For My Kid: Off the Grid in Hides by Rod Moody-Corbett — James Butler-Gruett

Every true loss brings about an End Times. In David Wallace-Wells’s viral 2017 article (and later book of the same name), “The Uninhabitable Earth,” what we’ve lost is the planet, or at least the planet we know. What’s coming is new and eschatologically bleak—perpetual war, permanent economic collapse, poisonous oceans, and “death smog that suffocates millions.” Because of rapacious industry and the technology driving it, on ecological Judgment Day, we will finally pay our “moral and economic debt.” Wallace-Wells’s tone is self-consciously apocalyptic. Beneath section headings like “Doomsday” and “Heat Death,” he aims to counteract the establishment’s inaction, the “timid language” and “scientific reticence” that leave us complacent. “No matter how well-informed you are,” he writes, “you are surely not alarmed enough.”

In Hides, debut novelist Rod Moody-Corbett recognizes the similarity between ecological loss and the loss of a child. The novel’s unnamed narrator accompanies his father, his childhood friend Willis, and Willis’s son Isaac on a hunting trip to commemorate one year since the murder of Willis’s elder son, Travis. A former “cross country prodigy” and undergraduate at the university where the narrator teaches, Travis was murdered in a mass shooting on a train by an environmental extremist. Since Travis’s death, his brother Isaac has begun to display some “concerning behavior,” padding wraithlike around the house while listening to an audiobook of Wallace-Wells’s prophecies. Perhaps a trip to a luxurious hunting lodge called the Castle, operated by a mysterious woman named Judith Muir, can heal their grief, Willis thinks. Perhaps it can heal the narrator’s relationship with Willis and with his own father, strained after his mother’s death from cancer. Perhaps, while coping with their losses, they can return to “an era when we didn’t feel so umbilically fettered to our technology.” 

Like the narrator, Moody-Corbett earned his PhD at the University of Calgary and teaches as a sessional instructor there, so he knows its details. The book likewise foregrounds his love of Newfoundland locality, pointing out individual safety bollards on Queen St. when the narrator returns to his hometown of St. John’s, or listing the national origins of people who summer in Stephenville (“Americans, Germans, some French”). When the setting shifts to the Castle, “two hundred square kilometres of legitimate wilderness” in northern Newfoundland, it plays even more to his writerly strengths. The novel’s language relishes the sounds of particulars, the “anthuriums, bromeliads, some seriously poisonous-looking bush vines.” Moody professes admiration for Melville and Cormac McCarthy, and one can sense the similarity in how their language heats up most when naming, noticing an old road “of rutted macadam” or a “pitcher plant’s drifted slipper.” Even a father-son noogie gets rendered as “knuckles over my toque’s pert navy bobble.”

In a recent interview, Moody-Corbett admits that part of why he set Hides in the wilderness was “to keep myself from writing 600 sentences like ‘I checked my phone.’” Writing contemporary fiction in a way that reflects our reliance on tech but doesn’t plunge us back into it is a challenge facing all fiction writers at the moment. American novelist John Brandon recently admitted that setting his novel during the Civil War, even with all the necessary research, was “less intimidating than facing a now in which everyone is continually peering at a screen.” Writing realistic contemporary characters has come to mean writing characters who drown out their interiority whenever possible, through podcasts, texts, music, or social media. Even in Hides’s wilderness, the word phone appears twenty times in 220 pages. It’s a problem no one can fully duck.

This is what sells the trip to the narrator in the first place, the possibility of being “completely off-grid,” especially during an election year. Once the characters arrive at the Castle, they hand over their phones to be put in a “flat fireproof box.” The narrator feels, after days away from his phone, how it’s atrophied his memory, how now without it, “details fluttered just out of reach,” so that he can’t remember Travis’s birth year. They sense what we all sense: each day technology invents a new way to lose each other.

There’s only so much you can take. Critic David Schurman Wallace recently totted up the proliferation of ecoterrorism themes in literature and film, noting that if forecasts like Wallace-Wells’s are accurate, “one might expect more, and more serious, revolts.” What frightens Willis, as he reveals to the narrator, is that Isaac seems to be taking interest in these more serious revolts. Willis admits that one evening he found Isaac secretly reading a PDF of the manifesto written by his brother’s shooter. The shooter presents a “call to purge,” an explicitly violent solution to “all this climate stuff.” Seeming already to regret telling the narrator this, Willis says, “And this goes back to the Unabomber.” 

Even outside of Hides, a lot does seem to go back to the Unabomber. The ideas of Ted Kaczynski, in a bizarre contortion, have become a sort of meme ideology for the extremely online who wish they weren’t. Only last spring an unnamed student was arrested in Finland after posting a video detailing her plans to carry out a school shooting at the University of Vaasa. She left a copy of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto on her desk beside her diary, in which she quoted him and wrote about “the destruction of nature and the Earth.”  Natalie Rupnow chose a quote from Kaczynski to end her own manifesto, posted online hours after she killed two others and herself during study hall at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. Before shooting Brian Thompson, Luigi Mangione read and wrote about Ted Kaczynski on Goodreads. Ironically, the tech Kaczynski’s work targeted has prolonged its impact. 

Right now, for instance, you can easily find Kaczynski’s manifesto online. I read it on the UC Davis website—which is also where I read “The Uninhabitable Earth.” Its appeal is in gathering disparate losses (of environment, of community, of privacy, of freedom), finding the seams where they conjoin, and laying the blame pretty convincingly at the feet of advancing technology and the people advancing it. It’s as if they’ve enshittified the earth. “The ‘bad’ parts of technology cannot be separated from the good,” Kaczynski writes, and any response short of a revolution is a half-measure. “This revolution,” he adds, as if under his breath, “may or may not make use of violence.”

