The Animal in Our Midst at the Library

by Bill Peak

Recently, I read an article about a poultry processing plant on Virginia's Eastern Shore that employed underage immigrants to work overnight shifts servicing machines that rapidly decapitated, declawed, and disemboweled chickens. Not surprisingly, all the spinning blades and belts occasionally maimed one of the youngsters, who, because they were miles from home and parents in a strange country whose language they did not understand, had to suffer in silence or risk losing their sole source of income.

The essay reminded me of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which described how, in the early twentieth century, Eastern European immigrants were similarly harnessed to Chicago’s newly-industrialized slaughterhouses. Thinking about what Charles Dickens did for people incarcerated in debtors’ prisons and John Steinbeck did for seasonal agricultural workers, I wondered why there wasn’t a modern equivalent to Sinclair out there who could write a book like The Jungle to awaken us to the conditions under which some people in the United State must live and labor even today.

But, then again, maybe it's me. Has television's nightly catastrophe parade so inured me to human suffering that I can’t see the forest for the trees? Are such works being written and I’ve just failed to recognize what their authors are trying to accomplish?

Julia Phillips’ new novel Bear tells the story of two sisters, Elena and Sam. For years now the women have been caring for their mother, who is slowly dying from an unnamed chronic illness. The family lives on the remote island of San Juan, off the coast of Washington State, in a poorly-insulated, dilapidated house that is on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its years.

Elena is employed as a waitress in the local country club, while Sam works long shifts behind a concession stand in the ferry that moves wealthy tourists to and from the island. During the pandemic, the ferry ceased operations, and their mother’s medical bills sunk the sisters deep in debt.

Written in the third-person, Bear is told from Sam’s point of view. She hates her work, hates the contempt with which the wealthy tourists treat her, hates her bondage to a life with few pleasures other than the love she feels for her sister and mother.

But Sam has a dream. When eventually, inevitably, their mother passes away, Sam and her sister will be free to sell their home (and the valuable real estate it sits upon), which means they’ll be able to move to a warmer clime and begin living the sort of life she imagines the tourists she waits upon live.

Then one night, as she is taking a break out on the ferry’s upper deck, Sam sees something remarkable in the oily blackness of the water beneath her. It’s a bear, swimming alongside the boat, making for the shore of their island.

As it happens, the bear takes up residence in the forest that surrounds the two sisters’ home. Elena, who is the older of the two and has borne the brunt of bill-paying, housekeeping, and caregiving—Elena who arrives home from work each day exhausted and stinking of griddle grease and fried onions—sees the bear as a sort of other-worldly figure, one that has brought into their threadbare existence a hint of magic and even enchantment.

While the hardship of Elena’s life moves her to try to befriend the bear, the hardship of Sam’s makes her see the beast as a threat to her dreams. What if her beloved sister strays too close to the thing, what if it kills her, if it takes from Sam the one person she loves besides the mother she knows she will soon lose?

The tension between these two divergent views and the wild animal that instigates that tension creates a narrative force at once both troubling and seductive. We want everything to work out for the sisters. We don’t see how everything possibly can.

It is this dilemma that drives Bear and made me think that, in a subtle way, a way somehow appropriate for our time, Phillips has written a modern equivalent to Dickens’ Little Dorrit, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and Sinclair’s The Jungle. For it is the crushing, inescapable reality of Sam and Elena’s poverty that puts them at loggerheads, that drives them toward the bear—one armed only with love, the other with a gun.

You can find Phillips’ Bear (as well as Dickens, Steinbeck, and Sinclair) at the place we visit to try to reconcile such irreconcilables: the Talbot County Free Library.