In “Bad Nature,” Ariel Courage’s debut novel, we meet Hester—a 40-year-old corporate lawyer just diagnosed with terminal cancer who decides to drive across America to kill her estranged father. This premise might sound like the setup for a revenge thriller, but Courage has crafted something far more complex: a darkly comic meditation on mortality, environmental destruction, and the ways trauma shapes our lives like toxic waste reshapes landscapes.
The novel unfolds as Hester abandons her sterile Manhattan existence and heads west, picking up John, a young environmental activist documenting America’s Superfund sites. What begins as a straightforward revenge tale transforms into a bizarre road trip across a poisoned America—a journey where the personal and ecological apocalypses mirror each other in ways both subtle and devastating.
A Protagonist Both Chilling and Charming
Hester’s first-person narration is the novel’s greatest strength. She’s chillingly detached yet capable of razor-sharp observations that cut through pretense. When she tells us, “I occasionally sought out gruesome snuff or quasi snuff online to be able to imagine this [my skull exploding] in more realistic detail,” we understand we’re in the company of someone profoundly alienated from normal human connection.
Yet Hester remains strangely magnetic. Her clinical assessment of others, her dark humor, and her absolute commitment to her warped moral code create a character both repulsive and compelling. When she casually mentions having sex with her “objectively repulsive super,” adding that she “always came early and silently, with no real effort on the super’s part,” we glimpse her strange mix of disconnection and need. Courage has crafted a protagonist whose damage is so comprehensive it becomes a kind of terrible integrity.
The novel’s supporting characters provide essential counterpoints. John, with his earnest environmental activism and religious background, becomes an unlikely moral center. Their dynamic evolves from the transactional to something genuinely affecting—a connection that throws Hester’s isolation into sharper relief.
America as Superfund Site
“Bad Nature” by Ariel Courage paints America as a contaminated landscape where ecological and human destruction are inseparable. As Hester and John visit sites of environmental catastrophe, Courage writes with haunting clarity about our poisoned world:
“The place seemed afflicted with a lack of belief in nice things; faith in God but skepticism for everything else.”
This environmental backdrop isn’t mere setting but metaphor—the external landscape reflecting Hester’s internal wasteland. The novel suggests that individual pathologies mirror collective ones; both Hester and America carry pollutants that can never fully be remediated.
Courage’s evocation of these degraded spaces is masterful, filled with precise, unsettling details: “A rainbow sheen of biofilm floated on its surface, changeable as a mood ring” and “The water was unnaturally, flawlessly round…abandoned sand mines filled with water.” These descriptions create an America that feels simultaneously real and nightmarishly distorted.
Breaking the Revenge Narrative
While initially propelled by Hester’s quest for vengeance, “Bad Nature” by Ariel Courage ultimately disrupts this narrative drive in ways that feel both surprising and inevitable. The novel builds to a confrontation with Hester’s father that is messy, anticlimactic, and morally ambiguous—a confrontation that refuses the catharsis of traditional revenge tales.
This subversion of expectations extends to the novel’s structure. What begins as a linear journey fragments as Hester’s physical and mental states deteriorate. Flashbacks to her troubled childhood and previous relationships (particularly with her college boyfriend Caleb) complicate our understanding of her motivations. The pace accelerates and then slows, mirroring Hester’s increasingly disjointed experience of time as she approaches her dual destination of patricide and self-destruction.
Stylistic Precision and Dark Humor
Courage’s prose style deserves special mention. Her sentences are precise, often clinical, yet capable of startling beauty. She moves fluidly between detached observation and moments of unexpected lyricism:
“I’d been in a squad car before under no happier circumstances, but sometimes it’s hard to tell if my memories of it are real or implanted from some dream or old film. My mother standing in the door, talking to officers, their jackets backlit by headlights and the dizzying swirl of cherry tops that were the only lights but the stars and moon.”
The novel’s dark humor provides necessary relief from its bleakness. When John explains the environmental impact of murder, Hester responds: “You should count what would’ve been consumed had the victim kept living.” This gallows humor permeates the text, creating moments of uncomfortable laughter that make the darkness more bearable.
Weaknesses That Reflect Strengths
The novel’s weaknesses largely stem from its strengths. Hester’s detachment sometimes creates an emotional distance that can make certain sections feel cold. The environmental themes, while powerfully rendered, occasionally overwhelm the narrative momentum.
Additionally, some readers may find the resolution unsatisfying in conventional terms. The novel deliberately frustrates expectations of both redemption and catastrophe, landing in a more complex, murkier territory. This ambiguity is clearly intentional but may leave some readers wanting more definitive closure.
The Final Assessment
“Bad Nature” is a remarkable, unsettling debut by Ariel Courage that defies easy categorization. It’s at once a road novel, an environmental elegy, a revenge tale, and a dark comedy. Courage has created a protagonist unlike any other—a woman whose moral compass is broken yet who possesses a strange, terrible honesty.
What lingers after reading is not just Hester’s journey but the novel’s vision of America—a place where personal and ecological poisons have seeped so deeply into the ground that complete remediation seems impossible. Yet within this bleakness, Courage finds moments of connection and even hope, suggesting that even the most contaminated landscapes might harbor some form of life.
Strengths:
- Hester’s distinctive, uncompromising voice
- Vivid depictions of America’s poisoned landscapes
- Dark, unexpected humor
- Precise, unflinching prose
- Complex moral vision that refuses easy answers
Weaknesses:
- Emotional detachment sometimes creates distance
- Environmental themes occasionally overwhelm the narrative
- Resolution may feel unsatisfying to readers seeking conventional closure
For Readers Who Enjoyed:
“Bad Nature” by Ariel Courage will appeal to fans of dark literary fiction that blends the personal and political. Readers who appreciated the road-trip nihilism of Joy Williams’ “The Quick and the Dead,” the environmental concerns of Richard Powers’ “The Overstory,” or the mordant humor of Ottessa Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” will find much to admire here.
In this impressive debut, Ariel Courage has created a distinctively American novel—one that maps the contaminated territories of both a damaged psyche and a damaged nation with unflinching precision. “Bad Nature” suggests that redemption, if it exists at all, comes not from easy absolution but from the hard work of confronting our most poisoned places, both external and internal.
The final lines of the novel capture its strange, haunting power: “I wait for signs of him the way you wait for sightings of rare species to confirm they are not extinct. He’s a rare breed, the last hitcher in America.” In a world of extinction and contamination, Courage finds a way to end on a note that, while not exactly hopeful, suggests the possibility of something beyond mere destruction—a note that makes this dark journey worth taking.
