by Deborah Willis
HAMISH HAMILTON
2023/$34.00/368 pp.
Listing the themes of Deborah Willis’s debut novel Girlfriend on Mars sounds like a 21st-century bridge to that famous Billy Joel song from the ’80s: climate panic, polyamory, daddy issues, content factories, space travel, going viral, neoliberal thought. Each of these issues plagues Amber and Kevin, now grown past their prime as high-school sweethearts and into the epitome of millennial dysfunction. They hate their jobs, they grow weed in their overpriced Vancouver basement suite, they cheat on each other and don’t seem to care. Then, without discussing it with Kevin, Amber elects to participate in MarsNow, a reality television show masterminded by a (familiar, likely evil) billionaire. The prize: a one-way ticket aboard the first human mission to the red planet. The resulting novel, alternating between Amber’s and Kevin’s points of view, narrates the couple’s disintegration as they encounter global anxieties in their most material forms.
If Amber defines herself through action—hiking, eschewing refined sugar, researching carbon capture, competing to leave the planet forever—Kevin is her slothy character foil. He locks himself in the basement suite in protest of Amber’s departure, watching in horror as his girlfriend develops an on-screen romance with a sexy castmate. On the show, Amber spirals as well—often finding herself in conflict between her values and the production’s demands for manufactured drama. Still, Amber’s sections lack reality TV’s characteristic salaciousness. Pages of thick backstory saddle each of her decisions, both on- and off-camera, returning to the time she injured herself as a juvenile gymnast and the time she was temporarily disowned by her evangelical Christian father; passages illustrate her early days with Kevin, her electives in undergrad, her master’s thesis, memories of Bible camp. As a result, the plot for much of the 368-page novel plods along, inert between Kevin’s moaning and Amber’s ceaseless self-excavation.
Stakes and momentum lift off, however, in the last third of Girlfriend on Mars as the consequences of Amber’s and Kevin’s decisions finally begin to manifest. The resolution is simultaneously tragic, profound and satisfying—thanks in part to the thorough interiority of Willis’s characters. One’s capacity to reckon with the world’s impersonally grand issues, we learn, is inextricable from the wounds accrued in becoming an adult. At the same time, Willis cautions against isolation as a solution. Attempting to escape ourselves, society, earth itself, only abstracts us further from what makes life worth living in the first place. We didn’t start the fire, sure, but we can’t outrun it, either.
Kate Black is a Vancouver writer who grew up in St. Albert
