Now that parenthood is a literary subgenre all its own, it was surely only a matter of time before it joined forces with dystopia, fiction’s other current obsession. In her spare, stylish debut novel, The End We Start From (Grove), Megan Hunter depicts new motherhood against a climate-change cataclysm in which city-swallowing floods tip England into chaos. “We have planned a water birth,” the narrator notes wryly, “with whale music, and hypnotism, and maybe an orgasm.” Her son arrives just as the London neighborhood where she lives with her boyfriend is submerged, and no sooner have they selected a name—“We nearly called him Noah, but we heard it rustling between the curtains. A popular choice”—than they’re evicted from the hospital. They flee, first to her in-laws in the countryside, then to a refugee camp, their journey sketched in aphoristic sentences scattered across a mostly white page, an improvised path toward an uncertain future.
Hunter’s mordant, undeceived narrator alludes to checkpoints, stampedes, and shortages—“We are told not to panic, the most panic-inducing instruction known to man”—but the peril is largely impressionistic, obscured by the ordinary life miraculously unfolding in front of her eyes: first smile, first tooth, first step. There are delightfully granular observations of babies, as her son first tries to roll over and his efforts look “like someone trying to turn over a car with their bare hands.” But the real strength of this wonderfully earthy novel is in its sharpened lens on motherhood’s apocalyptic-feeling joys and terrors, and how they can form an all-encompassing world. “A secret,” admits the narrator: “I thought having a baby would stop the fear.”
Those fears are infinitely multiplied for Cedar Hawk Songmaker, the flinty 26-year-old mother-to-be in National Book Award–winner Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (Harper). In Erdrich’s hallucinatory latest novel, which takes the form of Cedar’s letter to her unborn child, a biological catastrophe has occurred, manifesting in the appearance of increasingly ominous creatures—a dragonfly with a 6-foot wingspan; a beakless lizard-bird. Scientists speculate that evolution may be running backward. Soon, borders are closed, legislation unseals confidential medical records, and pregnant women are rounded up—for ominous reasons Cedar, and we, will eventually learn. Cedar, the adopted Ojibwe daughter of earnest white Minnesota liberals, goes into hiding. The Handmaid’s Tale–like setup provides a fresh, eerie canvas for Erdrich’s enduring themes: the “collage of dreams and DNA” we inherit and pass on to our children, the normalization of appalling cruelty, and a certain human irreducibility that persists in spite of it all.
