In her second novel, Julia Phillips has written the great American post-pandemic parable. No, it’s not “The Bear” of the acclaimed TV series, it’s an actual fantasy bear, inspired by the “gruesome, bloody and hypnotising” fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red, which haunted Phillips’ childhood.
In the Grimm brothers’ telling, a bear knocks on the door of a cottage in the woods that the sisters share with their widowed mother. The bear tells the girls not to be afraid and they play with him and let him spend the night in front of their fire. Phillips has said the image of a big brown bear rolling around on a cottage carpet with two young, innocent girls was riveting and horrifying to her girlish self. The bear, empowered by the sisters’ trusting love, ultimately reveals itself to be a handsome prince imprisoned by the spell of a wicked dwarf.
Bear was also inspired by a report that in 2019, a black bear in search of a mate swam out to the lush San Juan Islands in Washington State’s northern Puget Sound, a place that Phillips has wistfully described as “taking her back to a time when she felt free of sadness”. This sense of innocence, delight and transformation pervades the novel, as it is set during the time that the world woke up, like Sleeping Beauty, from the claustrophobia and isolation of the Covid 19 pandemic.
The sisters of Phillips’ creation are beautiful. Blonde Elena, the elder by 13 months, works as a waitress at a country club to keep the family afloat as their 51-year-old manicurist mother is dying of emphysema as a result of her long exposure to harmful solvents. Sam, the unreliable narrator of this tale, dreams of the day when the sisters, who are best friends, can escape the gilded cage of San Juan Island, where during tourist season “the celebrities and Seattle tech millionaires … glowed at the gas station after getting to the island by private plane”.
Sam works at the concession on the island ferry, “making coffee for people who treated her like a peasant. Like Cinderella picking lentils from the ashes, Sam was a nobody doing work that meant nothing, but no prince was going to pluck her out of this.” So who will rescue her from her captivity? Not a prince, but the capitalist dream.
Their cottage is on six acres of valuable real estate, and Sam is hoping that upon their mother’s death the sisters will sell their property and be free of the island. This is her happily ever after.
As the novel is told through Sam’s point of view, we see the consequence of the bear’s arrival through her terrified eyes. The animal is first seen swimming next to Sam’s ferry. And then, as in the Grimms’ fairy tale, it comes knocking on the sisters’ cottage door.
Looking out the window, the sisters see it “facing away. Its rump was huge, thickly furred, gold and black and brown, matted in spots … It looked in profile towards 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.”
And though Sam continues to shrink in terror at its nearness, Elena befriends it on a sudden encounter. The bear looked right at her, “inhaled” her. “Elena talked about the sighting the way a person might if an angel touched down in front of them … or if a burning bush spoke.”
And so the bear creates a rift between the sisters. Elena is enchanted and Sam is spooked as this modern fable races towards its grimly inspired conclusion.
Phillips’ hyper-realistic description of the bear was sparked by her actual encounter with the relatively harmless bears at the nature preserve on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East while she was researching the setting for her first novel, the acclaimed Disappearing Earth, which explored the mysterious disappearance of another pair of sisters. Like Elena, Phillips said that during the encounter “she felt alive, more alive than she knew was possible – like she and the bear were the only living creatures that had ever been.”
Phillips’ prose is elegant and clear as crystal, powerfully descriptive rather than exaggeratedly lyrical. Hers is a modern parable of hope, but also a view into the divisions between rich and poor that blight America. Elena and Sam serve the wealthy, yet do not earn enough to afford the expensive medical treatment their mother requires to free her from pain. Tame bears can be real, but escape from poverty is a fantasy. The bear is not only their desire, but a representation of their shadow selves.
