Latest news with #BadNature
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
In brief: Bad Nature; Bad Friend; The Flitting
Ariel CourageChatto & Windus, £16.99, pp304 Diagnosed with terminal cancer on her 40th birthday, Manhattan lawyer Hester has just one item on her bucket list: drive to California and kill her estranged father, then herself. She gets only as far as Pennsylvania before picking up hitchhiker John, a young eco-activist whose own mission complicates Hester's as they travel from five-star hotels to cult-like communes and Vegas casinos. She's clever, caustic company; cynical as well, but not, it turns out, irredeemably so. Funny and moving, this is a road-trip novel for the here and now, intent on mapping a way forward even when the end might seem to be nigh. Tiffany Watt SmithFaber, £18.99, pp336 Like so many other aspects of womanhood, female friendship has long been patrolled and controlled, enshrouded in myths of perfection. With an eye trained irresistibly on her own friend-centred longings and failures, cultural historian Watt Smith disentangles our thinking about this most vital of relationships, roaming across the past 100 years and more to consider 1900s boarding school pashes and 1950s mum cliques, 'work wives' (office gossips too) and AI chatbots. Questioning the roles played by identity, power and trust, she dispels nostalgic fantasies and idealised expectations to arrive at a more realistic and sustaining sense of friendship's meaning. A generous, timely book. Ben MastersGranta, £10.99, pp384 (paperback) The bar is set high for hybrids of grief memoir and nature writing, but Masters brings a disarming reluctance to his initial outings as a lepidopterist, undertaken on behalf of his father, housebound with inoperable cancer, during the pandemic summer of 2020. In boyhood, Masters was profoundly indifferent to gifts of binoculars and books about the natural world. Now a new dad himself, he heads off into the fields and woodlands of his native Northamptonshire, ever hungrier for flutter-by sightings of fritillaries, admirals and hairstreaks. Meditations on masculinity, metamorphosis and endangerment deepen a poignant tribute to the father-son bond. To order Bad Nature, Bad Friend or The Flitting go to Delivery charges may apply
New York Times
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
After a Terminal Cancer Diagnosis, a Lawyer Seeks Revenge
For many people, being diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of 40 might prompt an instant reassessment of priorities. For Hester, the narrator of Ariel Courage's debut novel, 'Bad Nature,' this means immediately quitting her job in Manhattan to drive across the country and murder her father. It's the sole item on her bucket list, and it's also unfinished business: Her first attempt, at 13, when she shot him with a BB gun to stop him from abusing her mother, coincided with his permanent exit from their household. Since then, their relationship has consisted of Hester checking the internet now and then 'to confirm he was alive and therefore still killable.' Think of 'Bad Nature' as the anti 'Eat, Pray, Love.' Personal-crisis travel narratives by white women, both memoirs and fiction, tend to follow certain conventions: protagonists embarking on journeys of earnest, emotional introspection in response to devastating news. These women tend not to be jerks. Hester — a lawyer who spends her days negotiating settlements for her conglomerate employer's E.P.A. violations — runs right over these expectations with her Jaguar E-Type, then throws the car in reverse to do it again. Putting an unlikable heroine in the (literal) driver's seat of a debut is an admirable feat, and Courage pulls it off through her character's ruthless self-awareness, acerbic humor and one-liners so hilarious it's tempting to read them aloud. 'I wondered what my tumor was up to,' she thinks. 'My breast was such an inhospitable place, meager and thin. I pictured my tumor like a goat on a cliff's face, hunting for roughage to gnaw on. You almost had to root for it, the underdog. I called it Beryl.' Over the course of her journey — which quickly strays from the linear path she's planned — Hester is not immune to personal growth, but 'Bad Nature' is refreshingly more interested in social critique — particularly of American individualism and its harm to the collective good. Before she's even left New York she's already picked up a hitchhiker named John, a radical environmentalist (and sometimes eco-terrorist) whose current mission involves breaking into government 'cleanup' sites and documenting their chemical damage via artistic photographs. Guiding Hester to several of these sites along her westward route, John becomes an unlikely but convincing foil to her amoral, fur-wearing consumerism: He's 'a species of ethical genius' who shuns materialism, shows interpersonal care and has an encyclopedic knowledge about the environmental impact of every human action, from drinking coffee to shooting someone. John challenges Hester's long-held yet barely examined values by forcing her to confront the tangible fallout of the same kind of work that made her wealthy — and its link to terminal illnesses like her own. At times we have to root for Hester, too: a 'prickly and standoffish' (her words) corporate powerhouse who hasn't had a friend since high school and who would rather catch chlamydia than feelings. 'I had a policy of jettisoning any man I dated around week six,' she says early on, and sleeping with 'a lot of borderline-grotesque strangers in between.' But through Hester's flashbacks to her earlier life, Courage skillfully illuminates the source of her 'bad nature': a traumatic upbringing mired in poverty and her father's physical abuse. It becomes clear that her commitment to such a patriarchal model of success — shunning emotional development and personal connection in favor of amassing wealth in morally deplorable ways — is a means of protecting herself from her own childhood suffering. 'I thought everyone eventually grew up to want the kind of money that would enable them to escape their past,' she thinks. In other words, to avoid being a victim, Hester uses the oldest trick in the book: Become a villain instead. It works until it doesn't, when only John is able to get close enough to Hester to diagnose the one secret she tries to guard even from herself: She's lonely. It's a particularly painful truth to handle while readying to die. Among her coping strategies is calling her oncologist from pay phones along her journey; to heckle him, or accuse him of malpractice, or deliver an epiphany regarding lead-coated creek beds on Quapaw land in Oklahoma. 'Do you think I'd be like this if the world didn't make it so easy?' she desperately, almost manically asks the doctor. 'Was I always going to be like this?' He responds by imploring her to call 911. It is easy, living in America, to be poisoned — physically and ethically. To suffer abuse, and then to perpetuate the cycle of harm. To chase wealth with little regard for the cost. But 'Bad Nature' shows we're getting selfishness all wrong. As uproariously funny as a takedown of our deadly society can be, the novel is also an urgent call to exchange possession for belonging. Hester is proof that, eventually, capitalism destroys even those it seems to benefit most.
