n 2019, Julia Phillips published a celebrated novel called “Disappearing Earth,” set on a remote Russian peninsula called Kamchatka. It’s not a place many Western readers were likely to have heard of before. Indeed, a travel story in The Washington Post noted, “You come to Kamchatka for two reasons: bears and volcanoes.
” Courtesy of Hogarth “Bear” By Julia Phillips Hogarth. 286 pages. $28 Now, for her second novel, Phillips has returned to America, but she’s still showing a penchant for far-flung, disconnected places.
This time, it’s San Juan Island, off the coast of Washington state. And at least one of those ursine creatures has come lumbering back with her. A grizzly haunts the pages of “Bear.
” It’s hard to identify at first, and so unlikely that everyone’s giddy with excitement, but there it is: a bear swimming in the San Juan Channel, where they’d never seen one. Folks on the ferry take pictures and call out to the animal. Later, the sheriff’s deputy suggests it could have been a deer.
Please. It was no deer. But what those hundreds of pounds of muscle and fur might mean is challenging to see through the dark woods of this intense novel, which begins with an epigraph from the Brothers Grimm.
For almost 300 pages, Phillips wends along the vague barrier that separates pasture from forest, reason from madness. Once upon a time, two siblings, Sam and her elder sister, Elena, frolicked on San Juan. The rocky bluffs and woodland trails served as t.
