The Aftermath

Paired together, creativity and sorrow provide the engine for Rebecca Hirsch Garcia’s debut, Other Evolutions. After losing her eighteen-year-old son, Oliver, Mrs. Jentsch says, “Love is a powerful inventor, grief even more so.” The university student died in a car accident while driving his fourteen-year-old neighbour, Alma, from Montreal back to their hometown of Ottawa. Alma, who lost her right arm in the crash, narrates each of the non-linear novel’s four parts: “Vanishing,” “Absence,” “Loss,” and “Homecoming.”

Born to a Mexican mother and a Jewish father of German descent, Alma is raised in a dull residential neighbourhood, where she stays into adulthood. Despite the boredom of the capital region, her measured and self-aware opinions about her chaotic family spark an enjoyable page-turner. We first meet her in her twenties. In the opening passage, “Nothing Ever Happens in Ottawa,” she attends a boring wedding. “I always feel too human at parties,” she says, describing all that is artificial and depressing about her social scene, which pales in comparison with the “soft‑lens” magic of cinema. “Men’s carefully curated stubble doesn’t quite cover the acne scars left behind from teenagedom,” she comments. “There’s always a dead ant floating miserably in a bowl of flower arrangements.”

With this relatable insight, Garcia seemingly takes a cue from the novelist Carmen Maria Machado, who said in an interview with The Paris Review: “I tell my students that party scenes are really important in fiction because a party scene can go in any direction.” Like Machado, whose brand of realism is entangled with speculative, fantasy, and horror fiction, Garcia foreshadows Alma’s deeper philosophical inquiries: What does it mean to be human? Why is my family so dysfunctional? What happens after we die? Like many questions pertaining to loss, they can be answered only through ruptures with reality.

Alma elicits much compassion, particularly during the flashbacks to her teenage years and the accident. She recalls going spontaneously to visit her older sister, Marnie, who was studying in Montreal. There, shame and unspoken racism between the siblings came to the surface. In front of her dormmates, Marnie — the only one in their family with “fair skin and blonde hair”— pretended that Alma was a childhood friend. This unexpected rift prompted Alma to seek refuge in Oliver, the only other person she knew in the city. She accepted his offer to drive her back to her parents’ house, the decision that led to the tragedy that, as readers already know, would define the rest of her life.

Even when she should be unlikeable, Alma remains sympathetic and self-reflexive. She is aware of her own dramatic nature, recounting the times she deliberately disappeared as a child to make her parents dote on her and moments when she acted out for no reason other than wanting attention. “So halfway through the day,” she admits, “with a sudden exaggerated limp (what was I limping for? I didn’t know, only that once I started I couldn’t stop) I headed home, leaning heavily on my mother.”

Alma’s candour lends humour to the dark material but also keeps her at a distance from her emotions. When she finally stands up to Marnie, the relief of her minor victory is magnified and visceral. The complex dynamic between the siblings — whose relationship became further strained following Oliver’s death — shatters Alma’s veneer of detachment. “I’m so sorry my pain is inconvenient to you,” she says. “I’m so sorry that every day I’m reminded of the worst thing that ever happened to me, that I’m trapped in a body with the worst thing that ever happened to me and that by association you have to remember that what happened happened because you were selfish and cruel.”

Given its focus on Alma’s perspective, Other Evolutions could have closed with epiphanies about her difficult and iterative paths through the aftermath of the accident. But this meandering novel is as much about her family, Mrs. Jentsch, and Oliver as it is about the narrator. The title alludes to the character arcs that, combined, reveal the impact of layers of inherited trauma. “The changes I had seen within my lifetime were baffling,” Alma says, reflecting on the dissonance between generations, “the changes my parents had seen even more so, the changes that my abuela had seen ten times that.”

Each character is mysterious to the others; they confound and disturb one another with decisions and actions that slip in and out of the surreal. Marnie visits their family home in Mexico City and returns with surprising second thoughts about her career. Marnie and Alma’s mother, Merced, abandons her life in Canada to care for her dying mother in Mexico. In an unnerving display of mourning, the intensely intellectual Mrs. Jentsch creates an automaton of Oliver, who, inexplicably, comes to life.

Other Evolutions mutates and contorts in unexpected ways. Even in the denouement, the genre shifts, a life-altering crisis emerges. Despite the complexity of the plot, the culmination of Alma’s journey is a simple love letter to Ottawa: “this city I had been born in and raised in and would likely die in, had laughed and cried and loved and hated and nearly died in.” The stable idea of home endures through years of transformation. A self-proclaimed “Glebite,” she nostalgically embraces her neighbourhood, the Glebe, where, regardless of its residents’ personal upheavals, the maple leaves burn red, “leaving the ground aflame” every autumn.