The one-line synopsis for “Bad Nature” is about as juicy as it gets: A successful New York lawyer, having received a terminal breast-cancer diagnosis at age 40, decides to drive to California, confront her estranged father and then shoot him. But this isn’t a thriller or a caper in the vein of, say, Elmore Leonard. Ariel Courage’s debut is a fork jabbed into the electric socket of America. You can’t look away and, thanks to its bitter wit, can’t stop laughing.
Hester is a friendless, Type-A workaholic whose work includes helping corporations sidestep the EPA. She describes herself as “prickly and standoffish, selectively extroverted, largely humorless.” The kind of person who lies to strangers out of boredom and shrugs her way through flings with unattractive men. When her Whitman-quoting oncologist breaks the bad news, Hester remembers her mother’s early death from cancer. She forgoes chemotherapy, emails her resignation letter and hits the road. She names her tumor Beryl.
Sure, she could board an airplane. But that would deprive us of Courage’s wild picaresque through a rural and ravaged America. Hester figures she’ll say goodbye to all that with drop-ins on a college ex in Pittsburgh, and another on an old high school friend in Chicago. The former, Caleb, is a punk turned star chef. Hester sets a land-speed record for toppling his carefully constructed world. Things don’t go much better in the Windy City.
Things don’t go well anywhere. Her car is stolen; she crashes a replacement rental. There’s a parking-lot fistfight. She’s pulled over by police officers, who are then called away by an overturned oil tanker down the road.
Hester could have been simply a witness to the hollowed-out interior of the country: the passive protagonist encountered in so many first novels. And at times, Hester does feel like a stone skipping across a continent-wide toxic lake, with quick observations full of snark. “The sky was insultingly blue, a mean joke … The sun was like a drunk at a party, menacing and vivacious.”
But Courage is as interested in character as she is in her widescreen setting. Hester shares childhood memories of her father’s terror and neglect, and her resulting disavowal of her past: “I wanted to believe I had no family at all, like I’d sprung from the earth fully formed.” She wants revenge without dwelling on its cause or her trauma — a word Hester would surely detest. She’d rather think of herself as a short-term unstoppable force. Which is not unjustified. “I was an educated and experienced white woman. My life was well insulated from interference, police or otherwise.”
Interference does arrive via a young hitchhiker named John. He joins her for much of the journey, causing detours to photograph waste sites and abandoned munitions factories as part of a vague project on ecocide. As a spiritually inclined, politically committed itinerant, John is Hester’s polar opposite, poking at her beliefs with the earnestness of a college student drunk on Howard Zinn. He’s annoyed by her shallow contrarianism, but his own passions aren’t directed toward defined ends. John’s just killing time until the apocalypse arrives.
This odd couple encounters refuge with a New Mexico farming commune and the usual flat excess in Las Vegas. (“I thought a woman was kneeling to pray, but she was just trying to get a better angle on her camera.”) The road trip ends in, ahem, Death Valley, with violence and a different kind of revenge than Hester had planned. A touch of Elmore Leonard, after all.
At times, “Bad Nature” recalls Miranda July’s “All Fours.” A coastal elite narrator, mid-midlife crisis, running from home and bonding with a younger man. For July, the aging body resets her protagonist’s desires; Hester doesn’t want, in this sense. Intimacy requires vulnerability. Nor does Hester have much regard for her body, beyond its function as a tool she can hone at the gym.
Courage’s novel is more akin to Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho.” As with Patrick Bateman, Hester’s one-percenter status confers ultimate agency and exemption from the effects of her disastrous actions. She can go for broke because she never will be. Where Ellis captured the 1980s through satire so dark it swallows all light, Courage does so for 2025. It’s deeply impressive, at times uncomfortable.
There are minor flaws. Italicized bits of conservative talk radio, which appear throughout, are repetitive and facile. An adolescent memory of a trip from upstate New York to Manhattan runs overlong. These are easily forgiven.
Many novels portray what life feels like. A rarer strain captures what it looks like, at this moment, warts and all. The world of “Bad Nature” fixates on grievance. Ignores long-term consequence. Rejects medical advice. Embraces bawdiness. Extols gun violence. The novel “Bad Nature,” meanwhile, is a sun-blasted comic wonder.
Chapman is the author of the novels “The Audacity,” and “Riots I Have Known.”