Maria Reva, 'Endling' (2025)

See Yeva's 'S-Car' go

[Continuing my read-through of the 2025 Booker longlist: previously on this very stack: thoughts on Katie Kitamura’s Audition, Natasha Brown’s Universality, Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper, David Szalay’s Flesh and Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives]

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‘Endling’ is the word for the last remaining individual of any given species or subspecies, such that the species will become extinct upon that individual’s death (it was coined, by Robert M. Webster and Bruce Erickson, in a 1996 article in Nature). Aurochs, dodos, quaggas, mammoths, Tasmanian tigers— all must, at some point, have furnished the world with an endling. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, one of a great many 19^th-century ‘last man’ and ‘dernier homme’ tales, concerns a human-endling. In Maria Reva’s first novel (her previously published Good Citizens Need Not Fear being a series of short stories) the endling is a snail. The snail has been collected by Yeva, a young Ukrainian woman who, having experimented with sex and relationships, has decided that she doesn’t want either, and has instead dedicated her life to snailkind. She has what in America is called an RV, a van or motor-home, and this she has kitted-out with all the materiel for a mobile snail lab and facility. Yeva loves snails. She drives around the country collecting and caring for various different kinds of snail. Yeva has an S-car: S for snail. Of all her collection of snails, one has a special place in her heart: ‘Lefty’, the titular endling: the last C. surculus snail alive.

Yeva, needing money to maintain her travelling snail sanctuary, has decided to earn it by pretending to be a willing participant in one of the agency-organised ‘romance tours’, luring men from Europe and North America with the promise of nubile, biddable, marriageable Ukrainian women. ‘The secret of the Ukrainian Woman may be genetical. Invasions and wars led to fruity intermixing,’ boasts the company website. ‘Imagine an entire country of beautiful and lonely women! … This is where you, Western Man, enter.’

Yeva has no interest in marrying a rich, old Westerner: she just needs money for her snail-car and mobile lab, and this, it seems, is as good a way of earning as any. She has the looks, her ornery, misanthropic personality and her habit of replying to nervous men’s romantic conversational gambits with scientific data about snails and other environmentally endangered animals, leads to a number of droll scenes.

It is in this environment that Vera meets Nastia, younger and prettier, the object of much romantic and erotic fascination from the men—the novel’s opening couple of sentences are: ‘Anastasia, the girl called herself. Achingly young—too young, thought Yeva, to be taking part in the romance tours’. But Nastia is savvier, and tougher, than she looks. Everywhere she goes she’s accompanied by Sol, her interpreter (since the men only speak English). Sol, it turns out, is Nastia’s sister. Like Vera Nastia isn’t looking for a Western husband. She has an audacious plan, her way of getting back at her mother, whose naked protests are famous but who has been a distant, disruptive parent to Nastia—and of protesting the fact that Ukrainian women are the focus of this global cattle market. Her plan, into which she talks Vera, is to kidnap a number of the US and European ‘bachelors’ (she initially wants to kidnap 100, until Vera points out that they couldn’t possible fit so many into her RV), drive them and do a photo op, stir up some publicity, release the men.

The three women lure a dozen bachelors into the RV by telling them it’s an ‘escape room’ event, part of their Romance Tour itinerary. Once they’re in, they lock the doors and drive away. It so happens, as they drive off, Russia invades Ukraine, which is something that, perhaps you remember, actually happened.

At this point, 130 pages in, Reva ends her novel, with a couple of wrap-up sentences, an acknowledgements page, a potted author bio and a note on the font used. But Endling is 350-pages long, so obviously this isn’t the end. Tricksy! Immediately after this faux-finis, Reva indulges (if that’s not too unkind a way of putting it) in a bundle of metafictional stuff, inserting herself, as a Canadian of Ukrainian heritage, into the novel: her dismay over the invasion, anxiety about relatives and extended family still living in what is now a war zone, guilt about her own prosperity and security. There’s a section of playscript, in which YURT MAKERS interviews Reva, who, wincingly, calls herself UNFAMOUS AUTHOR.

Then we’re back to the main narrative: Yeva, Nastia and Sol and driving through Ukraine. They don’t tell the bachelors that war has broken out—they say that the various bangs and explosions are celebratory fireworks, which the bachelors, somewhat stupidly, believe—throughout the novel in fact this group is improbably incurious passive and, with one exception, undifferentiated. A weakness in the whole, really.

