BAD NATURE

This tightly wound novel follows a terminally ill woman on a quest to take vengeance against her long-absent father.

Hester, a corporate attorney in Manhattan, prides herself on her lack of emotional needs and connections, although she does like sex with strangers if they’re creepy enough. On the verge of turning 40, she discovers she has aggressive breast cancer and will die in six months unless she gets treatment. Instead, she quits her job and begins a cross-country drive to the California home of her father, an artist whom she last saw when she was 18, shortly after her mother’s death. Cancer aside, Hester is an emotionally damaged character, almost cringeworthy in her alienation from normal human feelings. Drawn with knife-sharp prose, she is a woman choosing to close herself off. Her travel plan is simple: “Drive west, find Dad, kill Dad, then self.” She claims that she’s wanted to kill her father since her parents’ divorce when she was 13. There’s a history of violence involved that Hester never allows to come fully into focus. Of course, her plans go awry in small and large ways. When her car is stolen, she can afford a rental; when visiting people from her past proves unnerving, she can escape. But what ultimately succeeds in throwing Hester’s equilibrium off balance is the bond she forms with a hitchhiker. John is an activist whose cause is “the dying world,” and Hester begins taking detours so he can photograph Superfund sites while fending off brushes with the law. Still in his early 20s, John is an idealistic extremist but also a character of profound integrity who cares deeply about both issues and people. Without being sexual, Hester and John’s relationship changes Hester—and the novel—for the better, weakening her self-protective solipsism while broadening her outlook to consider the world beyond her problems.

What starts as a bitter internal dialogue becomes a rich overlap of the personal and the political.