ASH

A mother must find a new path forward after a life-altering crisis.

A debut novel by New Zealand poet Wallace follows a young mother, who lives under a mountain with her husband and two young children, as her life is cleaved into before and after. At the start of the novel, the narrator is struggling, among other things, with the untamed nature of early motherhood, a growing distance from her careless husband, and the unending politicking at the rural veterinary practice where she works. When the nearby mountain erupts and blankets their world with unending ash, the narrator realizes her problems are both smaller and larger than she’d imagined—because life will not stop, even after a natural disaster. The house must be cleaned, animals must be tended to, and children must be cared for. As the ash starts to become their new normal, she thinks: “My home is not my home. The floor is lava and I am wading in it.” Throughout the novel, the narrator’s simmering rage at the world (both before and after the ash) threatens to engulf everything. Broken up into four parts, this radically slim novel has an experimental structure that manages to be equal parts fascinating and frustrating, including poetry, numbered “Figure” boxes such as “Figure 14. (Checklist)”—and a story told entirely in the footnotes. Though they are meant to overwhelm, these poetic sections become somewhat tiresome and repetitive as the novel goes on. Just before the final section, “later,” the narrator thinks: “Everything changes. Everything stays the same.” But rendered with Wallace’s insightful, sharp, and tender prose, the novel manages to beautifully capture so much about humanity—including motherhood, fear, love, fury, misogyny, community, and what we owe to ourselves and others. It feels impossible not to draw parallels between the novel and the Covid-19 pandemic as the narrator learns to live and parent through terrifyingly unimaginable times.

A darkly funny and rightfully furious portrait of motherhood in the era of climate change.