Julia Phillips will be hosted at Off-Square Books at 5 p.m. on Thursday for a conversation about “Bear” with Snowden Wright.

By Allen Boyer

This is the story of a poor woman and her two daughters, who all live together in a house in the middle of the forest.

The daughters are Samantha, whom the novel follows, and Elena. The forest is the rain-soaked overgrowth of Orcas Island, northwest of Seattle, where tourists come for kayaking and whale-watching and local people struggle to find jobs. The house is small and battered but it might bring half a million dollars, if Sam and Elena could sell it – which they can’t, not while their mother lives.

Elena works at the golf club. Sam works on the ferry, as it circles among the islands (both a route and a metaphor). She is painfully aware that she is not one of the official ferry crew, state employees with job security and benefits. She pours coffee at the ferryboat’s concessions counter, shift by shift, handling inane unfunny tourist questions. Their mother struggles quietly at home, her heart failing, waiting for her daughters to come home and change her and cook dinner.

And then a bear arrives, swimming alongside the ferryboat, “clear and shocking and strange.” It reappears on land, outside the family house, scraping the siding and blocking the door.

“It faced away. Its rump was huge, thickly furred, gold and black and brown. Matted in sports. Dense with texture. Past that, the lump of its shoulders, the soft half circles of its small high ears. . . . But it was calm. It looked in profile toward the road, sniffed the air, and yawned, expansive, a mouth opening vastly, yellow teeth exposed three inches long, black lips curling back and tongue spilling forth.”

William Faulkner’s bear suggested the brute power and persistence of the primeval world, something that could not be translated, tamed, or ordered. Samantha’s bear, settled down outside the house, reflects the problems within. The animal has the crushing strength of poverty and illness and the monstrous weight of anxiety.

Julia Phillips’ first novel, “Disappearing Earth,” was set in Kamchatka, and she knows how to sketch the cold, hardscrabble places of the world. This book is about interior life, which Phillips writes about well. Rather than wilderness and open water, this book features porches, driveways, small-town doctor’s offices, and the coffee counter on the ferryboat. The landscape is less Raymond Carver than it is grayed-out Bobbie Ann Mason.

Phillips also writes good dialogue, sentences that people might actually speak. There is a genuine, cheerful, flirtatious tone to Sam’s bantering small talk with Ben, a deckhand who might be her boyfriend, if she wanted to call him that. Mostly, however, the dialogue is internal – Sam’s sharp-edged thoughts about her life, or her increasingly desperate recollections of childhood.

Phillips knows what Chekhov said about the gun hanging on the wall. There is a gun here, mentioned early on – and a mother sickening to death, and people in uniform who give warnings, and a huge sharp-toothed bear, a beast that nearly everyone thinks is probably harmless.

For an epigraph to this story, Phillips quotes from the fairy tale of Snow White and Rose-Red, two sisters who befriend a talking bear who proves to be an enchanted prince. Phillips does not quote, however, what the fairy-tale bear says to the girls as they rough-house: “Leave me my life, Snow White, Rose-Red, for if I’m dead, you’ll never wed.”

There is nothing princely about this novel’s bear, but that warning holds. The bear is a challenge, a crisis, something that must be overcome before the sisters can make lives of their own.

“Bear” may mean the huge creature haunting the family home; or it may mean to endure, or even to bring forth fruit. In their own stories, Sam and Elena have made their own stopping- places and plaited their own twists. Happy endings may be too much to hope for, but lives, as they continue, are a chronicle of how problems find resolutions.

 

“Bear.” By Julia Phillips. Hogarth / Penguin Random House. 286 pp. $28.00

Allen Boyer grew up in Oxford and now writes in New York City.