“ Bad Nature '' turns a comic tale full of grievance and spirit: Revue

The online synopsis for “Bad Nature” is about as juicy as: a lawyer in New York, having received a diagnosis of terminal breast cancer at 40, decides to go to California, to confront his distant father, then shoot him. But it is not a thriller or a caper in the vein of Elmore Leonard. The beginnings of Ariel Courage are a fork that rushes into the electric socket of America. You cannot look away and, thanks to his bitter mind, I can't stop laughing.

Hester is an executioner without a friend, whose work includes companies to bypass the EPA. She describes herself as “thorny and exhibitor, selectively extroverted, largely without humor”. The kind of person who ments foreigners out of boredom and increases their shoulders through adventures with unattractive men. When his Whitman's quotation oncologist announces the bad news, Hester remembers the early death of his mother of cancer. She gives up chemotherapy, sends her letter of resignation by email and takes the road. She names her Beryl tumor.

Of course, she could embark on a plane. But that would deprive us of the wild picaresque of courage through a rural and ravaged America. Hester believes that she will say goodbye to all of this with drop-ins on a college ex in Pittsburgh, and another on an old high school friend in Chicago. The first, Caleb, is a starred chief who has become a punk. Hester sets a land record to overthrow his carefully built world. Things are not much better in the windy town.

Things are not going well anywhere. His car is stolen; It crushes a replacement rental. There is a parking-line fight. It is arrested by police officers, who are then called by an oil tanker canceled on the road.

Hester could have simply witnessed the country dug in the country: the passive protagonist encountered in so many novels. And sometimes, Hester feels like a stone jumping on a toxic lake on the continent's scale, with fast observations full of snark. “The sky was insulting, a nasty joke … The sun was like a drunk during a party, threatening and lively.”

But courage is also interested in the character as in its wide screen. Hester shares childhood memories of her father's terror and neglect, and his disavowal that results from his past: “I wanted to believe that I had no family at all, as if I was from the fully formed land.” She wants to take revenge without linger on her cause or trauma – a word Hester would surely hate. She prefers to consider herself as a short -term unstoppable force. Which is not unjustified. “I was an educated and experienced white woman. My life was well isolated from interference, police or otherwise. ”

Interference arrives via a young hitchhiking named John. He joined her for a large part of the trip, which made the detours photograph waste sites and abandoned ammunition factories as part of a vague project on the ecode. As a spiritual and politically committed politically, John is the polar opposite of Hester, pushing his convictions with the seriousness of a drunk student of Howard Zinn. He is annoyed by his superficial contractualism, but his own passions are not directed towards defined ends. John kills time until the arrival of the apocalypse.

This strange couple meets a refuge with an agricultural commune of New Mexico and the usual excess flat in Las Vegas. (“I thought that a woman was kneeling to pray, but she was just trying to get a better angle on her camera.”) The trip on the road ends, Ahem, Death Valley, with violence and another type of revenge that Hester had not planned. A touch of Elmore Leonard, after all.

Sometimes “bad nature” remembers “All to four” by Miranda July. A narrator of the coastal elite, the crisis of mid-life, flowing from the house and binding with a younger man. For July, the aging body resets the desires of its protagonist; Hester does not do to wantin this sense. Intimacy requires vulnerability. Hester also does not have much respect for her body, beyond her function as a tool that she can refine at the gymnasium.

The novel of courage is more akin to the “” American psycho “of Bret Easton Ellis. As with Patrick Bateman, the status of a percentage of Hester gives an ultimate agency and an exemption from the effects of its disastrous actions. She can go to break because she will never be. Where Ellis captured the 1980s through the satire so dark that he swallows very light, the courage does it for 2025. It is deeply impressive, sometimes uncomfortable.

There are minor faults. Bits in italics of the conversation radio conversation, which appear everywhere, are repetitive and easy. A teenage memory of a trip from New York State to Manhattan takes place too much. These are easily forgiven.

Many novels describe what life looks like. A rarer tension captures what it looks like warts at the moment and everything. The world of “bad nature” is attached to the grievance. Ignore the long -term consequences. Reject medical advice. Kiss the Bawness. Executes armed violence. The novel “Bad Nature”, meanwhile, is a marvel of comics.

Chapman is the author of the novels “The Audacity” and “Réfubles that I know”.