‘Endling’ is a shape-shifting debut that takes on heavy themes with humor

George Bernard Shaw once said that the privilege of joking in public should only be granted to people who know thoroughly what they are joking about. I thought of his words as I devoured Endling, the virtuosic debut novel by Maria Reva, a Canadian writer who was born in Ukraine and still has family there.

Starting out as a straightforward story about a Ukrainian biologist, this witty, shape-shifting book turns into something trickier and more interesting. Like so many works from or about the former Soviet bloc, Endling takes on bleak subjects — environmental ruin, the business in brides, the war in Ukraine — and dresses them up in playful irony.

Its heroine, Yeva, is a rogue ecologist who lives in a mobile lab and spends her time collecting and housing snails facing extinction. Her favorite is Lefty, a tree snail who’s an endling — the term for the last surviving member of a species.

Yeva funds her mission by working for Romeo Meets Yulia, a Canadian company that deals in “romance tours” to Ukraine — a euphemism for the mail-order bride business. She’s in it for the paycheck, not for a husband, let alone for sexual encounters.

Just as she’s despairing over her failure to save the snails, Yeva meets two other romance tour workers — gorgeous Nastia and her brainy sister Sol, the daughters of a famous Pussy Riot-style feminist who has gone missing.

Nastia cooks up a plot to kidnap a dozen foreign bachelors who’ve come to Kyiv looking for wives. It’s a PR stunt to draw attention to the demeaning traffic in Ukrainian brides. Frazzled and pliant, Yeva lets them use her lab to transport their hostages, even taking the wheel.

As they drive through the countryside, Nastia’s scheme is going just as planned … until the bombs start falling. Vladimir Putin has begun his invasion.

At precisely this point, Endling pivots, and like Percival Everett’s Erasure or Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, the frame shifts to make us question what we’ve been reading. In Part 2, we begin following the author’s fictional avatar, named Maria Reva, who lives in her parent’s attic in Vancouver and is having an artistic crisis.

Not only does she owe her publisher a book, but the one she’s working on — the one we’ve just been reading — fills her with shame. It deals in clichés about Ukraine — especially the bride business — clichés that pander to Western readers. And the war makes things even worse. How dare Maria write from the safety of Canada about the home country that’s currently fighting for its life?

After a bevy of metafictional hijinks, Reva eventually takes us back to war-torn Ukraine where Yeva, Nastia, and Sol must figure out what to do with their bachelors. I won’t say what happens, but I do want to assure you that all of Reva’s many strands — the war, the snails, the bride business, the kidnapping, Maria’s writerly anxiety and family ties — dovetail brilliantly.

Along the way, characters get gunned down, schlemiels become heroic, and we wonder whether Ukraine, like Lefty the snail, might be an endling?

One can’t juggle all these balls without being a nifty writer, and Reva is that. I wish I could read you the delightful page-long passage in which Yeva explains why snails are marvelous. But it’s too long. So instead, here is Yeva thinking bitterly about why they’re not popular:

Snails weren’t pandas — those oversize bumbling toddlers that sucked up national conservation budgets — or any of the other charismatic megafauna, like orcas or gorillas. Snails weren’t huggy koala bears, which in reality were vicious and riddled with chlamydia. Nor were snails otters, which looked like plush toys made for mascots by aquariums, despite the fact that they lured dogs from beaches to drown and rape them.

A crunch under the boot. A speck to flick off a lettuce leaf. … Snails were just that — snails.

Of course, Yeva and Reva believe that snails, like Ukraine itself, may not be adored by the world at large but deserve to survive, and even thrive in a world that threatens them with extinction. Indeed, for all her humor and brio — she’s never, ever preachy — Reva knows what she’s joking about. Suffused with yearning for what’s being lost, Endling leaves you asking one painful question: When creatures or nations are fighting for their very existence, shouldn’t we try to help them?