Novelist Debuts 'Under Water' as Climate Fiction Response to Ghosh
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- The author traveled through Europe on a book tour this summer, finding 37°C average temperatures in Zurich and Poland hitting an all-time high as one of 14 countries to set new temperature records
- European heatwaves since summer have caused more than 10,000 excess deaths, while the author's own experience of the heat amounted to little more than 'uncomfortable commutes' and heat rash
- Hurricane Sandy killed 233 people across eight countries and caused $70bn in damage in 2012, yet disparities meant the author's Upper West Side neighborhood saw brunch while lower Manhattan lost power for half a million residents
- Amitav Ghosh's 'The Great Derangement' argues literary fiction has failed at climate representation because modern novels focus on individual psychology, human-centered imagination, and improbable events at odds with probability
- The debut novel 'Under Water' moves between Hurricane Sandy and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, set in New York and Thailand with protagonist Marissa, positioned as a realist-form rebuttal to Ghosh's claim that the novel is ill-suited to climate
- The novel's argument holds that a realist novel centered on a globalized bourgeois subject can range across space and time, imbuing 'improbable' events like Sandy with expectation through the protagonist's childhood history
Why it matters: The author stakes a literary claim that directly contradicts a widely cited critique: realist novels can wield close attention to people and places as an effective weapon against the climate crisis. For readers, the practical test is whether 'Under Water' makes Sandy's inequalities and the 2004 tsunami's devastation feel present rather than speculative future.
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