Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips (Knopf)

When two little girls disappear after playing on a deserted stretch of beach one summer’s day, the small city of Zavoyko on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula is besieged with tinges of fear. Children are confined to their homes, young women are flooded with memories of an older girl who vanished years before and was never seen again. A woman who claims she saw the two children entering a black car driven by a man on the afternoon of their disappearance has no details that could help the local police in the search for the girls and her story is disregarded. Eleven months later the mother of the two missing children meets the mother of the lost teenager and is given a clue that might allow her to know what became of all three girls.

A novel with the basic plot of a conventional mystery becomes far more than that. Zavoyko is a divided community, with white residents, “real Russians,” on one side and indigenous people, grouped together as “natives,” on the other. And yet the city is small enough that lives within it intertwine and intermingle when they are brought together by tragedies. When Marina, the mother of the little girls, finally meets Alla, the mother of the teenager, their racial differences are transcended by their shared pain.

In chapters that function almost as linked short stories, Julia Phillips gives voice to eleven different women, white and native, who live in Zavoyko. All of them are displaced.

The indigenous women have lost their identities, with five separate tribes stripped of their cultures by the former Soviet Union and homogenized as a monolithic group. Living far from the communities that had nurtured them, they’ve come to Zavoyko for an education and for jobs. When the little girls go missing, they watch the search that takes place, angered that the vanished teenager was ignored and quickly forgotten. The little girls are Russian, the teenager was native, and the different reactions to the two disappearances point out the supremacy of one group over the other. This is “a deep common knowledge, an ache that was native.”

The Russian women came to Zavoya when the Kamchatka Peninsula was an integral part of the Soviet Union’s military system, “so tightly defended that even other Russians needed government permission to enter.” Military funding made this outpost a comfortable place to live but when the Soviet rule disintegrated, “Kamchatka went down with it.” Now they live in a region surrounded on three sides by water, linked to the mainland only by roads made from dirt and ice, a spot where 32 degrees is considered to be warm.

The division is sharply revealed when Alla, one of the Even tribe, confronts the Russian, Marina about the police search for the two little girls while her daughter was given scant attention. “You must have paid them, I think…They didn’t listen to me.” Yet when Marina is given a shred of information that may conclude her search, it’s given to her by a man who is Even.

There are no easy answers to the questions that pervade Disappearing Earth. There is no conclusively happy ending. But Phillips, in her debut novel, has depicted a haunting and compelling narrative of bleakness, beauty, and the powerful strength of telling a story.~Janet Brown