Well then if it’s Kaczynski’s ideas that inspire Travis’s shooting and have begun to intrigue Isaac, who in Hides is to oppose them? 

Certainly the narrator can’t. Bereft of opinions and critiques, possessing not even a name much less a purpose, he’s in no position to provide an alternative response to loss. By sticking readers with a self-described “high-functioning lush” for a protagonist, Moody-Corbett effectively satirizes the same establishment reticence both Wallace-Wells and Kaczynski rage against. By giving the narrator molars “crooked and sore and brown as milked tea,” by placing him in a “cramped basement apartment” spending his days riding a stationary bike, the novel makes a pun: such a response as his is toothless, going nowhere. A true Beckett scholar, he sits around waiting. His response to Travis’s death is not to comfort his friend but to symbolically “spurn all subterranean transit.” When Willis confronts the narrator about it and gives him a bloody nose, the narrator takes it. Fittingly, he apologizes to Willis for getting punched. Spending the novel in his perspective feels like being caught in a dream where you tell your legs to run but your body won’t budge.

Willis opposes his son’s extremity, but his responses are hollow and cartoonish. “‘I fucking love capitalism,’” Willis says. He tells Isaac to look on the brightside and calls him “Greta,” like Thunberg. (In the wake of jokes like this, or other Willis lines like “Sorry, Darwin,” the reader’s left to imagine the plaintive chirp of crickets.) A former weatherman, Willis has taken his meteorological expertise to a cushier job as a “site manager for a Danish energy investor.” It’s not even that he disputes the facts of Isaac’s environmentalism but rather that he tells him to make the most of it. If they’re stuck with a dying earth, he says, “why not make a buck”? This is the kind of thinking, after all, that put him in a position to be able to pay for the whole trip.

At the Castle, where Wi-Fi is “absolutely prohibited except for emergencies,” Judith plays to the impulse to totally reject the technosphere. She concocted the idea for the Castle to cope with both “the interminable process of leaving my second husband” and the 2010 BP oil spill, both of which she blames on men, narrowing Kaczynski’s misanthropy down to misandry. “I hate men, I really hate men, all men, all the men, present company included,’” she says to the collected male campers, who sort of nod politely back. “All spills, all wars” are “man-made,” says Judith—making them, in the most baldly literal sense, anthropogenic. 

Yet what begins as a way to escape manmade evils quickly trips across contradictions. At once the Castle claims to be both a place to escape masculine destructiveness, a “refuge from all those patriarchal manacles,” and also a place “to harness the male ego” and pit men’s destructive tendencies “against nature.” The men must both cast off their masculinity and indulge in it. Though she claims to protect animals—proudly declaring that she loves gannets “more than most people”—and to be disgusted by men’s inherent violence, Judith spends most of the novel skinning and killing animals. She shows Isaac how to snap a squirrel’s neck, saying it’s like “‘opening a bottle of champagne.’” “‘Okay,’” Isaac agrees. “‘That was satisfying.’” The Castle’s radical separation in fact creates a greater opportunity for evil. “‘Here,’” she tells the campers, “‘if you wish, violence is limitless.’”

Yet the separation the Castle promises is itself spurious. Even the tech the campers are so glad to leave behind, full of data harvesting and brain fog, lurks on the Castle grounds, just below the surface. When the narrator asks for Judith’s theory behind taking people’s phones, she shrugs: “‘Do you want to use your phone?’” In a bizarre twist, some of the pine martens on the grounds, she reveals to the narrator, are bionic, stuffed with “smart cameras, sophisticated recording devices.” The professed environmentalism of the Castle is a clockwork orange, artificed beneath its surface, as sinister as what it claims to oppose.

The time at the Castle recoups none of their losses. As with Kaczynski’s radicalism, it only compounds loss. Even the narrator senses this, that “[l]osing a son, and rebutting that loss with this insipid hunting trip” is “categorically wrongheaded.” He returns home to discover that he forgot to cancel class, and after a flurry of missed and increasingly frantic emails, he’s been let go. Because of this, he moves back in with his father in St. John’s. All is lost—even more than originally was. Yet somehow, in Moody-Corbett’s crucial and impressive tonal navigation, these events read as a happy ending. “In a sense,” the narrator thinks, “this was good news.” 

The whole question of how to rebut or recoup loss, after all, is “categorically wrongheaded.” In his book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, philosopher Martin Hägglund advocates for gratitude in the face of loss. Though unbelievably painful, grief can’t be fixed. In fact, the existence of such loss is what makes us value someone or something when it’s still here. “To be invulnerable to grief,” writes Hägglund, “is to be deprived of the capacity to care.” It’s a more acute insight than making lemonade from lemons or finding silver linings. Profound loss only exists because of profound care. The searing apocalypse of grief—for the vanishing natural world, for a child, for victims of violence, for lost relationships—is the only ultimate proof of love in the first place. 

Appropriately, it’s Travis himself who demonstrates this concept. In the book’s only scene involving him, the narrator remembers watching Travis coming in third in a 5000 m race he’d trained for, a heartbreaking defeat for a virtuosic athlete. Even the narrator can sense “his loss, the inevitability of it, at the sound of the bell.” But when he goes to console Travis, the teenager isn’t as devastated as he suspects. “‘Well, for a second there,’ he said, and this very quietly, ‘I was almost relieved.’”

***

James Butler-Gruett writes fiction, poetry, and book reviews. They have appeared in the Millions, Poetry London, HAD, DIAGRAM, the Cardiff Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Arizona MFA program, he is an Associate Professor at York University in York, NE. Find him on Twitter here and links to his writing here.