The most read New Yorker article of 2015 was Kathryn Schulz’s “The Really Big One,” about the potentially devastating Cascadia earthquake that has a 1-in-3 chance of striking the Pacific Northwest within the next 40 years. Taking this very real threat as its knockout premise, Emma Pattee’s debut novel, “Tilt,” is a moving adrenaline rush that also manages to be very funny.
When “the really big one” hits, Annie — who narrates the novel as if addressing her unborn child, “Bean” — is 37 weeks pregnant and shopping for a crib at Ikea in Portland, Ore. “Tilt” takes readers through the next 24 hours, with chapters that flash back to fill in the details of Annie’s life. Annie and her husband, Dom, are “star children who forgot to become stars”: Annie, once a promising playwright, supports them as the office manager at a tech company, while Dom auditions for acting roles and picks up shifts at a cafe. Financially strapped, creatively stifled and increasingly distant, Annie and Dom are, “if not on the path to breaking up, at least able to see the path to breaking up from where we’re standing.”
But when Annie emerges from the rubble of Ikea, all she can think of is finding Dom. And so she embarks on a journey across the ravaged city. In the summer heat, swollen and dehydrated, Annie trudges past collapsed bridges and burning houses, looted shops and leveled schools. Along the way, she crosses paths with others in their own dire circumstances — most memorably an Ikea employee named Taylor — some of whose fates we will learn, some of whom the narrative will leave behind as Annie presses on.
The ingredients in “Tilt” are familiar: a bit of Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” (theater kids in the apocalypse) and a bit of Rumaan Alam’s “Leave the World Behind” (cutting social observation in the apocalypse); the acerbic takes on marriage and motherhood reminiscent of Ashley Audrain and Rachel Yoder. Shaken together, these ingredients make for a potent cocktail.
I cried more than once reading it. The book’s cover image — a small model bird — comes from an anecdote about Annie’s late mother’s unrealized artistic ambitions that is as heartbreaking as any of the tragic scenes Annie encounters on her journey. I also laughed out loud at many of her dark, unfiltered thoughts, like this one: “I read somewhere that in the case of a natural disaster, you should not look strangers in the eye in case they die later and you’re forced to eat them.”
Readers’ mileage with Annie may vary. Her emotions are often dialed up to 11 — not just in the aftermath of the earthquake, but in flashbacks, too. The novel’s prose sometimes strains to capture the intensity of her perspective. “I need your father. Like hunger. Like thirst,” she tells Bean as she walks. Flashing back to a fight with Dom the day before the earthquake: “The terribleness of it fills my entire body. Not just this moment but all the moments.” Her heart is frequently “pounding.”
Often, I wanted to grab Annie by the straps of her lavender maternity romper and shout: “What are you doing? Stop walking, find water and shelter, and protect your baby!” Of course, the novel’s plot depends upon Annie not doing this. But her decision to keep walking is also indicative of Annie’s initial resistance to motherhood and its demands.
The ruined city is a crucible through which she passes — a perilous trial not unlike childbirth itself. While Pattee’s readers will not get the answer to every question, at the end Annie will have an answer of her own: All that matters is this ferocious creature she is becoming — a mother, prepared to do whatever she must.
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