By Jessie Tu
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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.
Journalist and author Emma Pattee.
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.
Annie narrates the novel as if talking to her unborn child, Bean, and the tone of her voice is emotionally charged, frank and comfortably self-assured. This is a woman who is not afraid to tell it like it is.
Her love story with Dom (related in flashbacks) is candidly unsentimental. Little moments are extracted and beautifully unravelled. They tied the knot several years ago for health insurance reasons, marrying at a civil ceremony in their jeans in a park next to men practising tai chi.
Tilt’s protagonist is at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits.Credit: Louise Kennerley
Months out from the due date, the couple are on the precipice of the greatest change they will undergo, they are told — and Pattee explores the shifting dynamics of their relationship with tenderness and sensitivity. Her prose is clean, uncluttered. We discover that both Annie and Dom are dreamers. Annie was once a budding playwright. Dom is still desperately auditioning for roles as an actor.
The most moving parts of the novel explore the pursuit (and failure to achieve) the Great American Dream. The pair lean on each other as their ambitions are thwarted by the realities of growing up, of adulthood — money troubles, ageing parents and friends moving away.
The mourning is real. On the verge of parenthood, Annie is finally realising the agony of chaining yourself to a dream which morphs into a burden.
Beneath the shifting chaos and hardship, a sense of wonder and pleasure emerges. Our heroine radiates a sort of unbridled grit. Her energy and thirst for life ripples underneath the surface. She’s aware of the intimate catastrophe of a marriage that might not necessarily have a future. But still, she keeps walking. She needs to keep her baby alive. She needs to find Dom.
Pattee examines the beastly animal forms that emerge when natural disaster strikes and survival mode kicks in. Violent looters destroy businesses and stores. Cruel teenagers roam the streets wreaking further havoc. Danger looms everywhere. All the while, Annie keeps on walking.
Memories of her mother sustain her. As she prepares for the role of motherhood, she gathers evidence of maternal love from her own mother, using it to fuel her journey into the next phase of her life.
Reflections on her mother are some of the most beautiful passages of writing I have ever read. This book will send your heart retching with pain. It will also confirm that women are the superior sex.