Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

In the center of the bay, a trawler pushed south, heading for whatever waited out there--Chukotka, Alaska, Japan. The sisters had never left the Kamchatka Peninsula. One day, their mother said, they would visit Moscow, but that was a nine-hour flight away, a whole continent's distance, and would require them to cross above the mountains and the seas and fault lines that isolated Kamchatka. they had never known a big earthquake, but their mother told them what one was like. She described how 1997 felt in their apartment: the kitchen light swinging high enough on its cord to smash against the ceiling, the cabinet doors swinging so jars of preserves could dance out, the eggy smell of leaking gas that made her head ache. On the street afterward, their mother said, she saw cars ground into one another and the asphalt opened up.

The Kamchatka Peninsula is an immense arm hanging off of Russia's easternmost side, between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific. About 300,000 people live there, mostly in the peninsula's southern tip, cut off from the mainland, to which there are no connecting roads. In Kamchatka's largest city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatky, two little girls disappear on a summer morning. One witness--perhaps unreliable--saw them climbing into a conspicuously shiny black car with a strange man, but neither car and man have been seen since. Julia Phillips' Disappearing Earth takes the form of a series of stories that follow the people of Kamchatka for one year after the girls' disappearance.

The girls touch some of these stories only slightly: the one about the girl whose best friend has been forbidden to see her by her mother, on a flimsy pretext about needing to be surrounded by the "right people"; the one about the lesbian who returns to the small village she left behind. As the stories and months plod forward, the narrative moves away from Petropavlovsk and closer and closer to the heart of Kamchatka, the home of the indigenous Evens. The girls' disappearance inflames many of the most wearyingly familiar anxieties of insider and outsider, suspicion of indigenous people and migrants, and the inequality of settler culture. An Even girl, we are slowly informed, disappeared in similar circumstances years before, her case closed, without much inquiry or evidence, as a runaway.

I had the unsettling feeling, perhaps wrongly, that Disappearing Earth is an American novel wearing Russian clothing. I'm sure the dynamics of racism and xenophobia in Kamchatka are broadly recognizable, but it seemed to me that many of these stories could be air-dropped into Washington state or Indiana with only the names changed--and maybe the food the characters eat. That's part of the point, I suppose: isolated Kamchatka is really no more isolated than anywhere else. We are always trying to make our communities into islands, thinking it will keep us safe.

But if there is a specific perspective or understanding that living in Kamchatka granted to Phillips, I missed it. The closest thing to it--and the best moment in the novel--comes in the final story, when the mother of the two disappeared white girls and the mother of the disappeared indigenous girl meet at an Even cultural festival. The Even mother begs the white one to tell her how much she paid to have the police search for her children as long as they did, even though the search turned up nothing. But of course, the white mother paid nothing--she was merely white. This was, for me, the truest and sharpest moment of the book.