Confronting a sense of futility

Endling 
by Maria Reva

Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2025
$36 / 9780735278448

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

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“It’s just you out there, for me. No one else,” Kevin says to Yeva, two conservationists working to protect vulnerable species in different parts of the world; Maria Reva’s debut novel Endling is about how we find one another, and how we lose another—her characters, yes, but also writers and readers. 

These two characters, Kevin and Yeva, never meet face-to-face but share a long distance ritual for acknowledging the passing of the last of a species: they unite in grief. The term ‘endling’ originated in a human context to describe the last of a family line, but it’s more often used to describe other species’ movements towards extinction. 

Though Endling opens with Yeva, the novel’s ending rests with another character: how individual characters connect—or don’t—seems as important as the characters themselves. Reva’s previous book, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, also features an extensive cast, in ten short stories revolving around an apartment building in 1970s Ukraine. A line drawing from the story collection—of the building and its changes over time—repeats in Endling. 

Reva’s short- and long-form fiction connect not only structurally and geographically, but also thematically. In one story, readers learned: “Maybe nature isn’t a circle of life, but a circle of abandonment.” And, although there is a sense of the author half-smiling at life’s absurdities, a sense of loss proliferates: “Those who mourn quietest, mourn deepest.” Community and disconnect, mourning and resilience: here is where Reva’s narratives reside.

Even in dire circumstances, however, her characters might take a breath, but then they take action. Shifts in power, personal and political, buoy the novel’s pacing. As with another key figure in Endling, for instance, who works in the wedding industry in Ukraine, ostensibly seeking a husband (lest a male be the last in his line). Yeva recognizes the risks in the younger woman’s headstrong approach to social justice, when she asks to borrow the trailer Yeva has outfitted as a lab. Yeva’s own dreams of saving the planet were too ambitious, she says. You must “set some parameters,” she warns the other woman, “Otherwise, you’ll never be satisfied. You’ll never rest.”

But Yeva doesn’t actually rest, and neither does Reva. She began Endling against a backdrop of historic strife (including the aftermath of the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine) and finished after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. A fictionalized Reva can rewrite scenes to achieve a peaceful conclusion on the page: “If I get the details just right, my grandfather will leave Kherson.” But is it ethical to create a work of art while real people are battling, fleeing war and dying? “Here I am again, trying to make use of another cataclysm. Am I no better than a snail, sniffing out the softest, most rotten part of a log to feast on? At least a snail digests the rot and excretes nutrients, useful.” 

Both writer and characters confront a sense of futility. The extinction rate is multiplying, exemplified by the inimitable snail, Lefty—possibly the eponymous endling. Capitalism exacts its price on the environment, on the young people dreaming of good marriages and long lives, and on the future. “Never get on the wrong side of the wedding industry, let me tell you” Reva writes, “Behind every boutonniere hides a pin primed for your aorta.” 

While Lefty and the bachelors are preoccupied by their search for “the one,” Yeva takes her trailer off-road. Reva, too, takes her readers into unfamiliar territory. For although it’s possible to isolate individual characters and plotlines in Endling, readers who expect direct exposition, methodical character development, a navigable timeline, a clear delineation between fiction and reality, and a traditional narrative arc will be adrift, disappointed

One character muses on the kind of people “who got away with a crime but turned themselves in anyway, just to tell someone how they did it”: but Reva offers no explanations. Characters have backstories, but they might be told backwards. One actually says: “It’s February 23, 2022, and none of what I’ve written above has happened yet.” Or, was that a character? Perhaps it was the author, whose emails and conversations with editors are included—with debates about how wartime-Ukraine should be depicted, and talk of craft more typically found in author interviews than in fiction. There’s a nomadic energy to the work, as certain elements dart towards and retreat from readers’ understanding and the ending feels—unfinished. 

But for that one reader… a reader who enjoys a glimpse of an entirely different novel encapsulated in a single parenthetical aside? Who engages in the act of unravelling literary confusion? Who grips a book’s covers more tightly when timelines are disorienting? That reader will thrill to the idea that Endling is unlikely to be the last of Reva’s novels, unlikely to be an endling. 

That reader, waiting out there, will feel like Vancouver-based Reva is that one writer, who has written this novel specifically for them: they will recognize her reaching out like Kevin does. This peculiar and spirited and discombobulating story is for them and no one else: “That’s what it feels like, like we’re the last of our kind.” When the only thing that matters, in the end, is story.

[Editor’s note: The Vancouver launch of Endling will start at 7pm on Tuesday, June 17th at La
Fabrique St-George Winery. Upstart & Crow will be the bookseller at the event. Seating is first
come, first served.]

Marcie McCauley writes and reads in Tkaronto (Toronto) and N’Swakamok (Sudbury) on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—including the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabeg, and Wendat—land still inhabited by their descendants. Her writing has been published in American, British, and Canadian magazines and journals, in print and online. [Editor’s note: this review of Endling is Marcie’s first for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” –E.M. Forster