6 The New York Review
going through that again.” The narra-
tor thinks, but does not say, that she
also remembers driving through those
fires with her mother, “remember[s]
the smoke and the heat and the roads
blocked off and no way home.” She
connects the caller to the fire brigade
and writes “like a war zone” in her
notebook.
No Triple Zero script can entirely
protect her. Even the fellow worker
who advises her not to take the calls
too much to heart blurts out “Climate
change is real,” followed by a string of
dire ecological facts and projections—
the kind of abstract bad news that takes
specific form in the callers’ lives. During
her year on the job, the narrator begins
to study ecological collapse and write
articles, and saves up money to leave
Australia. When a woman is raped and
killed in Sydney, she pores over news
of the investigation. “Everything con-
tained the potential for menace,” she
observes, while also contriving to put
herself in harm’s way whenever possi-
ble—swimming too far out in the bay,
walking home alone drunk, getting in
taxis with strangers.
In The Great Derangement: Climate
Change and the Unthinkable (2016),
Amitav Ghosh argued that literary re-
alism could not handle the “improba-
bilities” of climate change. Yet Watts’s
elastic, digressive narrative shows that
literary realism can adapt to these
new exigencies—and that little may
remain improbable to us now. Read-
ers may sometimes resist being pulled
away, however, from the novel’s main
story for abrupt science reports and ex-
tended childhood memories.
The conceptual heart of the novel,
the narrator’s harrowing job fielding
calls from people in crisis, is drawn
from life. Watts grew up in Sydney and
worked at an emergency call center
there. In an essay for The Irish Times,
she recounts her first, unusually warm
American winter, after she moved to
New York City in 2015 to study writing
at Columbia:
The book I had begun writing was
about the idea of emergencies,
but it was around this time, when
the cherry blossoms bloomed at
Christmas, that I began to suspect
I was missing a vital connection
to the natural world, and that it was
the natural world that portended
the biggest emergency of all.These changes—now evident all
around us—felt to her like part of a
“slow apocalypse.”
In Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020),
another recent novel suffused with
climate dread, a celebrated speaker
is asked to explain the difference be-
tween a disaster and an emergency. She
answers:
A disaster is a sudden event that
causes great damage or loss. An
emergency is a situation in which
normal operations cannot con-
tinue and immediate action is re-
quired so as to prevent a disaster.Clearly the slow apocalypse unfolding
around us does not always feel urgent.
Between extreme disruptions like the
California wildfires, Hurricane Sandy,
and the recent winter storms and power
outages in Texas and Oregon, we carry
on ordinary lives. This may be chang-
ing as climate change accelerates, but
even the climate- obsessed narrator of
The Inland Sea—who pauses her own
story near the end to bluntly lay out the
“best- case scenario” for Sydney in the
future, in the event of a plausible two-
degree temperature spike—does not
throw herself into activism. She takes
notes.
But she is a writer, and we infer that
she will someday devote her talents to
the cause of environmental awareness,
as Watts has. “To not write about cli-
mate change, the most important issue
of our time,” Watts comments in her
essay, “seemed like lunacy.” How to
write about it, though? Her command
of physical detail, combined with her
narrator’s attunement to nature, makes
for an immersive, visceral read. The
elemental furies of fire and water elicit
some of Watts’s best descriptive prose.
One night when the narrator has just
walked back to her empty house after
a hard rain, she hears a sudden crack,
then another:With every crack the darkness of
the bedroom was flooded with
light. Blue and bright and sickly.
I stood at the window and looked
out at the mechanic’s and the pa-
perbark tree and Elizabeth Street
slicked wet by the rain. The sky’s
heart torn wide open. Blue light
splintered the room. I could see,
out there above the fig and the
mulberry trees, the flash of light,
and then the smoke.
The power line was on fire.She dials Triple Zero and goes outside
in the dark alone to wait for rescue—“I
knew the protocol.” This is the moment
one of her neighbors, a large man,
chooses to make an unwelcome physi-
cal pass at her, adding the fear of rape
to the existing emergency, from the fire
to the frying pan. The vulnerability of
the narrator’s female body is expressed
not only through the threat of male ag-
gression and her often self- destructive
sexual choices but in intense descrip-
tions of her abortion. Later, the nar-
rator attempts to get fitted for an
IUD—surely a rare account in fiction
of a gynecological procedure and, in
this case, its traumatic aftermath. The
narrator wakes in the night afterward,
bleeding and trembling:What punishment was this?
My temperature rose. The
streetlight shimmered and lifted.
Fever took hold....
I waited for the waters to rise
and cover my salt plains, waited for
the stretcher to bear me away, the
policeman to hold me down, the
fireman to douse my flames. Every
siren was personal, because the
border between world and self had
been—it was now clear—washed
away in the flood long ago. I was
swimming in it. All things were
wet.
Every siren was for me.In image after image, Watts evokes the
ancient association of the female body
with the suffering, life- giving earth,
but at its logical end point: no more
life- giving.
Watts’s constrained metaphoric
range—nature, disaster, violence—
lends this novel the compressed charge
of poetry. The narrator, who starts tosleep with Lachlan again secretly while
he is involved with Cate, knows the
relationship hurts her, but “the burn
seemed worth it, or the fire seemed
interesting, or both.” Lachlan speaks
in “that voice which seemed to prom-
ise that he could refreeze the ice pack
and replenish the floodplains,” and the
narrator imagines them collaborating,
their writing and research projects
helping them “build a kind of life raft
we could float on together when the
flood arrived.” Watts falters only in
sometimes spelling out too much; even
the section titles refer to catastrophes
(“Tremor,” “Wildfire”). As the narra-
tor tells us midway through the novel,
“the environment was merely the outer
equivalent of my inner reality.” Any-
one who does not already know this has
been reading a different book.
