentalist, Dan Bloom,
in 2007.^2 ) While environmental disas-
ters have been a staple of dystopian
science fiction since the late nineteenth
century, writers before the mid-1960s
rarely envisioned anthropogenic cli-
mate change. Terrible things just hap-
pened, like the hurricane that sweeps
humanity off the planet in J. G. Bal-
lard’s first novel, The Wind from No-
where (1961). But more recent climate
fiction tends to assign blame. The re-
productive toxins that render most
women infertile in Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), for ex-
ample, derive from leaking nuclear
plants and discarded chemical weapon
stockpiles—very much humanity’s
doing. Almost all climate fiction is po-
litical now. It wants to kick the read-
er’s chair.

In The Inland Sea, an artful debut

novel by Madeleine Watts, the effects

of climate change have become ines-

capable and relentless. The book opens

during the record- setting Australian

heat wave of 2013—until 2019, Austra-

lia’s hottest year on record:

Ambulance crews raced towards

Circular Quay and Parramatta to

tend to the elderly, the pregnant,

and the very young. In the western

suburbs dogs and babies were dis-

covered comatose after five min-

utes left inside locked cars.... At

Taronga Zoo, the lions were given

milk- flavored ice blocks. Carrot-

flavored ice was fed to the zebras.

Dozens of fires break out along the

south coast, and flash floods follow the

fires: “The ocean bled into the land.

Salt water seeped into the crops. Rivers

not rivers. Homes not homes.”

The narrator, who is unnamed, is

adrift after dropping out of a one- year

postgraduate honors program. She

moves to a semi- seedy part of Sydney

and takes a full- time job at an emer-

gency call center, a temporary stopgap,

she thinks. She knows the work might

be stressful, but

the script we were taught on our

first day was meant to shield us from

distress. If all went as planned, the

person calling didn’t tell us about

the fire raging down their cliff or

the body they’d discovered at the

bottom of a gully. We waited to

hear the caller engage with the

paramedic or the firefighter and

then quietly hung up before hear-

ing the details. We were not meant

to hear the problem. We were not

meant to hear the woman howl for

the baby turning blue in her arms.

Her own life is also in crisis. Her

plans for a doctorate have come to

nothing; when she starts drinking, she

can’t stop. Her boyfriend, an aspiring

playwright, dumped her for a fellow

student two days after the narrator

had an abortion: Cate is “really worth

trying for,” he tells her. “I want to be a

good man, with her.” The narrator calls

him “Lachlan” as a kind of in- joke: it’s

the name of one of Australia’s inland-

flowing rivers (now dammed) that led

nineteenth- century white explorers to

believe that the continent had a large

body of water and fertile lands at its

center. “The inland sea,” the narrator

says, “allowed everyone to believe that

the prisonscape they had established

in the Antipodes might really be a

kind of pristine Eden, which God had

set down on the earth as a gift to the

British Empire.” Among the explorers

was the narrator’s ancestor, the real-

life explorer John Oxley. Oxley’s failed

1817 expedition to find that inland sea

mirrors the narrator’s attempt to find a

safe haven with Lachlan—one of many

correspondences in this metaphorically

rich, tightly patterned novel.

After Lachlan leaves her, she

plunges into risky, random hookups

that parallel her attraction to danger in

other areas of her life: “I wanted to be

undone. I wasn’t interested in protect-

ing myself.” The narrative recourse to

risky sex as coping strategy, distraction,

and self- inflicted punishment for young

women is something of a trend in con-

temporary fiction (see Queenie (2019)

by Candice Carty- Williams and last

year’s Topi c s of C o nve r s a t i o n by Mi-

randa Popkey), and the unnamed nar-

rator is another. As Sam Sacks wrote in

an essay titled “The Rise of the Name-

less Narrator,” in The New Yorker,

Behind this effacement, there

seems to lurk a deepening distrust

in writing itself, a crisis of faith in

the ability of words to either cap-

ture the essence of a life or else

speak truthfully to its essenceless

condition.^3

While Watts’s narrator’s chaotic sex

life taps into larger debates about gen-

dered violence and the policing of be-

havior and identity—you immediately

recognize the “bad man” in this novel

when he shows up on the dance floor

and moves in on the narrator while

she’s dancing with a female friend—the

decision not to name the narrator of

The Inland Sea reads more as a marker

of contemporaneity, a shrug toward

Everywoman, though she hardly seems

typical in her choices.

At work, she finds that others’ emer-

gencies are “leaking through the bor-

ders” of her own life. Riveted by the

calls that come into Triple Zero—Aus-

tralia’s emergency call number—she

jots down details in a notebook. When

more than 135 fires are burning across

New South Wales, a woman calls to let

the fire service know that she has “cho-

sen to go instead of stay. I lived through

the fires of ’94, she told me. It’s like a

war zone. Smoke everywhere. I’m not

Bea Nettles: Golden Evenin, 1975; from the exhibition ‘Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory,’ on view at the Krannert Art Museum,

Champaign, Illinois, through March 6, 2021. For more on Nettles’s work, see Nicole Rudick’s essay at nybooks.com /nettles.

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(^1) “It’s Not Science Fiction,” a review
of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Min-
istry for the Future, December 17,
2020.
(^2) An alternate name, “eco- fiction,” sug-
gests a broader focus but does not seem
to be taking off. Nevertheless, see the
excellent Where the Wild Books Are: A
Field Guide to Ecofiction (2010) by Jim
Dwyer.
(^3) The New Yorker, March 3, 2015; and
my “The Fleshly School: Sex Writing in
Recent Fiction,” The Point, November
12, 2020.