Book Notes: Tilt by Emma Pattee

People become very left-wing because they cannot enjoy the regular stuff of life. Getting up, brushing teeth, making the bed. The daily routine fills them with horror. Is that all there is? There should be more to life. There should be more space, more excitement, more money and more fame to accommodate their ever-expanding egos. They appoint themselves saviors because they can’t tolerate life without some hugely important mission. They fight imaginary oppressions because they can’t explain to themselves why they are so miserable and invent structural inequities to justify their unhappiness.

In Emma Pattee’s novel Tilt, we meet Annie, a 35-year-old woman in the last week of her first pregnancy. Annie lives in Portland, a city which – and this I didn’t know – is considered to be at risk of experiencing a massive earthquake. At the start of the novel, that earthquake comes, and Annie has to trudge across the devastated ruin of the city on foot, in hopes of reuniting with her husband. The scenes of post-quake destruction are harrowing but Annie’s inner life is so bleak that even the worst damage wrought by nature is less scary than the recesses of her mind. Annie and her husband Dom are miserable because they never became rich and famous. They have a marriage, a home, a baby on the way, jobs, safety and comfort but they despise all of that because their youthful dreams of making it big in Hollywood or on Broadway didn’t come true.

As she searches for her husband amidst the wreckage of Portland, Annie doesn’t become a different person. She doesn’t stop being her usual entitled, pouty, lefty self. Tilt would be a crappy novel if it depicted a dramatic, unrealistic transformation. No disaster can bring out of a person things that aren’t already there. But Annie does learn something about the value of life, family, and marriage.

It’s a good novel, not a work of art like Emma Cline’s stuff, but still quite good. It’s not at all politically heavy. There are very few actual political statements, although it is very clear that the characters are far-left.  But the mentality that causes leftism is on full view.

Please don’t tell me that the author is an airhead climate prattler. I know that. One’s capacity to write good books is very unconnected to what kind of person one is. And this is a good novel that makes some important points.