Initially the S-Car [to be clear: Reva at no point calls it the ‘S-Car’: that’s just me] is heading away from the main Russian advance, with a view to reaching the border of a friendly country, to release the bachelors there. But then a swerve: Yeva becomes aware, serendipitously, of a second C. surculus snail, glimpsed on a TV screen, on a tree stump—but in Kherson, right into the path of the invading Russians. U-turn on the road, and off they go: ensuring the survival of this snail species is more important to Yeva than their safety.

Only one of the twelve kidnapped bachelors is fleshed out in the novel: a Canadian of Ukrainian heritage called Pasha, who has come not only to find a good Ukrainian wife but to reconnect with his homeland. The rest of the men are interchangeable, a set of shop-front dummies—one is killed by Russians, but you still don’t feel you know him.

Yeva presents snails as important environmental bellweathers, ‘due to their low mobility and sensitivity to environmental changes, gastropods served as barometers of a biome’s heath.’ But, the narrator adds, ‘that’s not really why Yeva loved them, not really.’

Snails could’ve been useless, purely ornamental, and she’d still have scoured every leaf and blade for them. She could spend hours watching them in their terrariums, hours while her own mind slowed, slowed, emptied. Whe she lifted her eyes, the world seemed separate from her, a movie in comical fast motion, something she could turn off. [9]

(Isn’t the plural terraria?) There are ways in which Reva has structured her story snailishly: the whorls and reversals of her plotting, the curl of story like a snailshell, the way characters—both Reva’s and the narrator’s grandfather is stuck in Kherson and refuses to leave, like a clinging snail—move. But in this regard Endling is not snaily: it is not slow, does not pull down perception to a leisurely, unhurried pace. On the contrary, the novel hops about restlessly, buzzing from moment to moment. There is a mismatch, we might say. Endling fizzes rapidly and somewhat superficially along. Reva’s skill is in short, focused, witty pieces (‘her work,’ the backflapblurb tells us, ‘has appeared in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s and Granta’) and there are many nice, focused moments in Endling. But it is not a coherent whole, it does not hold together particularly as a novel. The opening chapter, with its account of Yeva’s snail obsession, is a good McSweenyish short story. There’s a chapter in which Yeva, Nastia and Sol, as well as all the bachelors in the S-car, get caught up in a Russian filmmaker, backed by soldiery, making a propaganda movie that portrays Ukranians greeting the invading army as liberators: an improbable, but nicely written, episode. There are one-liners, interesting facts, and sharply turned sentences. But the larger focus, the characters on their various arcs, and the topic of Putin’s military aggression and the sufferings of civilians caught in war, are intermittent, friable, unconvincing. What has happened, and is happening, to Ukraine is ghastly, unconscionable and it would be a monstrous figure who would question Reva—of Ukrainian heritage, clearly moved and scared and engaged by the Russia-Ukraine war—as entitled to write about this large topic.

The lineaments of the novel, that which would have been called ‘postmodern’ had it been published in 1990, seem quaint now, almost trad: earnestly witty, somewhat crabbed, embracing contrivance with enthusiasm as if that, like making clunkingly self-deprecating references to oneself as ‘UNFAMOUS AUTHOR’, will innoculate the resulting work against the infection of being contrived. But Contrived is what the book ends up being. All this research holds back the narrative, robbing it of suspense and forward momentum. The deliberately pitched under-whelm of the foreground stuff—snails, romance tours—tugs against the inevitable overwhelm of the widescreen History-with-a-capital-H stuff in the background. The novel is furnished with two epigraphs: the first, from Galician writer Chus Pato: ‘People don’t live history, they live their lives. History is a catastrophe that passes over them’ which is apropos; then Zsuzsi Gartner saying ‘I’d rather go down in flames, quite frankly, than have a nice little book. I’d rather go down screaming in flames. You can quote me on that.’ Here we must assume irony, since a nice, snaily, little book is exactly what Reva has written.

