8 The New York Review
but also edges into fantasy. As a child,
Ruthie senses “unseen beings” watch-
ing her and one day smells something
“from the canyon’s depths: a rot, a dead
thing come back to life.” She finds her-
self drawn helplessly toward the mys-
tery. Peering through the grass and
underbrush, sensing shadows moving,
she spots a “tall feathered thing” in the
murky canyon, “misshapen and lumpy,
frighteningly perched atop the thin
legs.... A monster, deviant in its un-
steadiness. But what horrified Ruthie,
what made her want to scream, was
that it had no head.”
Monsters fit comfortably within cli-
mate fiction, and it’s been argued that
eco- fiction as a whole is monster fic-
tion. The climate crisis is our own cre-
ation, a weird, uncontrolled force; and
like Frankenstein’s creature, the mu-
tant monster in the canyon both terri-
fies Ruthie and elicits her compassion.
For the rest of her life, she can’t stop
looking for it. Local rumor hints that
she is not the only one to have seen it,
and suspicion points to the biolab.
Not long after she spots the monster,
an earthquake strikes—that biblical
portent. Fire and floods follow. The
community withers, its various factions
settling into poisonous distrust. After a
stint in jail for dynamiting a rancher’s
duck feeders, Rutherford teaches his
now nine- year- old daughter to shoot;
she has to be able to fend off the sher-
iff. The long scene of their first lesson
is one of the most affecting in the book.
“An instinctive switch occurred within
her” as her aim improves:She began firing not for his love but
through it. Channeling his skill....
The barrel an extension of her eye,
the trigger extra length to her fin-
ger, the butt molded to her shoul-
der, and the lines between her and
him slipping away.Torn between love for her father
and disgust at his boozing and anger—
and the squalid, motherless existence
he somehow accepts for her—Ruthie
permits a shared language to grow be-
tween them. Her conflicted impulsestrouble her: she kills and eats the ani-
mals she loves; she hates the headless
creature but also imagines rescuing it,
carrying it to the vet with her friend
Pip to have its eyes and ears restored.
She is another generation removed
from the settler’s urge to master, mine,
and clear- cut the West, and Loskutoff
movingly conveys the pain of loving
wildlife and wild places that you know
to be vulnerable yet are complicit in
harming: the dilemma facing any na-
ture lover on this crowded planet. The
headless monster—which only Ruthie
and Pip fully believe is real—comes to
embody woodland mythology, the frag-
ile otherness of wildlife, and humani-
ty’s reckless ambitions and failures.
Isolated, recently arrived rich folk
are not well regarded by the val-
ley dwellers. But wealth has its uses.
Private land can be conserved or
re wilded. When a new landowner ap-
pears, Ruthie, now a young adult, be-
gins an affair with him and pulls him
into this movement. When he leaves,
her hopes go with him. Ruthie cannot
escape the valley (a brief stint working
in Las Vegas ends with her gun drawn),
and she pushes away love until nearly
the end of the book, when Loskutoff,
throwing off the bonds of realism, un-
leashes an environmental apocalypse
and a surprising, mystical postscript.
Climate fiction can typically be
plotted along a hope–despair axis. In
works with urgent moral or political
messages, endings are tricky: too de-
spairing and they risk further paralyz-
ing readers; too optimistic and they let
us off the hook. Sometimes the darkest,
most dystopian work, like Atwood’s,
comes from secret wellsprings of hope.
“I’m a screamingly optimistic Polly-
anna,” Atwood has said, “or I wouldn’t
write these books, would I?” Neither
Loskutoff nor Watts, it’s clear, wants
to end their novels conventionally: take
that, bourgeois narrative arc. Climate
justice demands new forms. The last
pages of Ruthie Fear are not even a
call to action, but a gratuitous burst of
natural beauty unfolding over decades.
One hint of a moral: there are no hu-
mans in sight. QUNCREDITED
No breakout leads—a prisoner of reruns
on local stations high up on the dial:
a stray recurring role, a guest appearance
on Perry Mason. Later, Rockford Files.Her second act? Pure dullsville in Van Nuys.
Chablis with ice. A Chevy dealership
gone belly up. Her paunchy husband’s lies:
a broken marriage. Then a broken hip.None of that matters, if you ever catch her
singing “How High the Moon”—silvery, misty—
on that one show... She isn’t any match for
the stainless Julie London or June Christy,but through her gauzy voice, as through a sieve,
spare notes of heaven reach you from afar.
For those two minutes, she’ll make you believe:
Somewhere there’s music. It’s where you are.—Boris DralyukDOUBLE TRIO
THE TROJAN WOMEN
AN APPRENTICESHIP,
OR THE BOOK
OF PLEASURES
NEW SPRING BOOKS FROM
NEW DIRECTIONS
THREE NEW BOOKS IN A SPECTACULAR LIMITED EDITION BOX CARRY
THE TRADITION OF THE LONG POEM FAR INTO THE 21ST CENTURY
WITH A “LOW-LIT, SLOW-DRAG EBULLIENCE”Nathaniel Mackey
Rosanna Bruno
Anne Carson
A FANTASTIC COMIC-BOOK
COLLABORATION BETWEEN
ARTIST AND POET, BASED ON
EURIPIDES FAMOUS TRAGEDY“The most important poetry collection to come out this year.”
— NPR“One of the hidden geniuses of twentieth century literature.”
— Colm TóibínA ROMANTIC LOVE STORY BY THE
GREAT BRAZILIAN WRITERTranslated by Stefan Tobler
and with an introduction
by Sheila Heti“Carson, like Euripides, is unafraid to take risks.”
— BOMB“Rosanna Bruno’s Slanted Life is so hysterical, you may find
yourself with a case of the vapors.”
— Alison BechdelNEW DIRECTIONS
INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS
SINCE 1936 WWW.NDBOOKS.COMClarice Lispector