But symbolic bears are way less hairy than real ones, and Phillips has made this one a compelling, visceral beast: massive and smelly, with huge teeth and jaws, who, when he’s not sniffing around the girls’ home, spends his vacation sampling local deer and livestock.
Sure, he might walk Elena to and from the country club where she works as a waitress, and, yes, the bear seems to enjoy heart-to-hearts with her in the woods, but Phillips smartly keeps us guessing whether the fantastical creature ultimately sees Elena as friend or feast.
Phillips is working in high fairy-tale register here. “Like Cinderella picking lentils from the ashes,” she writes, “Sam was a nobody doing work that meant nothing, but no prince was ever going to pluck her out of this … Elena was the only one who was going to save her from this place. They were going to have to save each other.”
The suspense rises in the last third, when, eschewing the Disneyfication of fairy tales, and cleverly hewing to the darker weirdness of an actual Grimm tale, “Snow White and Red Rose,” Phillips rolls out one last, haunting symbol for the bear to embody — the mysterious bonds and dangerous fissures of sisterhood.
This gives the novel its slow-burning power, as Sam’s vision of their seemingly perfect childhood (“sisters crouched on the forest floor of their property, studying mushrooms, telling each other stories”) crashes against the divergent desires of adult life.
“Bear” ends with a bang, and with the intriguing notion that sisterhood (or sisters?) may be as unknowable and unpredictable as anything else in nature. As Sam observes of Elena late in the novel, “Something else had pushed her to this point. A thing stranger, wilder. Bestial.”
BEAR | By Julia Phillips | Hogarth | 304 pp. | $28
