A playfully inventive novel set in Ukraine asks serious questions

Washington Post

3 days ago

Upon an initial reading, Maria Reva's remarkable debut novel, 'Endling,' might be categorized several different ways: a war novel about modern-day Ukraine; a metafictional tale that examines the ethics of writing about conflict and violence; a satirical send-up of the mail-order bride industry in Ukraine; a biologist's quest to save the last remaining snail of a species. Amazingly, 'Endling' is all these things.
Reva was born in Ukraine, moved as a child with her family to Canada, and was raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. In 2020, she published a linked story collection, 'Good Citizens Need Not Fear,' about the disparate residents of a decaying building block in the small Ukrainian town of Kirovka in the 1980s. Instead of looking back a few decades, much of 'Endling' animates the devastation of present-day Ukraine since the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.
At the novel's onset, the reader meets Yeva, a renegade biologist who is trying to save a snail named Lefty (hence 'Endling,' a term used to describe the last survivor of a dying species). Not surprisingly, Yeva prefers snails to the company of humans. She lives in a battered RV, which also doubles as her mobile lab. Reva writes: 'Snails! There'd been a time when she would tell anyone who'd listen how amazing these creatures were. How the many gastropod species have evolved to live anywhere on the planet, from deserts to deep ocean trenches. How they have gills to live in water, or have lungs to live on land — some, like the apple snail, possess one of each, to withstand both monsoons and droughts.'
Yeva meets Nastia and Sol, sisters who are working for the same 'romance tour' (a euphemism for a mail-order bridal business), and moonlights for them to fund her ongoing snail research. The young women are looking for their mother, a radical activist who used to fight 'against many evils, particularly the international bridal industry.' As part of this effort, Nastia hatches a plan to kidnap a band of bachelors, hoping that potential media coverage of the exploit will attract their mother's attention. Invoking the spirit of Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick,' Reva writes about Nastia's feelings for Yeva's RV: 'Every time she saw the thing — lumbering, white, speckled with rust — she felt a tinge of relief mixed with excitement. It seemed to grow larger every time she saw it, a great whale about to swallow a hundred men whole. It was the key to her plan.' This is one of the reader's first hints that this narrative is tipping toward epic proportions and has no intentions of staying constrained within traditional narrative conventions. Soon, Russia invades — and the novel we've been reading up to this point is interrupted.
In Part II, the reader is introduced to the first-person voice of author Maria Reva. She is struggling to write her first novel in her parents' attic in Canada, and her agent, Rufus Redpen (ha!), is touching base about the manuscript, which is well past overdue. 'My words drag along, on the verge of falling apart, but isn't this precarious place where true Art lives?' Reva writes. After she attempts to describe the novel, Redpen responds that the project sounds like merely 'a bunch of yurts,' or 'hobbled nubs of narrative, barely connected.'
Then, 'Endling' swerves into an interview between an 'Unfamous Author' and 'Yurt Makers.' 'What right do I have to write about the war from my armchair?' the author says. 'And to keep writing about the mail-order bride industry seems even worse. Dredge up that cliché? In these times? Anyway, am I even a real Ukrainian?' Throughout these meta forays, the author raises more and more questions. Though Reva doesn't answer all these questions, she tests the boundaries of storytelling with freshness and humor despite the bleak subject matter. A variety of voices, forms and ideas spring forth with a playful inventiveness: a correspondence between a magazine editor and the author, a completed grant application, more interviews, meeting minutes. In another author's hands, these departures might be experienced as digressions, draining suspense and power from the story, but Reva they alchemizes them into something between imagination and reality, an original way to investigate the artifice of the novel — its limitations but also its expansiveness. There may have been a few moments when this reader stumbled over the disparate narrative strategies, but ultimately it's easy to be won over by a novel that includes writing from a snail's point of view.
'Endling,' original as it is, did evoke other reading experiences: the survivalist adventure of Octavia Butler's classic 'The Parable of the Sower,' the sly satire of Percival Everett's 'Erasure,' the poetic inventions of Dana Spiotta's 'Stone Arabia' and 'Wayward.' Reva places her metaphorical arms around all of it — with the intention of using language to express the inexpressible: senseless violence, loneliness, extreme suffering and grief.
Near the beginning of 'Endling,' Reva writes about the bond between Yeva and a fellow conservationist: 'For comfort, for reassurance that, despite setbacks, their labs still offered the snails a higher chance of survival than the wild. They needed each other to bear witness, because the rest of the world didn't.' In the end, this may be the fulfilled purpose of Reva's wildly inventive novel: to bear witness.
S. Kirk Walsh is a book critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places, and the author of the novel 'The Elephant of Belfast.'
By Maria Reva
Doubleday. 338 pp. $28