Mobile Creatures

Mobile Creatures is a quiet, fragmented, deeply interior novel about grief, widowhood, sisters, childhood trauma, dogs, writing, migration, memory, and the difference between fact and truth. It is narrated by Faith, an American novelist living in Berlin with her elderly dog Sally after the death of her husband, Ronan Sullivan, who was also a writer. The novel does not unfold as a conventional plot so much as a pattern of movement: Berlin walks, remembered trips, old family wounds, Ronan’s illness, Grace’s pregnancy, Faith’s accident, Sally’s decline, and finally the act of writing the book we seem to be reading.

The opening establishes the central wound. Faith and Ronan once lived on the Oregon coast in a bungalow on Blueberry Lane, facing the Pacific, with their dog Sally. They were both fiction writers and, for a time, they lived in a rare state of mutual creative sympathy: one writing while the other wrote, one celebrating the other’s success, the ocean and forest outside their door. Then Ronan gets a phone call from his doctor. A routine test has revealed cancer that has already spread. The life they thought they had ahead of them collapses in a single moment. Faith thinks of Raymond Carver’s “Chef’s House,” about happiness in a seaside house that must come to an end.

After the diagnosis, Faith and Ronan begin travelling. They go first to Iceland, chasing wonder in a season of darkness. Ronan dreams of shooting the scan of tumors inside his body with a pistol that will not fire. They eat extraordinary cinnamon rolls, make love in the long dark, and take a trip to see the northern lights. The guide calls them the luckiest people she has ever taken out, because the aurora is unusually spectacular; she jokingly says they can all die happy now. Ronan whispers that she has no idea. The cruelty of that luck — to be given beauty while dying — becomes one of the novel’s central emotional tensions.