A larger question is whether Watts’s
controlling analogies—the narrator’s
body as the earth, her personal crises
as the earth’s crises—work as a narra-
tive strategy or whether they lock down
interpretation. They do allow her to
skip any redemptive arc. The fate of the
earth appears gloomy, and so does her
narrator’s future, even as she secures
her flight to America. Safety is illusory,
and there is no point in trying to protect
herself: “If working on the phones had
taught me anything, it was that emer-
gency could not be avoided. Emergency
would come for you no matter what you
did.”The novelist Lauren Groff has said
that while she finds it hard to face the
climate crisis—“the deepest terror of
our lives now”—she feels as though “I
am being immoral if I am not address-
ing it somehow in my work.” Despite
her roots in speculative fiction (Groff’s
2008 debut novel, The Monsters of
Templeton, featured a fifty- foot lake
monster), she has taken against “cata-
strophic apocalypse” novels: “Human-
ity always comes through in the end,
and that seems to me as though it’s a
false catharsis.”
Maxim Loskutoff’s first novel, Ruthie
Fear, offers no such relief. Set in the Bit-
terroot Valley of Montana in (for the
most part) the present day, the novel
develops many of the themes from Los-
kutoff’s much- praised debut story col-
lection, Come West and See (2018): the
beauty and menace of the American
West; the weirdness of rural folk; ro-
mantic individualism, with its fantasies
of freedom and self- sufficiency; and of
course the mad, ruinous grab made by
the succession of settlers, from the ear-
liest white explorers and loggers and
trappers to the current- day right- wing
militia movement and the new ultrarich
in their compounds. The fat of the land
has long since been skimmed. After
years of drought, the locals in Ruthie
Fear are as economically and spiritu-
ally parched as the surrounding woods
and hills. But developers still see op-
portunity and won’t rest until nature is
fully paved and gated.
Both The Inland Sea and Ruthie
Fear are in part about girls in dan-
ger: from men, from themselves, from
forces beyond their control. Ruthie is
the half- feral daughter of Rutherford
Fear, a crack shot but underemployed
day drinker who poaches firewood
from the national forest and plots re-
venge on the feds and the rich ranch-
ers who have blocked access to land he
grew up hunting. “All this land used tobe free,” he tells Ruthie. “Free game,
free wood.” Topping the roll call of the
dispossessed in the Bitterroot Valley
are the few surviving Native Ameri-
cans, the Salish, ruthlessly suppressed
and liable to burst into complaints that
white townspeople don’t want to hear.
Only one steady employer remains in
the area: a mysterious high- security
government biolab, the target of a
lackluster but heavily armed protest
by disgruntled former millworkers and
conspiracy nuts.
The road through the valley is
marked by signs at either end—one ad-
vertising Christ and the other the Sec-
ond Nature Taxidermy School, where,
we’re told, “farm boys with ghoulish
ambitions came to learn the modern,
fetishized art of embalming. Between
these risen corpses, thirty thousand
people lived.” The mills are closed and
the last wolf was killed by Rutherford
years ago and exhibited outside his
trailer for admiring locals.
We read stories set in the West in part
for such details—the wild peculiarity
that flourishes in people there—and in
part because frontier mythology still
pulls at us: the dream of expansion, of
gold in the hills. Like the exemplars of
Western fiction Cormac McCarthy and
Wallace Stegner, Loskutoff grants his
landscape the agency and complexity
of a main character, but not one you’d
trust. Climate- change- induced drought
is the malign backdrop to the damaged
beauty of the valley, the next bad thing
after the depletion of the woods and the
degradation of its delicate ecosystems.
Rutherford’s battered trailer sits
on a dry acre near the mouth of No-
Medicine Canyon, a forbidding place,
unfriendly even to old- timers: “The
Bitterroot Range loomed overhead.
Ten- thousand- foot peaks seeming to
attack the sky with jagged, glaciated
teeth.” Ruthie’s mother left when she
was a baby, and Rutherford has raised
her with his frontier values. All his
small wealth is in firearms. Ruthie, who
at six ingratiates herself with nearby
children by shying a rock at a toddler,
has one equally strange friend, Pip
Pascal, and a Yorkshire terrier, Moses,
the only animal in the book allowed to
live peacefully until old age. The story
follows Ruthie through childhood into
her thirties.On the whole, climate fiction is not
an understated genre. Claire Vaye
Watk i ns’s Gold Fame Citrus (2015),
an elegant nightmare set in a dune-
covered, postapocalyptic California,
marries gore and shimmer on the page
in descriptive riffs like a latter- day
William Burroughs. Paolo Bacigalu-
pi’s “drought thriller” The Water Knife
(2015) draws on noir: clipped sentences,
casual violence, careening between sex
and death. The New Wilderness (2020)
by Diane Cook, which was short- listed
for the Booker Prize, deploys the most
restrained prose of this group, perhaps
because her premise—a team is sent as
an anthropological experiment to live
as foraging nomads in the last remain-
ing wilderness on the planet—already
has the reader by the collar.
Loskutoff’s harshly vivid prose—a
duck’s nostrils look “as though they’d
been bored out by a dentist’s drill”—
and his pleasure in grisly details suit
his version of the West. It’s fully recog-
nizable to anyone who grew up in or
near these sparsely populated regions,