WITH the mystery of myth, a bear emerges from the water, seen so briefly that those on a passing ferry can’t be sure what they’ve seen: an apparition, a threat, a shadow, a mirage, a vision? In her spellbinding new novel, Bear, published by Random House imprint Hogarth in June, Julia Phillips raises all these possibilities and more as she tells the story of Elena and Sam, two sisters eking out a living on San Juan Island, off the coast of Washington State, as they care for their terminally ill mother and anticipate the sale of property that will grant them the freedom to transform their lives.
“A shape broke the surface. A creature. Moving.” Despite that enigmatic first glimpse, this is a real, living, breathing bear, “huge, thickly furred, gold and black and brown,” that emerges from Friday Harbor and eventually shows up at Elena and Sam’s door. Although Phillips prefaces the novel with a passage from the story of Snow-white and Rose-red from the Brothers Grimm, this is no fairy tale. To Elena, the bear is utterly enchanting, to Sam utterly terrifying, a disruption that Phillips explores at “the fine line between human existence and monstrosity” while calling into question whether there is any such line at all.
The publication of Phillips’s second novel coincides with the season-three premiere of the extremely popular series , streaming on Hulu, about family chaos and the culinary arts in Chicago—leading one to wonder whether there may be some concern about inter-media confusion. “That’s already happening,” she admits, laughing, “but I love this confusion.” In part this is because she is also familiar with it: “When came out, people asked if it was about climate change,” she says. Set in the volcanic peninsula on the far northeastern edge of Russia, her first novel, published by Knopf in 2019, focuses on the kidnapping of two fictional sisters. Each chapter is narrated by a different woman—reminiscent of a narrative structure frequently employed by her favorite author, Louise Erdrich—through the also centers on a pair of sisters, though the tension stems from the hierarchy of class and economic insecurity, in this case exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In different ways both novels examine issues of power, community, and gender—the last being a topic that fuels Phillips’s self-described “obsession” with stories of lost girls and women and children in peril.
