This hilarious, moving book confirms that women are the superior sex
Tilt
Emma Pattee
Harper Collins, $32.99
Every once in a while, a book comes along that alters the way you perceive the written word – the prose punctures something deep inside your soul. Your response is both emotional and physical. You are reminded why literature is superior at mining the depths of the human condition.
While reading Emma Pattee's debut novel Tilt, a surprisingly hilarious and heart-wrenching feminist survivalist narrative about a heavily pregnant woman trying to locate her husband after a huge earthquake, I felt my entire body being pulled up by some invisible hand. Some passages literally left me feeling as though I was being elevated off my seat.
Such were the effects of Pattee's reflections on love, loss and unresolved grief.
Our heroine Annie is 37 weeks' pregnant and begrudgingly shopping for a crib at Ikea on a Monday morning when the earthquake hits. It's The Big One, long predicted to occur along the Pacific Northwest of the US in the next decade.
Annie is alone when the quake strikes, but manages to clamber out of the ruins of the megastore with the help of a benevolent Ikea employee. In a stampede of panicked survivors, the pair lose each other.
Without her phone, Annie is powerless, weak, vulnerable. She has no way to get in touch with her husband, a struggling actor, who she believes is working at a cafe on the other side of the city. For the rest of the book, we chart her voyage on foot through the streets of Portland as she reflects on her impending parenthood, her relationship with her child's father, Dom, and the recent loss of her mother.
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