There is a good deal of information, a load of natty observation and apothegmatic liens and bon mots, the load approaching overload, the restless metafictional gameplaying pervasively dislocating. The texture of the whole is not the smooth, gelatinous slide of a snail-trail, but something cluttered, staccato. There are thematic connections between the disparate short-story-esque elements, though many are tendentious or pat—war, obviously, is bad; the environment, obviously, is worth caring for; home is a complicated but inescapable quantity. But if Reva is, knowingly, attempting to blend something heartfelt and humanist with something swirlingly postmodern and alienating. I’m not sure she succeeds. Self-consciousness, taken to certain levels of intensity, becomes a salt that dissolves the mollusc-body of the work.

Near the end Yeva is driving the S-car and hears the wheelnuts starting to rattle loose. Dare she stop, in this debateable land where Russian invaders are likely about, to get out and tighten them? The nuts are loosening. If they come off altogether then we will no longer be able to watch the S-car go.

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[Postscript] I posted this a couple of days ago, but have been thinking more about it, prompted in part by Dassi’s comment (below) asking whether the novel, which she hasn’t read, is styling Ukraine itself as an ‘endling’. I don’t think: which is to say, I don’t think Ukraine—having repelled the Russian invasion so valiantly, and sticking at the ongoing war so stoically—is on the way out, and don’t think Reva believes it is. I think what happened was that Reva started writing a novel about a number of endling-types: Yeva, who has given up on sex and relationships (although her family keep urging her to marry); Nastia cosplaying the wannabe-bride for her own, non-romantic reasons, the various no-hoper and deadloss Western men. The snail Lefty, as a literal endling, focused this thematic. But then (she says as much in the course of the book) Russia invaded Ukraine and Reva felt duty bound to reconfigure the book to include that detail. But although it is this that may (not to second guess the judges, but) guaranteed the novel’s place on the Booker longlist—a worthy and important subject for fiction—it drags the whole out of shape, and leaves the final result skew.

One comparison occurs to me: Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker (2022)—a great novel about multiple endlings, which did not trouble the Booker prize (though, slightly oddly—I don’t mean in terms of merit—it won the Arthur C Clarke Award). Venomous Lumpsucker is as witty and lively a novel as Endling, and rather more capacious and wide-ranging; but more to the point because it keeps its focus on its endangered animals, and the self-serving and Kafkaesque organisations supposedly established to protect them—the attempt to turn endlings into Capitalisable commodities, through ‘Intrinsic Exchange Group’ allocating and then trading extinction credits. The establishment of the ‘World Commission on Species Extinction to protect endangered animals’ follows the death of the last surviving panda, Chiu Chius: as one official says, the aim of the organisation is ‘to make him the endling of endlings’. But of course extinctions continue to happen. Beauman’s capacious satire takes us all over his near-future, collapsing world, but he keeps his main theme in focus. Some of his characters are cynically exploiting the credits system to make money; some genuinely care about animals. But the pressure of the novel’s satiric focus, and Beauman’s mixing of rather more cynical humour, brings out a kind of terminal pressure to ‘caring about animals’.

One character has been spending his life in the odour of environmental sanctity, dedicating his life in guarding the world’s last surviving colony of Pallid Nuthatches, a species of bird indigenous to Turkey, not own found in a remote national park. He builds structures, with little doorways in them, to keep the birds safe from predators; he removes their eggs—liable to breakage or predation—to ensure they hatch in incubators. Then a friend carelessly compares his work to ‘performance art.’ He is destroyed by this observation, and loses all sense of purpose.

What was the point of all this? Wasn’t it, indeed, an empty ritual, a performance for nobody ... Weren’t the pallid nuthatches an evolutionary dead end ... a banal, shoddy creature, no more than filler in the Book of Nature? Weren’t they just witless, ungrateful, screeching little vermin?

This flip-about is perfectly observed, as is the oppressive weight, liable to flip us too into uncaring, of mostly imagined endlings (now-extinctees):

The legless skink. Also the velvet scoter. The Hainan black crested gibbon. The angel shark. The rusty pipistrelle. The Stone Mountain fairy shrimp. The variable cuckoo bumblebee. The marbled gecko. The Alagoas tyrannulet. The thicklip pupfish. The hoary-throated spinetail. The white-chested white-eye. The Cozumel thrasher. The spine-fingered tree frog. The Zempoaltepec deer mouse. The cracking pearlymussel. The Papaloapan chub. The dromedary naiad. The warrior pigtoe…

Reva can’t match this buzzing satiric focus and energy.