If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways: Get help with access Institutional accessĪccess to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. Rather than offer tidy “narrative solutions” that conflate “biological and cultural diversity” (388), I argue that the pregnancies embody a principle similar to Chekhov’s gun. Heise critiques the marriage plot in relation to cli-fi as the “ecological family romance” (388) because of “the portrayal of multicultural and sometimes transnational nuclear families as the narrative solution to environmental and political problems” (383). 1 The shared pregnant endings invite comparison, suggesting contemporary US climate-fiction (cli-fi) novels are, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis explains, “replac the alternate endings in marriage and death that are their cultural legacy from nineteenth-century life and letters by offering,” if not always “a different set of choices” (4), then at least a distinct, as Frank Kermode describes, “sense of an ending.” The four cli-fi novels do not end with death or marriage. Cedar ( Future Home of the Living God) gives birth in the final pages, only to have her child immediately taken from her. The novels end before pregnant protagonists Esch ( Salvage the Bones), Frida ( California), and Fan ( On Such a Full Sea) give birth.

Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), Edan Lepucki’s California (2014), Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014), and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017) notably all share a focus on pregnancy-as opposed to childrearing or the children themselves.

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