In 2019, a black bear swam out to the San Juan Islands, the lush, lovely archipelago in Washington’s north Puget Sound. The bear, an adult male, was spotted on six islands before moving on, apparently discouraged by the paucity of mates. More than a year later, when I visited the San Juans, the bear was still the talk of the float plane.
Such a rare occurrence is the launching point for Julia Phillips’ second novel, “Bear,” the moody and affecting follow-up to her bestselling debut, the 2019 National Book Award finalist “Disappearing Earth.” That book, which began with the abduction of two sisters, created deep pools of pathos and suspense by spreading its narrative over a range of characters in the girls’ remote home, the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia.
In “Bear,” Phillips has found another evocative setting, San Juan Island, on which to craft another story of hard-luck sisters, this time the 20-somethings Sam and Elena, who live with their dying 51-year-old mother in a “1979 vinyl-sided nightmare” surrounded by swank summer homes.
But the symphonic narration of “Disappearing Earth” has given way here to a soloist. “Bear” is told through the close third-person point of view of the younger sister, Sam, who bitterly toils away inside a ferry for $24 an hour, selling coffee and snacks to “people who treated her like a peasant.” One day, Sam wanders on deck, looks down at the water and sees something remarkable. “A shape broke the surface. A creature. Moving.”
It’s a marvelous opening, but riding shotgun for the next 270 sparely written pages with such a brittle protagonist proves wearying. Sam suffers her dead-end job, her mother’s illness, her class anger and her slim prospects. (“How exhausting. This slog. Endless.”) She distrusts anyone who tries to help her: friendly neighbor, attractive wildlife expert, even her seemingly attentive lover. “It wasn’t fair that Ben should move around, rent his own place, go fishing when he felt like it,” Phillips writes. “It enraged her.”
The only person in the world Sam doesn’t seem to resent is her beloved older sister, Elena, a freer, less-troubled soul. When the swimming bear — an even rarer and scarier grizzly — shows up outside their home, Elena sees it as a sign. “The bear was their one good thing, a specter, a spirit, an extraordinary beast,” she tells her sister, “teaching them what it was to love living, helping them to make it through.”
But Sam is unconvinced. Her fear and obsessive anxiety over the bear grow in inverse relation to her sister’s mystical fixation. Elena leaves food out for the beast; Sam reports it to wildlife officials. Elena goes for walks with her new friend; Sam seeks out bear spray and, eventually, a Chekhovian gun.
For Sam, the bear would seem to be a shifting symbol, not just of impending death but for all that threatens the girls’ once-idyllic island life: outsiders coming between them; their mother’s abusive ex-boyfriend (or, perhaps, the violent nature of all men); even the unfairness of late-stage American capitalism.
But symbolic bears are way less hairy than real ones, and Phillips has made this one a compelling, visceral beast: massive and smelly, with huge teeth and jaws, who, when he’s not sniffing around the girls’ home, spends his vacation sampling local deer and livestock.
Sure, he might walk Elena to and from the country club where she works as a waitress, and, yes, the bear seems to enjoy heart-to-hearts with her in the woods, but Phillips smartly keeps us guessing whether the fantastical creature ultimately sees Elena as friend or feast.
Phillips is working in high fairy-tale register here. “Like Cinderella picking lentils from the ashes,” she writes, “Sam was a nobody doing work that meant nothing, but no prince was ever going to pluck her out of this … Elena was the only one who was going to save her from this place. They were going to have to save each other.”
The suspense rises in the last third, when, eschewing the Disneyfication of fairy tales, and cleverly hewing to the darker weirdness of an actual Grimm tale, “Snow White and Red Rose,” Phillips rolls out one last, haunting symbol for the bear to embody — the mysterious bonds and dangerous fissures of sisterhood.
This gives the novel its slow-burning power, as Sam’s vision of their seemingly perfect childhood (“sisters crouched on the forest floor of their property, studying mushrooms, telling each other stories”) crashes against the divergent desires of adult life.
“Bear” ends with a bang, and with the intriguing notion that sisterhood (or sisters?) may be as unknowable and unpredictable as anything else in nature. As Sam observes of Elena late in the novel, “Something else had pushed her to this point. A thing stranger, wilder. Bestial.”
Jess Walter is the author of 10 books, most recently the story collection “The Angel of Rome.”
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About the book
“BEAR”
Julia Phillips
Hogarth. 304 pp. $28.
