Book review of “Bear” by Julia Phillips

Now Phillips has returned to America for her second novel, but still shows a penchant for far-flung, remote places. This time it’s San Juan Island, off the coast of Washington state. And at least one of those bear-like creatures has lumbered back with her.

A grizzly bear haunts the pages of Bear. It’s hard to identify at first and so unlikely that everyone is freaked out with excitement, but there it is: a bear swimming in the San Juan Channel, where they’ve never seen one before. The people on the ferry take photos and call out to the animal. Later, the deputy suspects it might have been a deer. PleaseIt wasn’t a deer.

Yet what those hundreds of pounds of muscle and fur might mean is hard to discern in the dark woods of this intense novel, which begins with an epigram from the Brothers Grimm. For nearly 300 pages, Phillips wanders along the vague line that separates pasture from forest, sanity from madness.

Once upon a time, two siblings, Sam and her older sister Elena, frolicked on San Juan, using the rocky bluffs and forest trails as their playground. “The sisters would sit on the forest floor of their property, studying mushrooms and telling each other stories,” Phillips writes. “They were heroines. They performed magic. They were the girls at the center of a fairy tale, and they would live in such bliss with their mother for the rest of their lives.”

But that grim past has given way to a grim present. As the novel begins in the wake of the Covid pandemic, Sam and Elena are stuck in dead-end jobs and struggling to care for their terminally ill mother. Adequate healthcare is hard to reach from San Juan Island and already too expensive for a family drowning in $11,000 in credit card debt.

We experience this story from Sam’s perspective, which turns out to be crucial. Sam works at the ferry concession stand, handing out drinks and plastic-wrapped cinnamon rolls to wealthy tourists with “orthodontically straightened smiles” and Seattle tech millionaires who leave stingy tips. “They didn’t see them. They never would,” Phillips writes, expressing Sam’s simmering bitterness. “It was all routine. Making coffee. Pouring out coffee grounds. Refilling sugar packets. Getting through another shift.” In her free time, Sam toils for pennies doing consumer surveys for a consumer economy that largely excludes her.

Elena isn’t doing much better as she works at a nearby golf club. “How exhausting. This drudgery. Endless. No matter what they do or how much they earn, that’s how it will be as long as they live on the island.”

Only one thought makes the drudgery bearable for Sam: the knowledge that when her beloved mother dies – and that is sure to be soon – she and Elena can sell the family home and build a new life somewhere far away – “versions of paradise that they created. Places that were tiny, smelled of salt and were barely visible to others. Places that belonged to them and would belong to them.” It is a dream that Sam has been mulling over for years. “To work less, to live more. To become the people they could never be before.”

But then we come across this chapter at the beginning of the novel with just one sentence: “The next day they were awakened and a bear was standing at the door.”

How perfectly calibrated this page is: a single line on an otherwise blank page. It brings back memories of our first reading experiences when we “came to the place where the wild things are.” There is something childlike about these deceptively cuddly animals – from Little Bear to Paddington to the Hundred Acre Wood.

When the sisters discover the bear right outside their door – “this horrible, holy sight” – they are both frightened and excited. “Is this real?” Elena whispers. “Sam couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of this particular thing,” Phillips writes. “The bear’s proximity unbalanced them. … It had abilities they couldn’t imagine.”

Bear may remind readers of Alice Hoffman’s fantasy novels, and Phillips sprinkles fairy dust liberally in some sections, but it’s actually more in the realm of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, in which the main character infuses the story with his own distorting fears.

The bear remains not only elusive, but essentially inscrutable. “Nobody,” Phillips writes, “had yet gotten a good picture of the thing.” It’s likely that every reader projects something different onto this hairy, multifaceted symbol, but perhaps Phillips’ clever book captures the cumulative stress of long-term care, the kind of maddening environment that comes from fearing the death of a loved one while simultaneously yearning for release from the prison of care.

For Sam, the bear is an existential terror that brings back memories of her mother’s abusive boyfriend. But while she becomes increasingly concerned about its presence on the island, Elena sees the animal as a welcome respite from the tedium of her days – no, more than that: “Elena spoke of her sighting like a person having an angel land right in front of her,” Phillips writes. “After crossing the bear’s path, the simple fact of her life had to be interpreted as some kind of miracle.”

These impressions are of course irreconcilable. In a way, a battle of interpretation develops between the two sisters, a struggle over whose definition of the beast will prevail: horror or magic.

All of this is woven into an ever-tightening web of fear. Phillips wisely keeps her book relatively short, using the story’s narrow focus to emphasize the sisters’ physical isolation. Even the novel’s YA tone, which feels cloying at first, soon turns out to be entirely intentional, a reflection of Sam’s developmental arrest made worse by those two years of Covid stasis. Impoverished, alienated, and desperately lonely, she has retreated further than she realizes, into a world of fragile hope. When that shatters, as it inevitably does, the situation becomes more unpredictable and dangerous than one might think.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club Newsletter for the Washington Post. He is a book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”