Los Angeles Times
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
On the road, full of grievance and bitter wit: A (fictional) woman for our era
The one-line synopsis for 'Bad Nature' is about as juicy as it gets: A successful New York lawyer, having received a terminal breast-cancer diagnosis at age 40, decides to drive to California, confront her estranged father and then shoot him. But this isn't a thriller or a caper in the vein of, say, Elmore Leonard. Ariel Courage's debut is a fork jabbed into the electric socket of America. You can't look away and, thanks to its bitter wit, can't stop laughing. Hester is a friendless, Type-A workaholic whose work includes helping corporations sidestep the EPA. She describes herself as 'prickly and standoffish, selectively extroverted, largely humorless.' The kind of person who lies to strangers out of boredom and shrugs her way through flings with unattractive men. When her Whitman-quoting oncologist breaks the bad news, Hester remembers her mother's early death from cancer. She forgoes chemotherapy, emails her resignation letter and hits the road. She names her tumor Beryl. Sure, she could board an airplane. But that would deprive us of Courage's wild picaresque through a rural and ravaged America. Hester figures she'll say goodbye to all that with drop-ins on a college ex in Pittsburgh, and another on an old high school friend in Chicago. The former, Caleb, is a punk turned star chef. Hester sets a land-speed record for toppling his carefully constructed world. Things don't go much better in the Windy City. Things don't go well anywhere. Her car is stolen; she crashes a replacement rental. There's a parking-lot fistfight. She's pulled over by police officers, who are then called away by an overturned oil tanker down the road. Hester could have been simply a witness to the hollowed-out interior of the country: the passive protagonist encountered in so many first novels. And at times, Hester does feel like a stone skipping across a continent-wide toxic lake, with quick observations full of snark. 'The sky was insultingly blue, a mean joke … The sun was like a drunk at a party, menacing and vivacious.' But Courage is as interested in character as she is in her widescreen setting. Hester shares childhood memories of her father's terror and neglect, and her resulting disavowal of her past: 'I wanted to believe I had no family at all, like I'd sprung from the earth fully formed.' She wants revenge without dwelling on its cause or her trauma — a word Hester would surely detest. She'd rather think of herself as a short-term unstoppable force. Which is not unjustified. 'I was an educated and experienced white woman. My life was well insulated from interference, police or otherwise.' Interference does arrive via a young hitchhiker named John. He joins her for much of the journey, causing detours to photograph waste sites and abandoned munitions factories as part of a vague project on ecocide. As a spiritually inclined, politically committed itinerant, John is Hester's polar opposite, poking at her beliefs with the earnestness of a college student drunk on Howard Zinn. He's annoyed by her shallow contrarianism, but his own passions aren't directed toward defined ends. John's just killing time until the apocalypse arrives. This odd couple encounters refuge with a New Mexico farming commune and the usual flat excess in Las Vegas. ('I thought a woman was kneeling to pray, but she was just trying to get a better angle on her camera.') The road trip ends in, ahem, Death Valley, with violence and a different kind of revenge than Hester had planned. A touch of Elmore Leonard, after all. At times, 'Bad Nature' recalls Miranda July's 'All Fours.' A coastal elite narrator, mid-midlife crisis, running from home and bonding with a younger man. For July, the aging body resets her protagonist's desires; Hester doesn't want, in this sense. Intimacy requires vulnerability. Nor does Hester have much regard for her body, beyond its function as a tool she can hone at the gym. Courage's novel is more akin to Bret Easton Ellis' 'American Psycho.' As with Patrick Bateman, Hester's one-percenter status confers ultimate agency and exemption from the effects of her disastrous actions. She can go for broke because she never will be. Where Ellis captured the 1980s through satire so dark it swallows all light, Courage does so for 2025. It's deeply impressive, at times uncomfortable. There are minor flaws. Italicized bits of conservative talk radio, which appear throughout, are repetitive and facile. An adolescent memory of a trip from upstate New York to Manhattan runs overlong. These are easily forgiven. Many novels portray what life feels like. A rarer strain captures what it looks like, at this moment, warts and all. The world of 'Bad Nature' fixates on grievance. Ignores long-term consequence. Rejects medical advice. Embraces bawdiness. Extols gun violence. The novel 'Bad Nature,' meanwhile, is a sun-blasted comic wonder. Chapman is the author of the novels 'The Audacity,' and 'Riots I Have Known.'
