Julia Phillips, in a recent photo, in New York.Nina Subin
When Julia Phillips (New Jersey, 32 years old) decided that she would finally write her first novel, she told herself that she would do it far away.
That, why not, he could do it in Russia.
He had started to study Russian, he loved Anton Chekhov's stories.
He would ask for a scholarship, and if it was given to him, he would go to the Kamchatka Peninsula and let the novel grow there.
He would learn everything he could about such a remote and volcanic place and set the story there, with characters born there, who had nothing to do with his native America.
The result,
The Disappearance
(Sixth Floor), is a
disjointed
noir
, in which violence beats, without actually breaking out, everywhere.
A
noir
which is almost a manual of invisible, psychological abuse against women.
But not only against them.
"I wanted to explore how we cannot avoid being cruel to others, and even to ourselves," says the writer. It is a day in May. Phillips just answered the video call somewhere in Brooklyn. He says that Kamchatka now seems like another planet, and life before the pandemic, another life. "It's curious. Before I felt the need to go far away to write. Now I am writing here, wishing to recover places to which I kept returning. Writing is becoming a nostalgic exercise, ”he says. The place where he has set his second novel is Cape Cod, a summer peninsula in Massachusetts, where his in-laws live. She was a mother a year ago. His family has yet to meet the baby.
Phillips was a finalist for the prestigious National Book Award for
The Disappearance
, which he did not expect at all. She insists she was only fulfilling two dreams at once: that of trying to become a writer and that of learning more about Russia. “It is not as Russian a novel as it might seem. The stories that are told are stories that could happen in the United States or any other part of the world, ”he says. But that's not true, because in the year he spent there, he took such a careful look at the way families are articulated, and the nuances of their relationships, that a society that is not at all American portrays. Other writers of his generation have also stopped writing from the United States. Garth Greenwell, for example, writes about Bulgaria in his latest novel.
“American literature has been deeply solipsistic for too long. She only saw herself "
Do you think it is a trend? "I do not know. Maybe we have grown as a society and we need to look out there. Maybe we are fed up with so much solipsism. American literature has been deeply solipsistic for too long. She saw only herself. I do not know why. Maybe it has to do with the immaturity of the country ”, he answers. Returning to
The Disappearance
, the truth is that the engine of it is a topic, deep down, very American. “Yes, the disappearance of two white girls, who are taken away by a man in a car, and how the news of the days that pass without appearing affects the rest of the characters, who, somehow, become aware of something that they would not have to endure ”, he exposes.
Normalized violence, that kind of "poison" with which one human being goads another, is the true villain of such a particular police story, in which there are, for example, mothers who envy other mothers because they are something that they never They will be and, to defend themselves, they attack them, breaking the friendship of their daughters.
Or couples in which the contempt is so subtle that the protagonist does not even notice it.
What you notice is some kind of discomfort.
He does not come to think that what is happening should not be happening, but he knows that something is not right.
“We inevitably hurt ourselves.
Sometimes very consciously, and sometimes completely unconscious.
We are afraid, we feel insecure, we attack.
The other suffers the blow, and does not understand it.
He doesn't know how to process it, ”he says.
Sharp and concise
It is in this void that relational violence becomes normal and can gradually undermine the recipient. Sometimes it happens that we exert violence against ourselves. “It fascinates me to think in what way we were not aware of all this until a few years ago. I mean, what they did to us could hurt us, but we took it for granted that we had to endure it, we didn't consider that we could demand respect. Because nothing that hurts us is normal, ”insists Phillips. His style is sometimes sharp and concise, like that of his admired Alice Munro; sometimes, pure weather in the drawing of the scene, like that of Louise Erdrich, another of his favorites.
She has wanted to be a writer since she was eight years old. He had a teacher who asked them to write stories all the time. "She told us we did everything beautifully," he recalls. He liked to imagine the teacher waiting for what she wrote, so he began to write a novel in installments. “Every day at lunchtime, I would bring him the chapter I had written the day before. It was a very boring novel about a girl who lived in the forest with her dog, but she read it with great interest. It's amazing what a kind gesture like that can do. Why is it so hard for us to be nice to others? What we receive is infinitely superior to what we receive when we are cruel. I want to think that we will be more and more aware of that ”, he assures.
The novel may speak of violence, of how deeply rooted it is in the very idea of the human being, but writing it gave him "hope." “While I was writing I thought that there is much more that unites us than what separates us. The very fact of being in Russia telling stories that could have happened to my friends in New York was a way of becoming aware of how connected we are, ”he explains. He does not believe that it is easy to end this systemic abuse, but "the first step is to open your eyes, and we have already taken that." “Today's children are no longer going to grow as we did, we normalize certain things because we were not in control of anything and we believed that everything was normal. Today nothing is ”, he adds.
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