In England, where I live, temperatures soared past 100 degrees last week, a record. Fires swept across the country, roads and train tracks buckled in the heat, and even climate scientists were stunned. Perhaps unsurprisingly, so much contemporary fiction attempts to address climate change, whether it is presented as a problem that needs to be solved or as a problem we fail to solve, dooming us to a post-apocalyptic (“cli-fi”) future. In the last two years alone, we’ve had Ali Smith’s “Summer,” Jenny Offill’s “Weather,” Jessie Greengrass’s “The High House,” and Alexandra Kleeman’s “Something New Under the Sun,” among others, emphasize the urgency of the situation.
Brett Ashley Kaplan’s “Rare Stuff” fits into this literary conversation about our ecological crisis, but simply calling the novel eco-fiction would not do it justice. This novel has a bit of everything, including, but not limited to, a plea for the planet: a mystery that takes readers, along with its protagonists, from Chicago to New York, from Boston to Quebec City, to the world in Ocean bottom; Yiddish-speaking whales (also at least one shark); evil slapstick villains and wild, furry escapades; an ode to interracial love; and connecting them together, a message that we can all do better.
The novel opens with the main character, Sid, a young Jewish photographer in an on-and-off relationship with a mestizo Jewish man from Guadeloupe, who loses his father. To launch us into the adventure that the novel becomes, Kaplan asks Sid to uncover a suitcase full of clues left behind by his late father: a single red high-heeled shoe, a pair of blue kid gloves, a photograph of a man in a felt hat. , a small metal sculpture of a reclining woman, a glass paperweight, a wax paper bag, and other items.
But where will these clues lead? Will they help Sid solve the mystery of his mother’s disappearance decades before? Understand his father? Herself? Climate change?
Always keeping us on our toes, the first-person narration moves, allowing us to hear not only Sid’s voice, but also that of her boyfriend, André, an academic; his father, Aaron (we are aware of the manuscript of his unfinished book in which the Yiddish-speaking whales reside); and his mother, Dorothy (also through her writings). There are also interviews, poems, book reviews, and letters cleverly woven into this colorful tapestry. However, at no point is the novel confusing; on the contrary, questions asked in one section can be answered in another, and the narrative pace is fast.
The characters in “Rare Stuff” are not deeply developed, but they each have their own rich history and collectively add to an image of interconnectedness. We see glimpses of the aristocratic life of Austrian Jews before the war, as well as Crypto-Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition and resettled in the Caribbean. We know couples who, like Sid and André, are interracial; are the subject of Sid’s photography project. We read about Jewish whalers in 19th-century New England and about Jack Johnson, a black heavyweight champion who, in a novel within the novel, is given a happier ending than the one that was allowed to the historical figure. We read about dark times and dark places: Eagle’s Nest (Hitler’s refuge), the looting of Jewish art in the Holocaust, the murder of Eric Garner (albeit set in another time and place).
Implicitly, we are asked to think about the genocide of Jews along with the extinction of species, and what the loss of these species might mean.
We even got to meet some whales who, we are told, have been speaking Yiddish ever since they decided to learn a human language in the early 20th century, when it was a transnational language spoken by millions and therefore seemed like a good fit. Who could have imagined that Yiddish speakers, and Yiddish itself, would be in short supply by the end of the century? Implicitly, we are asked to think about the genocide of Jews along with the extinction of species, and what the loss of these species might mean.
However, these serious points are often wrapped in humor. “We sent messages saying things like ‘save the humans’ and ‘save the planet,’” one whale explains, “but then something got lost in translation and we heard reports from the surface of bumper stickers appearing on their cars (fortunately no longer fed with whale oil) that said ‘save the whales’”. Kaplan’s wise but misunderstood creatures are reminiscent of dolphins in Douglas Adams’ similarly picaresque classic comic series, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” As the title of the fourth novel in the Adams series indicates, “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish,” the dolphins warned humans to flee a doomed planet; Unfortunately, the humans misunderstood the message, thinking that the dolphins were singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”. Kaplan’s whales, like Adams’s dolphins, know (and act on) what humans have continually failed to really understand: the earth is in trouble.
If you look up Brett Ashley Kaplan, a literature professor for whom Rare Stuff is a fictional debut, you probably won’t be surprised to find that he’s written a book about Philip Roth. After all, in addition to references to many other American novelists, poets, and filmmakers (Herman Melville, Henry James, Ezra Pound, Toni Morrison, Woody Allen), we find many of Roth’s recurring characters making cameo appearances in Kaplan’s book. For example, David Kepesh (of “The Dying Animal,” among other Roth titles) makes an appearance here, interviewing Sid’s father, a novelist named Aaron Zimmerman, who resembles Roth novelist Nathan Zuckerman (who resembles Roth). But more importantly, Roth’s playfulness abounds in this novel, making “Strange Things,” despite its dire warnings to humanity, a joy to read.
Karen E. H. Skinazi, PhD, is Senior Lecturer and Director of Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol (UK) and author of Women of Courage: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture.