When is the end of the world not the end of the world? That question sits at the center of Deb Olin Unferth’s third novel, Earth 7, which unfolds in a future where humanity has, in many ways, destroyed itself yet still manages to muddle on. Revolving around a woman named Dylan—whom we encounter first as a five-year-old, taken by her mother to live in a community of undersea pods—the book presents apocalypse as a process, not so much catastrophic as incidental.
“In those years,” Unferth begins, “the sky was full of sulfur and diamonds, shot into the air by cannons to scatter the sunlight. The population of Earth had been falling for decades, and the drop did not have a sole cause.” The implication is that, despite everything, a harsh and difficult beauty lingers. Dylan represents a case in point: Removed from humanity by a parent who is “sick of people,” she wants nothing more than to return to the surface, to reconnect with what’s been left behind.
“You cannot hide flaws that are not flaws but are mere signs that you are part of this world,” Unferth insists, “a place where terrible and wonderful beauties are coming to pieces at every moment and others are constructing themselves out of the remains.… We exist in and as part of that destruction, that rebirth.” The perspective recalls Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle or Carolyn See’s Golden Days. In Earth 7, as in those novels, Armageddon is less an end point than a punctuation, an ellipsis of a kind. On the other side of it, existence continues (how could it not?) with all its hopes and challenges, its imperatives and demands. “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on,” Samuel Beckett wrote in 1953, in The Unnamable. Unferth is operating in a related register, where comfort and discomfort are inevitably intertwined.
Such a dichotomy has long been part of the author’s playbook, going back to her 2007 debut, Minor Robberies. In the nearly two decades since, she has gleefully confounded expectations—or, even more, discarded them entirely. Her 2011 memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, recounts her decision, as a college freshman, to drop out of school and join the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; it was short-listed for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Wait Till You See Me Dance, her 2017 collection of short fiction, tracks a quieter set of disruptions and disorders to equally devastating effect. The story “Stay Where You Are” is an example, reframing Unferth’s Nicaraguan experience (or a through-the-looking-glass version of it) around a couple detained in Latin America. “Humans,” Unferth observes there, “go through all sorts of things, and it doesn’t always settle their hearts.”
Dylan’s heart, too, remains unsettled. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it’s adrift. If not quite abandoned by her mother, she moves through childhood like an afterthought. Unferth encapsulates her early existence in a series of one-word paragraphs:
Tantrums.
Sleep.
Staring.
Water.
The minimalism is a big part of the point.
Dylan’s removal from the world, after all, is nothing if not a winnowing. And yet, it cannot obliterate her presence there. “But wasn’t she on Earth?” her mother, Rosemary, reflects from the isolation of her underwater lair. The conundrum is essential, not least because it remains necessarily unresolved. To highlight the tension, Unferth uses subtle point-of-view shifts, more than once beginning a section—Earth 7 is divided into five titled parts—through the eyes of one character before doubling back to retell, or fill in gaps, by turning to someone else. Often, this involves a dyad: first, Dylan and her mother; later, after Dylan returns to the surface, her relationship with a woman named Melanie, who will become her wife. Initially, Melanie appears to be a service bot, but that impression changes once Unferth’s narration, constructed in an intimate third person, moves from Melanie to Dylan, who notices the simplest and smallest of imperfections: a misshapen toe.
“No designer would construct a toe that way,” she recognizes. “And this was not a manufacturing flaw. This was sheer organic imperfection. That toe, the smallest one, the toe of nicknames and songs, the littlest ‘piggie,’ the hero of the story of a wanderer who embarks on a quest, strays too far for its youth, and comes roaring down the road, crying out a syllable passed through generations, ‘Wee, wee, wee,’ seeking home, longing for it, racing toward it—that toe on this robot was real. And by real she meant human, because that is what this robot was.”
There it is, the notion of flaw again. And also, that of narrative. This is what defines our humanity. There is no life without either one. In the story of the little piggy, roaring “wee, wee, wee” as it seeks to find a passage home, Unferth illuminates if not a pathway to redemption then one in which meaning may be uncovered. That this meaning is temporary, insufficient, is what makes it so profound. Indeed, such transience hints at a more expansive understanding, if we can bear to face it. That’s the reason for the narrative’s ongoing shifts and movements from character to character. That’s the reason Dylan returns to the surface, where she researches tardigrades—microscopic animals also known as water bears. These creatures become the mechanism for an immortality project of sorts, involving the preservation not of individuals but rather of life itself. It is in this effort, at once individual and collective in its focus, that the world may be reborn.
“Who cares?” Unferth writes near the end of Earth 7. “They all die anyway.” She’s right, of course. We all die. Our bodies and memories disappear. At the same time, she adds, “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.… It all matters.” Everything connects. Here, we see the capaciousness of this vivid and unexpected novel, a breadth that takes your breath away. “What a miracle,” Unferth urges.
Yes. A miracle, this life.•
